8 different types of email campaigns

Originally published April 05, 2021, updated June 19, 2024

The source of life for digital marketers? You guessed it, email marketing!

Email marketing is a gift that keeps giving, but only if you aren’t afraid of mixing it up every now and then. To leverage all the glorious benefits of email marketing, you need to expand your arsenal and alternate between different email campaigns you send out to your subscribers.

That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today - different types of email campaigns and how you can use them to achieve your goals. Tune in!

What Is an Email Campaign?

An email campaign is a sequence of several individual emails (or, sometimes, a single email), all of which are sent in a particular order over a set period of time and have the same, specific purpose.

At the same time, despite having a self-standing goal it pursues, every email marketing campaign needs to be aligned with the goals of the broader email marketing and digital marketing strategies. Therefore, it’s possible to say that an email campaign is an element of a digital marketing complex.

It’s essential you familiarise yourself with a variety of different email marketing campaigns types and use all of them for your business. That way, you’ll both have more content to send to your mailing list, and be able to keep your subscribers engaged for longer.

8 Types of Email Campaigns for Your Business to Use [+ Free Templates]

Each and every email campaign needs to have a reason why it’s being sent - the goal it has to achieve. Otherwise, you won’t be able to leverage the benefits of email marketing and get an astonishing ROI.

Depending on the goal of the email marketing campaign, it’s possible to differentiate between lots of different types of email campaigns. All of them, however, fall into one of the two categories - automated email campaigns or manual email campaigns.

The Welcome Message

On average, it takes people about 7 seconds to make up their mind about a person they see for the first time, and even less than that, about 1/10 of a second, to form the first impression. The digital plane is no different.

According to a study conducted by Gitte Lindgaard, it takes less than 0.05 seconds for your email subscribers to make the initial judgement about your business, based solely on the first instance of communication. In a matter of milliseconds, they’ll make a decision of whether your business matches their sphere of interests well and is, therefore, worthy of their attention, or if they should just bin your email straight away without giving it too much thought.

Just one little email can make or break your business. Sounds like a lot of pressure, doesn’t it?

That’s why you need to get it right on the first try. Instead of just sending a random email to your new subscribers, make sure to target them with a meticulously crafted Welcome campaign!

Here are some of the things you can include in your Welcome campaign:

• A greeting. Say ‘Hello!’ and welcome your new subscribers; tell them how much you appreciate them joining your mailing list, and how much you’re looking forward to sharing some moments with them.
• An introduction. Tell more about yourself, your best offers and star marketing materials. Perhaps, there’s a particularly sexy blog post or YouTube video you know will make a lasting positive impression on your new subscribers. That’s the best time to do that - just don’t forget to perfect your CTA for maximum conversion.
• Reassurance. Nowadays, people are very protective of their inboxes, so don’t shy away from reassuring your new subscribers that they’ve made a great choice joining your mailing list.
• A gift. Welcome emails are an ideal place to slip new subscribers something special. Access to exclusive content or a nifty discount code are both amazing at breaking the ice between you and your new subscribers.
• Next steps. Show your new subscribers that you respect them and give them control over your future communication - let them decide on the emailing frequency and other preferences. Also, it’s a great opportunity to ask your new subscribers to follow your socials.
• A question. Finally, include a short survey to get to know your subscribers.

That’s where you object - but isn’t it too much to put into just one email? And you’re absolutely right.

Apart from being timely, your welcome campaign needs to also be easy to digest. You don’t want to overwhelm your new subscribers with too much information at once. Instead, you should consider sending out an automated sequence of welcome emails to deliver all that info in smaller drips.

‘On average, sending a series of welcome emails yields an average of 51% more revenue than a single welcome email.’
[Source: Mailchimp]

There’s an ongoing debate regarding the number of emails the welcome campaign should consist of. Some marketers stop at 2 or 3, while others send out 5 or 6 emails.

