The first email marketing broadcast I ever sent was downright embarrassing.
“LIMITED-TIME DISCOUNT, SIGN UP NOW FOR 50% OFF”
I pushed the “send now” button on a broadcast email to 4,927 subscribers, awkwardly promoting a product I was selling.
There was no context. There was no warming up. There was no value being offered.
Not a huge surprise, but this was a disaster.
If you’ve spent any amount of time on the Internet, I don’t need to tell you that the world has way too much low-quality promotional emails being sent.
Using your email list exclusively for sales offers is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
What a lot of digital marketers may not realize, is that every email you send usually fits into one of four categories. If you structure your campaigns to fit into these categories, you’re going to be a lot more effective.
Lucky for you, we have free, world-class, downloadable templates for you for each of these categories. How awesome is that?
To make sure we understand the customer journey and send relevant emails to keep your subscribers engaged, we’re going to go through each of them in this post.
In this post, we’ll share different types of email marketing examples to help you craft the perfect email sequences that engage with your audience to keep them wanting to hear from you.
We will critique a couple of companies and their campaigns and what we like and don’t like. You can use this to get inspiration for your campaigns as we look at how other companies are doing.
Let’s get started:
Onboarding Email Campaigns
Onboarding campaigns are important because it’s the first contact with your subscriber’s inbox. It helps the user take the first action, whether that is completing their profile, finishing their first action, or inviting more users. The open-rates of onboarding emails are higher than other emails. Onboarding can be more than one email (as seen in the example below).
To help you get inspiration for your campaigns, we have listed examples of a couple of onboarding campaigns for different types of businesses and industries. You can check out our 11+ Inspiring Welcome Email Templates For Nurturing New Subscribers.
Engagement Email Campaigns
Most of the emails you’ll send will be part of an engagement campaign. Engagement campaigns help to keep your product top of mind for your users.
The goal is to make your subscribers engage with your product which turns them into loyal customers.
You need to define what engagement looks like for your business.
To help you get inspiration for your campaigns, let’s look at an engagement campaign for a consulting business: Neil Patel
Here’s how Neil Patel pitches his consulting services.
Email #1
Subject line: Do you want me to PERSONALLY help you?
Goal: Warm up the audience to receive the consulting pitch
Email #2: I’ll personally grow your business for you (details inside)
Goal: Hard pitch of the consulting service
What we liked about Neil Patel’s pitch campaign:
- Social proof and building a case before the pitch
- Simple plain text email—feels more personal
What we didn’t like about Neil Patel’s pitch campaign:
- Few details on the offer—what exactly am I getting?
- Case studies and examples are mostly for massive corporations— medium and small businesses have different needs
Win Back Email Campaigns
Winback campaigns are used when engagement doesn’t work anymore. Winback campaigns bring users back into the engagement cycle.
You want to send win back campaigns if your subscribers have not interacted with your engagement campaigns in the last 90 days.
If they interact, you bring them back to the engagement campaign.
To help you get inspiration for your campaigns, let’s look at a win-back campaign for a mobile app: Verse
Here’s how Verse gets people to start using their app again.
Email #1
Subject line: We really miss you
Goal: Get inactive users to make a transactionIn the example, you can see Verse tries to give some incentive to make users make the transaction again.
What we liked about Verse’s win-back campaign:
- A clear incentive to start using again (free money)
What we didn’t like about Verse’s win-back campaign:
- No sense of urgency to the CTA—when does this offer expire?
Sunset Email Campaigns
Use sunset campaigns only if you care about your subscribers. Sunset campaigns are designed to give you better segmentation of your list. These campaigns help your list hygiene.
If they respond: Bring them back into the engagement campaign.
If they don’t respond: Unsubscribe them or better filter them out.
To help you get inspiration for your own campaigns, let’s look at one of our favorite sunset campaigns by Hubspot.
Here’s what happens when you stop interacting with Hubspot’s emails.
Email #1
Subject line: Your free HubSpot account will be deactivated in 30 days
Goal: Give users the last chance to stay on their email funnel and prune inactive accounts
Email #2
Subject line: Your free HubSpot account will be deactivated in 7 days
Email #2
Subject Line: Your free HubSpot account will be deactivated in 1 day
What we liked about Hubspot’s sunset campaign:
- A simple, clear messaging with clear CTA
- Several reminders before removing (30, 7, and 1 day)
What we didn’t like about Hubspot’s sunset campaign:
- No description of the benefits the user is missing out on
Broadcast Email Campaigns
It’s best to send email marketing automation that is specific to your audience. However, in some cases, it’s ok to send a broadcast. The main goal of broadcast emails is to share the message. A good time to broadcast is during a new product launch or when segmenting your subscribers.
A bad time to broadcast is when your boss wants to email all users.
One of the most common types of broadcast campaigns is email newsletters.
Newsletters that curate relevant and interesting content for their subscribers are getting a ton of engagement and generating massive email list growth.
Here are some of our broadcasting email examples:
Morning Brew is a daily digest of the most important news, presented with fun commentary
Glimpse is a monthly newsletter featuring surprising growth trends in products, industries, and topics.
If you want more examples of email newsletters, and learn how to craft one, then we recommend you check out our 10+ Engaging Newsletter Templates and Design Tips.
More Resources
Learn how to massively increase sales with email marketing in our email marketing training where you learn from one of the best minds in the game.
Want More Email Campaign Templates?
Hope you got some email design ideas, tips, and inspiration to create your email marketing campaigns.
Don’t forget to download our free email marketing campaign templates below, if you want to craft powerful email campaigns that onboard, engage, and win back your subscribers to be your customers!
You can get it now!
