Email Marketing Fundamentals: The 3 Types of Emails That Every Business Needs
I love learning new things that will help my clients grow their businesses. It’s even better when they are things you can set up once, repeat, and see continuous results. Over the past six months, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with different platforms for our client’s email marketing campaigns – Klaviyo, Active Campaign, Faire, Hubspot, MailChimp, and Convert Kit, to name a few. And while they all differ in capabilities and structure, there are three types of emails that I always recommend my clients set up to generate results from their campaigns.
Welcome Emails
The first email to set up is the welcome series. Keep two goals in mind here:
- You want to build relationships with your customers
- You want to earn trust so that they take action
Give them an idea of what it will be like to be on your email list while also showcasing your offerings. Typically your welcome series starts immediately after they fill out your form. I’ve seen statistics with welcome area emails series ranging from 2 emails up to 10. I have 5 emails in my welcome series. When implementing a series of welcome emails, I will typically hold off sending regular campaign emails until the subscriber has gone through the series in its entirety.
For most businesses, the welcome series is the most opened e-mail(s), so you’ll want to make it good. It doesn’t mean you need to be giving away discounts or a free download, although those will certainly help to grow your list more quickly. But acknowledging that someone filled out of form and giving them an introduction to your business goes a long way. If you have any lead generation form on your website, be sure you are taking advantage of an automatic welcome e-mail right after the form is submitted.
Behavior-Based
This is another low-hanging fruit for businesses. For example, product-based businesses can utilize abandoned cart emails or browse abandonment emails based on what customers have done in their e-commerce shop. When using an e-commerce platform such as Shopify, these emails are very simple to set up. Additionally, Shopify has numerous automated emails that business owners can use to engage with their customers based on behavior.
For those not selling e-commerce, think of all the other ways you can touch your customers based on things they did or didn’t do. For example, if they sign up for a webinar or to attend online training, are you following up with a thank you? Are you acknowledging those who didn’t attend the event and offering assistance in other ways? There are many ways that you can look at your ideal client or customer’s behavior and identify ways that you can show up for them.
Loyalty
If you know me, you know that this is my favorite type of marketing. Before starting Ellen Grace Marketing, I launched a loyalty program for a national retailer with over 700 stores. It’s amazing what you can do when you segment and target a specific group of people and acknowledge them.
For product-based businesses, this can include a whole plethora of things. You could send a post-purchase email asking for a review of a product. Or, if someone hasn’t purchased in a while, you can set up an automated email to reach out to them. You can also send emails after a purchase has been made, suggesting other items they may like or may compliment what they have already bought.
You can do similar types of emails if you’re a service-based business. When was the last time you reached out to prior customers to re-engage them with your current offerings? Have you ever shared other services that your company provides that a client may not know about? What about asking for a video or written testimonial from someone you have worked with in the past? I’m amazed at how willing our clients are to provide testimonials, but if I never ask them, it will never happen.
It’s no surprise that these emails follow the typical marketing funnel of getting to know someone to getting them to trust you to becoming loyal repeat customers in the future!
Regular Campaign Emails
Setting up the three types of messages within your email marketing campaign is essential, but don’t forget to show up regularly for your audience, showcasing your content pillars and other key things that you are doing to help solve their pain points. Ellen Grace Marketing can help you with all of these things! Reach out to us today to set up a discovery call!
To learn more about email marketing:
Email Marketing: Building Community and Generating Sales