NetHunt believes the truth is always somewhere in the middle, so our go-to welcome sequence consists of 4 emails:

• Email 1: Welcome
• Email 2: How we work
• Email 3: What to expect from us
• Email 4: What we need from you

Here’s NetHunt’s take on Welcome emails written by our one and only George:

Here’s what we actually send out to our new users:

The Lead Nurturing Drip Campaign

You could be a pro at generating leads thanks to your powerful lead magnets, you might even have your lead capture down to a T, but your mail list is worth nothing if you don’t work with your leads once they enter your database.

To convert leads into customers and generate profit, you need to make sure you keep nudging them towards making a purchasing decision. That’s where lead nurturing drip campaigns come in handy.

Lead nurturing email campaigns are automated, personalised, email campaigns that marketers use to take users on a journey that may impact their buying behaviour. Usually, lead nurturing campaigns are set off the second a new lead enters the database - that is, their status changes from New to Lead in the CRM system. Implementing a CRM system for digital marketing agency is crucial to effectively manage and nurture leads throughout the sales funnel. You need to start your lead nurturing activities as early as possible in order to convert your leads into customers sooner.

This being said, if you want to make difference with your campaign, you need to make sure that you follow these rules:

• Identify your customer’s buyer persona.
  Lead nurturing is only effective when it’s personalised. To an extent, it isn’t even about you and your company. Instead, in your lead nurturing campaigns you should focus more on your leads. How can they benefit from purchasing the product you offer? How do they know you’re different (and better) than your competitors? How can they be sure you’re a good fit for them? It’s essential that you understand your leads’ background, identify their pain points and appeal to their needs. Only by actualising your product in their eyes and presenting it as a neat solution to fix any problem they’re currently facing, you’ll be able to convince your leads to finally make a purchasing decision.
• Make sure your content is customisable.
  Without a doubt, in 2021, personalisation is all about the content you provide - you need to craft your message in such a way that it’s relevant to the very lead you end your lead nurturing campaign email to. However, you still can’t forget about other little things that make your communication appear more personal: the use of your lead’s name, their job position and other bits of personal information. Make sure you leave room for those macros when crafting your email templates.
• Know at which stage of the buyer’s journey your lead is when they enter the sales funnel.
  This has a massive impact on the types of content they’ll be the most interested in. You can’t target Top of the funnel leads with the same content that works wonders on Bottom of the funnel leads, and vice versa.
• Keep your communication consistent.
  One of the key reasons why lead nurturing campaigns should be automated is because they work best when sent regularly. You want to be constantly making progress, moving closer towards closing the deal. It’s only possible when you’re on your lead’s mind (and in their inbox) all the time.

After you’ve established some sort of relationship with your leads, you can start including triggered emails into your lead nurturing campaign - that is, craft email offers based on user behaviour:

Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are often overlooked, even though they are a great way to show our company’s professionalism and emphasise on the fact you pay attention to the small details the same way you care about the bigger picture.

The trigger that sets off a transactional email campaign is a specific action, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

Depending on the action that set off the campaign, it’s possible to differentiate between confirmation emails and form submission kick-backs (thank you emails).

While these emails do sound a little bit technical and, therefore, aren’t that interesting, they can actually generate your business more sales than a lot of other, more exciting email campaigns. That’s because people are looking out for these emails and open them way more often than the email they aren’t expecting to receive.

Transactional emails get 4 to 8 times more opens and clicks than non-transactional emails.
[EmailMonks]

Now, put two and two together. An email that gets opened almost every time is a perfect opportunity to further establish your brand and up-sell or cross-sell products or services. In fact, you can treat transactional emails as a free ads board.

Just make sure you don’t go overboard with it. A simple yet effective CTA should do the job.

The Abandoned Cart Campaign

It might be a loud statement to make - after all, all email campaigns are equally important for your overall email marketing success, - but cart abandonment campaigns are the backbone of your sales.

Let me give you an example of how a well-crafted cart abandonment email sequence can save your deal and seriously boost your business’ sales.

