‘What’s the best time to send emails?’ ‘Should I use a drip campaign?’ You keep asking yourself email marketing questions and there is no straight answer. While some may be answered with statistics and data, others do not have official answer. This can leave you with so many questions concerning email marketing, especially when it comes to choosing the most appropriate time and tools to use in your strategy.

Email Marketing is one of the first steps many businesses will take to increase traffic and sales on their websites. The first step you should take is to create an email list. This can be done by using a free service like MailChimp or Constant Contact, but it is much more challenging to get people to subscribe through those services, that are also free. You should come up with an idea of what you want your subscribers to do when they arrive on your website, for example buy something or give you there email address so you can send them more interesting content in the future.

8. Harpoon Brewery

Marketing Campaign: Customer Delight

My friends at Harpoon are so thoughtful, aren’t they? This simple, timely email really does feel like it’s coming from a friend, which is why it’s so effective. In an age of email automation, it’s easy for email campaigns to feel a little robotic. And while I’m certain that this email was, in fact, automated, it feels really human.

If you’re looking to strengthen the relationship you have with your existing customers, consider taking the time to set up a quick email like this to let them know you’re thinking of them.

Why It Works

Personalization: From the timing of the email (birthday) to the personalized salutation, this email was sent to the right person at the right time.

9. Rip Curl

Marketing Campaign: Promotion

“JOIN THE REVOLUTION.”

That’s quite powerful, wouldn’t you agree? Rip Curl, an Australian surfing sportswear retailer, combines urgency and our psychological need to be part of something to create an email headline that jumps off the page. This positioning is designed to lead people to believe that there’s a “revolution” taking place and it’s their turn to get in on the action.

Why It Works

At the end of the day, people want to be part of something that’s bigger than themselves, and this email aims to motivate them to do so by purchasing this sleek watch.

10. J.Crew Factory

Marketing Campaign: Promotion

For many of us, when it comes to wrapping gifts, the struggle is real. J.Crew Factory recognized this problem and then created this email to serve as a solution for those incapable of pulling off a Pinterest-esque wrap job: gift cards. The email offers up two different ways to pick up a gift card — in store or online — in an effort to avoid excluding anyone.

They’ve also included a map of the nearest store location at the end of the email to lower the purchasing barrier even further.

Why It Works

It combines humor with a low-stress, low-friction solution.

11. charity: water

Marketing Campaign: Engagement

When people talk about email marketing, lots of them forget to mention transactional emails. These are the automated emails you get in your inbox after taking a certain action on a website. This could be anything from filling out a form to purchasing a product to updating you on the progress of your order. Often, these are plain text emails that marketers set and forget.

Well, charity: water took an alternate route. Once someone donates to a charity: water project, her money takes a long journey. Most charities don’t tell you about that journey at all — charity: water uses automated emails to show donors how their money is making an impact over time. With the project timeline and accompanying table, you don’t even really need to read the email — you know immediately where you are in the whole process so you can move onto other things in your inbox.

Why It Works

It keeps the audience engaged and shows the impact that their actions have made on the organization in the effort of staying top-of-mind and increasing future participation.

General Email Marketing Ideas

If you want to form a solid relationship with your mailing list and maximise your chances of driving first-time and ongoing sales then you need to be putting out engaging email content several times per week.

This will maximise your emails’ chances of getting read, allow you to drive consistent engagement, and help you earn and keep a spot at the top of your audience’s mind.

And remember, every email you send should include a call to action which encourages users to take the next step. This can be clicking through to your onsite content, viewing a product or offer, or claiming a coupon code.

Sending out emails with this level of frequency is highly effective, but it can be tough to find something valuable to say all the time. To help you keep your emails constantly flowing and consistently engaging here are some of our favourite ideas for emails you can send anytime:

1. Welcome Emails

Anytime someone new signs up to your mailing list it’s important that you immediately reach out and welcome them to your mailing list.

You don’t have to do anything too fancy here. You can simply welcome users to you mailing list and give them an introduction to what they can expect from your emails. A welcome email is also a great opportunity to give users a proper introduction to your business, and present them with a clear call to action to try to drive some instant activity.

If you really want to sweeten the deal you can even throw in an introductory coupon to encourage instant action, but we’ll talk more about that later.

2. News Emails

Sending out relevant news about your niche is a fantastic way to keep in touch with your subscribers, provide them with value, and drive engagement.

If all you do is send out advertisements and sales pitches, people will tune out pretty quickly. You need to mix it up with interesting, valuable content and sharing relevant news is a great way to do just that.

This is a great strategy for developing relationships with your audience and positioning yourself as a trusted and helpful authority within your niche. This goes a long way when it comes to driving long-term customer acquisition and retention.

Bonus points if you can direct users to your own blog posts covering relevant news updates.

3. Update Emails

Direct email is a fantastic way to keep your users and customers posted about any important updates to your products or procedures. Update emails aren’t inherently the most exciting emails, but if you’re looping users in on changes to your products and services these emails can serve as a great way to show off what you’ve got and promote your offering that’s constantly improving.

Update emails can even serve as a simple way to touch base with your customers and keep yourself fresh in their mind.

Wahanda were able to cleverly use a standard update email to incentivise customers to subscribe to their newsletter which will give their future promotional efforts a meaningful boost.

4. Sharing Valuable Content

When people sign up for your mailing list it will generally be because they like and trust your brand, and want to gain value from your communications. This value will often take the form of product news and special offers, or it can be the insightful and valuable content that you share.

Just about every business has something to gain to by producing valuable content about their niche, but it can be particularly effective for B2B and SaaS businesses. Whatever it is you’re writing about, your content needs to strike a balance between promoting your own offering, and providing readers with meaningful value.

If you regularly publish blog posts it’s always a good move to share them with your list, but also producing some exclusive email content is an awesome way to incentivise sign-ups and make your subscribers feel valued.

5. Curated Content

A great way to bulk up your email content is by sharing a curated collection of new, high-value, and relevant articles and videos from around the web.

Taking this approach will allow you to send out more emails and engage your audience more often. Just remember to prioritise your own content, and try not to direct your subscribers towards any of your competitors.

Helm Boots does this expertly by sending out a weekly roundup of engaging content from around the web, including content and deals from their own store.

6. Happy Holidays

Sending out emails around holidays is a great way to instantly make your emails more captivating and capitalise on people’s festive spirits. Whether you’re running a holiday sale, sharing some holiday-themed content or even just wishing people a happy holiday, this tactic is a surefire way to give your messages an easy boost in engagement.

And with the absurd amount of holidays floating around you’ll never run out of reasons to celebrate.

7. Ask Questions

The key to success in any industry is understanding your customers, and there’s no better way to gain this understanding than simply going out and asking for it.

If you want to get valuable audience insights then you should try sending your subscribers emails with targeted questions relevant to their stage in the customer journey.

Here’s how Vueling Airlines used a quick question to gauge customer preferences and tried to drive some instant conversions:

As well as helping you gauge preferences and drive conversions, this type of email also serves as a nice way to engage users and make them feel involved with your brand.

Conclusions

Email marketing is one of the easiest methods to getting your online business started. The problem is, that it’s not easy to just sit down and start coming up with ideas all the time. It requires you to be extra creative and find ways to say and do things differently than everyone else.