If you read our previous blog, you know all about the 3 types of emails that any business needs to send. But your email marketing strategy goes far beyond just the types of emails you send. You also want to consider the 5 email campaign themes to engage leads.

Welcome Email Campaigns

Welcome email campaigns are not only an opportunity to welcome your new subscribers but also to manage their expectations. In effect, it is the first impression of your new email relationship. You want it to be inviting, with a friendly tone, while also making it plain what the customer can anticipate. Let them know how often they should expect to hear from you.

There are a few key points to note for your welcome emails:

Be Timely

Send these emails immediately after the customer subscribes to your email list. You can automate this to ensure that they get it right away. The benefit of timeliness is that the consumer won’t forget about you between signing up and the next email you send. In the world of marketing, we can’t risk being forgotten.

Have a Clear Subject Line

Having a clear subject line avoids confusion for your subscribers. They need to know what they are getting from you for that very first email. Be sure to let them know what to anticipate.

Personalize the Greeting

Use the auto-fill resources available from your email platform to include the customer’s first name. This makes them feel welcomed and have a subconscious personal connection. Another benefit of that is it will improve open rates.

Give a Next Step

Every business that sends a welcome email needs to show the subscriber content, or at least encourage them with what to do next. You want to get them to start taking action. After all, this is still a marketing strategy and marketing is all about actions.

Provide Social Media Links

Social media gives you more ways to connect with your clients. Having these links gives you another chance to indoctrinate the customer with your brand. As they get more familiar with you, they will be more inclined to trust and shop with your brand.

Engagement or Conversion Email Campaigns

Engagement or conversion campaigns drive sales and trials for your marketing team and/or leases for your sales team. They draw the potential customer ever closer to the goal of becoming a lifelong customer. To gain their trust, there are further steps you’ll want to take as you build your marketing relationship.

Be Personal

In these campaigns, continue to write from the first-person perspective. You want to encourage replies and sound like a human. That makes this more of an interaction than just another spam in the inbox.

Tell a Story

Stories make a huge difference in business. Consumers engage more freely when there is a story behind a product, behind a business, or behind other customers of the business. You have an opportunity to share how a client’s life was impacted by working with you. Or you can tell about how an employee was facing hard times, but the business was able to help. There are stories everywhere in our businesses, and we should never neglect the opportunity they present.

Use a Strong CTA

Your Call to Action should be clear and easy to navigate. You may want to have a CTA button to present it easily before your customers. You want to clarify exactly what you want them to do.

Be Mobile Friendly

Have you ever opened an email on your phone only to see the formatting look pretty crazy? Chances are, it was only formatted for desktop. With more than half of email opens taking place on mobile devices, it’s essential to include this as a part of your strategy.

Link Your Images

People want to interact with emails. Linking your images makes it that much easier for them to navigate to your site. Use images that are direct.

Ascension Email Campaigns

Your ascension emails should drive people to more. You want to use logical upsells. Another beneficial option is to incentivize early subscription updates. So, if a potential customer signs up for your email list, consider offering something. Maybe a 3-day coupon code, or something else that will benefit them in the short-term.

Make Sure it’s Logical

Don’t give a customer an upsell that doesn’t apply to their needs. Let’s say you run a bookstore and a customer has just purchased one of your e-readers. You wouldn’t send them a 10% off coupon to be used in-store on a physical book. You would give them a digital code for e-books.

Speak to the Benefit

Don’t shy away from the explanation. Tell the customer exactly how and why this upsell will benefit them. How will it help them achieve their goals?

Segmentation Email Campaigns

Segmentation campaigns are a great opportunity to know exactly what your customers are interested in. They are able to identify which special offers they want for the benefit of your marketing. In the bookstore example, a customer could select whether they want to get more information about e-books or physical books.

But there are other ways of segmenting your customers, even if they haven’t specifically checked the box on which types of emails they want. Your marketing team can base this on how you think the consumer would best respond.

Demographics

Of course, we need information like age, gender, company position, income level, and more. Segmenting your customers by demographic allows you to tailor your marketing depending on what you think they would prefer. For an e-commerce fashion brand, they may send segmented emails based on trend targets for younger women versus older women.

Quiz Results

Creating a quiz or survey lets you get to know your customers and their interests. You can segment them based off the results to aid in email campaigns.

Email Engaging

Don’t be afraid to segment by active vs. inactive subscribers. This is important for email deliverability. Having a lot of emails go unopened hurts your metrics. Sending marketing emails primarily to active subscribers is a good way to keep the open rates up. It will help to engage customers who care about your brand.

Geographic Location

This allows you to send emails that are time-based, hitting inboxes at the peak hour, anywhere in the world. You can also include regional advertisements, as well as locally-timed webinars.

Past Purchases

By segmenting based on past purchases, your emails can be sent based on what shopping trends you have seen. If customers have shown an interest in a particular item, you can segment them. Then, you can send emails pointing to an upsell or a similar product.

At Planify, we can segment our subscribers by those who are already clients who work with us. Otherwise, we can segment our subscribers who prefer to just enjoy the content we love to share.

Amount Spent

Your customers will have different income brackets and segmenting as such can help. Along with past purchases, you will know their trends and what price points seem to work best and market accordingly.

These emails work to help re-engage subscribers to your list. But they do more than that. They let you know who you want to remove from your list. For instance, if a subscriber hasn’t opened an email from you in a year, that hurts your open rates. You can send a re-engagement email, reminding them about you and note that they haven’t opened in a while.

If they still don’t seem interested in opening, you can simply remove them from your list. This is important for maintaining list hygiene. Inactive subscribers affect the overall health and effectiveness of your email list. Removing them gives you the freedom to have better metrics.

These also ensure that you aren’t missing out on leads. If a potential customer simply needs to be re-engaged, you can see that they are still a good lead. If, however, they are still unresponsive, you know that you haven’t missed out, and you can take the next step.

Another huge benefit is you keep ISP spam rates low. If customers mark you as spam, as opposed to deleting your emails, that can really hurt your email metrics. Once more, you can take the next step if re-engagement doesn’t work.

Utilizing these Campaigns

Putting these email campaigns in place shouldn’t be a huge burden. By setting up and automating these email campaigns, your subscribers can receive just what they need from you–right when they need it.

With an email template for each of the five campaigns, you will see that it’s easier than ever to use email marketing.