Put yourself in your lead’s shoes. They’re obviously interested in whatever you’re offering. How do you know that? Well, they’ve gone a long way to get to that stage: if your leads already have some products chilling in their shopping cart, it means they’ve taken their time to research those items, differentiated you from your competitors, visited your website and deliberately clicked on the ‘Buy’ button. They are at the very bottom of the sales funnel - one click away from completing their purchase. Even if they leave your website without completing the order, it’s still a very do-able task to convert them into customers. You just need to give it one final push.

Or… One final email campaign - the Cart Abandonment campaign. A well-crafted one can work wonders for your business and increase your sales!

Check out how Whiskey Loot made that possible:

Shopping cart abandonment rates range from 70-80% and conversion rates from abandoned shopping cart reminder emails can easily exceed 20%.
[Bronto/Magento]

You just need to make sure you’re careful with what you do and how you do it. Here are some of the most valuable and actionable tips regarding the cart abandonment email campaign creation:

• Make sure you send your email when it’s needed the most. It’s important to identify the best time to send out your emails once the potential customer has left their purchase unfinished.
• Personalisation is always important. Make sure you create a lot of meaning to your lead. It’s your last chance to show how your product will help them to make their life easier and more successful - push those buttons!
• Offer an incentive. There must be a reason why your lead didn’t finish the checkout. Potentially, the problem is the price. That’s why a little discount or a free shipping coupon is often more than enough to land the deal!
• A little bit of humour goes a long way. If your business industry allows you to be a little bit funny, break the ice of an uncompleted order with a sassy line.

• The more, the merrier. Instead of just sending one reminder, turn it into a sequence.

Brands sending a second abandoned cart reminder had a 50% increase in abandoned cart revenue compared to just their first abandoned cart mailing.
[Experian]

For example, you could build your sequence to have the following structure:

Email 1: Cart reminder (sent a few hours after cart abandonment)

Email 2: Follow up (sent a few days later)

Email 3: Promotional discount (sent a few days after email two)

Just make sure that you keep the overall number of cart abandonment emails in the series reasonable and don’t go ham. Also, do double-check that every subsequent email is different from the previous one.

Just a couple of days ago, I received about a dozen emails reminding me that I had something left in the shopping cart. I wouldn’t really mind this had the emails not been identical and sent with the 11 minutes interval. Big oops!

Manual Email Campaigns

Manual email campaigns are the emails that you send to your audience one at a time — instead of being triggered by the subscribers’ actions, they’re crafted, assigned to a list or segment, and scheduled manually by the marketer in charge.

Newsletters

Email newsletter is one of the must-haves for every business that runs a blog and regularly posts lots of content for the audience to plough through.

You have to be a realist - only your most hardcore and devoted fans will go through every update you make. So, it’s your job to make sure you get as much content though as possible. The best way to do this is to send out a round-up at the end of each month and cover your star pieces.

The main audience for this type of email campaign is the people who’ve deliberately opted in to receive updates about your blog and subscribed to your blog mailing list. They’ve already expressed interest, so you can expect these emails to get opened.

The trick is not to just throw in all your blog posts for the month and call it a once-in-a-lifetime offer. You’re not going to fool anyone with that. Instead, take time to curate the content and personalise the newsletter to only feature the articles that will be of interest to the particular segment you’re sending them out to.

Moreover, you could benefit from including some exclusive content into the mix or adding little personal remarks that would make the newsletter more exciting to read. Here are a couple of things you could put into this campaign:

• Editor’s comments that were previously unpublished in the blog
• Behind the scenes of the article writing process
• More facts and stats
• A special offer

You get the point, don’t you? The main purpose of this email campaign is to cover what you’ve been up to recently and make it interesting and worth reading. Create value for your readers!

Another thing about newsletters is that they don’t have to be all about your blog, either. In fact, you can easily focus on your company news and tell about the features and products you’ve released, the achievements you had, etc.

