10 Types of Emails to Send to Your Customers

Email is one of the most important communication channels between businesses and customers. From marketing and retention to notification and sign-ups, the right approach to this tool can have an impressive ROI.

Many companies limit themselves to sending promotional emails, forgetting about many other ways to maximize their profits through this channel. By knowing which emails to send to your subscribers, you can improve the bottom line tremendously while increasing customer satisfaction at the same time.

Let’s take a closer look at 10 types of emails to include in your next email marketing and retention campaign.

1. Transactional Emails

A transactional email is part of your email marketing automation efforts. These emails are generated automatically when a client takes a certain action. For example, when they sign up for your services or buy a product.

These relationship nurturing emails are a big part of improving the company-client relationship. They show that you care for the client’s needs and help them go down the marketing and sales funnel.

Transactional emails are also called triggered or notification emails because they are triggered by the client’s actions. They recover abandoned carts, reactivate inactive users, congratulate clients on birthdays, and much more.

By implementing transactional emails into your marketing efforts, you are taking part of the burden off your team’s shoulders.

Today customers expect to receive emails when they take action:

Sign up – get an email
Buy something – get an email
Christmas time – get an email
Welcome email
Announcement email
Abandoned cart email
Newsletter email
Notification emails
Confirmation emails
Survey email
Product announcement emails
Request email

Failure to send a transactional email timely could make the customer wary of your offer.

2. Abandoned Cart Emails

Cart abandonment emails are transactional emails that deserve special attention. Regardless of your lead nurturing efforts, only about 2% of customers end up buying a product when visiting your website for the first time. The rest get distracted, don’t find what they were looking for, don’t like your website’s design, are surprised by the shipping fees, and much more.

Abandoned cart emails are designed to bring the customer back to complete a purchase. About 46% of people open these emails, thus increasing your chances of driving a sale through tremendously. When designing these emails, it’s important to follow best practices:

Timing is important – about an hour after the abandonment.
Send a series of emails – if the client doesn’t react, send one or two more emails 24 and 48 hours later.
Include the abandonment product – customers may not remember which products they left in the cart.
Add a bold CTA button – a call to action is an integral part of a successful email.
Work on subject lines and content – a compelling subject line and interesting content are the key to high cart abandonment email open rates.

A smart approach to cart abandonment messages can help re-engage your audience and finalize sales.

3. Promotional Emails

Marketing emails come in all shapes and sizes. One of the common types is a promotional email. You can use such emails for lead nurturing purposes. They vary from a new product or service email to special offers.

These emails are an excellent way to recover an inactive client or to appeal to a new subscriber. They usually don’t need to have an extremely efficient special offer. A discount or a free shipping proposal can do wonders for your marketing campaign and conversion rates.

The key to promotional emails is timing. Sending too many emails could annoy the recipient. By not sending enough, you risk losing a client.

The content of promotional emails should create emotion and leave the customers curious about your offer. Use colors, graphics or music to grab the attention of an email subscriber.

4. Seasonal Emails

The success of your marketing strategy depends on how well you anticipate the needs of your email subscribers. A holiday email marketing campaign should include different types of emails aimed at bringing the customer to your doorstep.

Holiday shopping creates an excellent opportunity to improve your company’s profitability. You have to design a series of emails to plant the right ideas in the heads of your subscribers.

The content of your holiday emails must be tweaked to sound urgent and capitalize on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Provide your customers with valuable content to help them choose the right products so they are ready to make a purchase by the time holidays arrive.

It’s imperative to consider all holidays during the season, not just Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year. Study your target audience via social media to learn which holidays they celebrate. If you aren’t sure whether the subscribers celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, one of the best ways to go is to send a generalized “holiday” email.

Pro tip: Before starting your holiday email marketing campaign, make sure you employ email validation. Without a clean email list, your efforts could have a low ROI.

5. Lead Nurturing Emails

One of the most important types of emails are created with the purpose of nurturing leads. Lead nurturing marketing efforts are essential to maximizing the number of your clients and building your email list.

A lead nurturing email campaign can be automated. However, it’s important to personalize all of your messages to make sure email subscribers are happy with your content. Nurturing emails are a great way to push potential clients down the sales funnel.

To customize your lead nurturing emails, it’s essential to segment your customer lists and research user behavior. You need to adjust your email campaign depending on the target audience’s preferences, demographics, location, and much more.

For big customers, you may want to design email content manually to maximize your chances of driving the conversion through.

6. Follow-Up Emails

One of the important types of email is a post-purchase message. While it’s not a marketing email, any email marketer will tell you about its utter importance. Post-purchase email allows you to maintain a good relationship with your client. Since 80% of profits tend to come from 20% of your existing customers, such work is integral to your success.

A simple follow-up can go a long way toward making a customer feel a part of the family. A satisfied user is likely to come back for more. But only if you show them how welcome they are by sending something special to their inbox.

7. Re-Engagement Emails

Another important email type is re-engagement messages. No matter how much of a fan a customer is, a year after the purchase they may forget about your brand entirely. It’s possible that you have hundreds of addresses on your email list, waiting for your attention.

Re-engagement campaigns bring back users, who have interacted with your brand in the past but stopped buying. You need to send emails with appealing offers to help them become interested in your products once again.

A re-engagement campaign can also tell you which email addresses to remove from your list. If a customer doesn’t react to your re-engagement and confirmation emails or visit your website for several months, they don’t belong on the list you use for your email marketing.

8. Content Emails

These types of emails are announcement messages. They tell the customer about the new content you are offering – a blog post, a whitepaper, or an e-book – customers love this type of freebies.

By creating high-quality content and sending it to users on your email list, you don’t just remind them about your brand. Such content can help position you as an industry leader and turn customers into brand ambassadors. The latter is possible if the content is shareable and you add social media sharing options to your message.

9. Product Update Emails

Another kind of marketing email that you should be considering is product updates. Unlike special offer emails, they are less urgent and contain content, which can be highly valuable to the user.

By sending one email a month with product updates, you can remind your existing customers about your offer. Updates may include important information about new ways to use the product or additional exciting features.

You could send such emails to clients who have abandoned these products in the cart. Perhaps an update could help them change their mind.

10. Newsletters

Newsletters are an integral part of your marketing campaign. In this type of email, you can include important information about your brand, company updates, new content, and much more.

While a newsletter isn’t a special offer email, it can contain information about discounts as well and include a CTA.

The Takeaway

To streamline your marketing, retention, and sales campaigns, you need to send different types of emails to all subscribers.

All of the above email types can help you establish trustworthy and efficient relationships with your customers while turning them into your brand ambassadors.