Have a look at what we included in our NetHunt’s October newsletter:

Advantages of Email newsletters:

• They let you talk all about you. Finally, you get a chance to spill the tea about the insides of your company.
• They’re easy to customise and personalise. You can make them extremely appealing to the recipients of the campaign simply by picking the appropriate content they’d be interested in the most.
• They boost brand awareness. These campaigns are very branded, which means every time someone forwards them to their network, you get a bit more exposure.
• They let you be creative. Newsletters welcome a lot of different content formats, which means you can showcase your skill and share not only texts but also videos, images and more!

Disadvantages of Email newsletters:

• They’re quite complicated to make. You need to make sure that your newsletter represents who you are. Essentially, your email newsletter is the face of your company, so you have to ensure it’s designed well. The layout of these emails is more complex than any other email campaign, which means you’ll probably spend more time crafting them.
• You can’t send them too often. The whole idea of a newsletter is to provide your email subscribers with a look at what they’ve missed. A certain amount of time needs to pass before you can craft another meaningful and content-full roundup to send to your audience.
• Diluted CTA. Due to the nature of these emails, it’s difficult to include a hard CTA that would convert. If you include a series of blurbs or article summaries, the attention of your recipients will most likely be spread across those, instead of staying focused on a single element that is your CTa button.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails do exactly what you’d expect them to do - they promote a product or service, or your company in general.

Usually, these email campaigns are rather short - you simply let your email subscribers know more about the product you offer and tell them how they can benefit from using it. You encourage them to take the next step and move further down the sales funnel.

These emails are all visual. You need to make sure you advertise your product correctly and include a strong CTA. Your reader’s attention needs to be as focused as ever. You don’t get a second chance.

On top of that, considering the fact that these emails carry a bit less value to the lead than the others, you want to think hard about the subject line you want to accompany your email. It’s your job to encourage the email recipient to open the email by differentiating your message from the hundreds of similar emails already chilling in their inbox:

• Offer a discount or a free product
• Personalise your offer
• Provoke emotion
• Add humour
• Leave them curious
• Use slogans from popular music
• Use colour, images and font that grabs attention

But also… Make sure you don’t overdo it. Otherwise, there’s a chance of our promotional email landing straight into spam.

Read more about how to prevent your emails from going into the spam folder!

Advantages of the Promotional campaign:

• They let you advertise your business and promote the products you offer.
• They’re CTA-centered, so they help to convert and, subsequently, generate sales.

Disadvantages of the Promotional campaign:

• They don’t have the most extraordinarily high open rates and CTR. While it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother sending them, it definitely does imply that you’ll have to spend more time crafting a campaign that stands out in your recipient’s inbox.

Seasonal Emails

These emails are, by far, the easiest to compose. You don’t have to think hard about what to include in your campaign - just use the occasion that’s already there for you to leverage.

Three-quarters of the holiday season consumers reported that sales, discounts, and similar promotions were highly important.
[NRF]

Either it’s a national, international or your company’s own holiday, you can suggest your email subscribers celebrate together and congratulate them with a couple of nice, merry words and a little coupon or a special offer!

Some of the things that can make your seasonal email campaign successful are:

• Using holiday-specific taglines, catchphrases and language, in general
• Using emojis to elevate the joyful spirit
• Going for a humorous angle
• Including some festive motives and lightening the mood by gamifying your email campaign
• Focusing on gifts for the email recipients
• Tying in the holiday ‘brand colours’ and your own brand identity

Here at NetHunt, we love holidays, so we try to go all out on every occasion possible. Check out this New Year’s email campaign we sent to our email subscribers last year:

Advantages of Seasonal emails:

• They're multi-format. You don’t have to only stick to texts and a couple of images. Holidays are the perfect time to make your email campaign exciting, colourful and full of different types of content - GIFs, emojis, videos, images, even games! There’s no limit to fun.
• They’re easy to make time-sensitive. You can act on the FOMO of your email subscribers and promote a product that is only available for a certain period of time - during the holiday season.
• They have extremely high open rates.

Disadvantages of Seasonal emails:

• You don’t have too many occasions for these emails. Everything is good in moderation, so you need to stop yourself from sending out a seasonal campaign for every single occasion that comes your way.

Invitation Emails

Invitation emails are a great way to establish your relationship with the email subscriber and show them that you care.

Email is a great medium for promoting your upcoming event and scoring more attendees. However, if you want your email campaign to be successful and fulfil its goal of attracting attendees, it's extremely important to clearly showcase why that event is worth their attendance.

A good invitation email campaign should include the following:

• Personalisation - you need to both show that you know who you’re targeting with the campaign and prove that their presence is important. Moreover, you need to also explain how attending your event will benefit them directly.
• An overview of the event - what’s going to happen, who will benefit the most from attending, and when and where it’s going to take place.
• An incentive to join - you can always bribe your email subscribers a bit by offering them a little something to confirm their attendance.
• A clear CTA - what’s the next step you want the email recipients to take; how can they accept or decline the invitation?

That’s how we invited people to our Workflows webinar via email:

Advantages of Invitation emails:

• They convert your email subscribers and move the further down the sales funnel.
• They’re easy to craft - you have a set layout and structure for such email campaigns that you can reuse for different events.

Disadvantages of Invitation emails:

• These emails require a lot of personalisation as you need to convince your recipients to join.

How to Send an Email Campaign

It’s pretty useless to just know about different types of email campaigns without actually using them to your business’ advantage.

If you want to leverage the benefits of all the aforementioned campaigns, you need to make sure you:

1. Know how to build an email template.
2. Know how to use email templates.
3. Know how to send email campaigns.

And…
Have a great tool in place to automate your email marketing!

Here’s how you can set an automated email sequence using NetHunt CRM’s new ‘Workflows’ feature.

Step 1. Create a new Workflow

Go to 'Workflows' and click the plus new button in the top right corner. Name your Workflow and hit 'CONTINUE'.

Step 2. Create a starting trigger

To create a workflow, hit the 'Add starting trigger' button:

Pick a trigger that will start the Workflow. In this example, we chose 'Field value changes'. Then chose the folder and the field:

'Run once per record' means the current Workflow will be executed once for any given record, regardless of how many times the selected field has changed.

Depending on the workflow type, you either check or uncheck this box.

If you don't specify change, the Workflow is triggered by any change in the selected field. In our case, we will need the Workflow to run when there's a specific change in the Status field, so we check the 'Specify change' box:

We're also defining a specific change in the Status field that triggers our Workflow: That is, when a Contact is moved from New to Lead.

Now, we have set up a starting trigger.

Step 3. Create a condition to stop

For Contacts to leave this Workflow, we need to set a condition to stop. In our example, we’ve got two conditions..

First, if the Contact has a new, incoming email linked to it

And second, If the Status has changed once again

To do this, we'll split our Workflow into 3 branches:

First, the main one - Branch A

Second, the one that checks for any incoming email - Branch B

And third, the one that checks for any changes to the Status field - Branch C

Here's what we've got so far:

So in Branch B, we’ll add an action to 'Wait for email' and click 'SAVE'.

In Branch C, we’ll add an action to 'Wait for update' in the Status field from Lead to Any value.

And here's what we get:

Step 4. Add actions

It's time to add the actions that we've created a trigger for. We’ll use Branch A for that. Click the 'Add action' button and pick the action type you need:

We want to send emails; so, we pick 'Send an email':

• In the 'From' field, pick who is sending the email.
• In the 'To' field, pick the email address field to send the email to.
• Enter the Subject and main Email text. You can use templates and insert macros if you need to.
• Finally hit 'SAVE'.

Let's add a couple more emails in the same way.

Let's also add a waiting time between the emails.

Step 5. Complete the workflow

In order to complete the workflow, at the end of every branch we need to add action 'End workflow'.

This is what it looks like:

When we’re ready, we hit 'ACTIVATE' to launch our shiny new Workflow. And in this way the automated email sequence is set up.

You can find out more about email marketing automation with NetHunt CRM here!

It’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest email marketing trends and keep your email campaigns varied. Get the most out of your email marketing today!

That’s it for today. Come back soon to find out more about email drip campaigns.

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