From relying on basic text to incorporating visually engaging infographics, email marketing has come a long way. Even so, new trends and promotional strategies are leading to the creation of distinctive templates designed to help with lead conversion and buyer retention.
But how do you discern among all the different types of emails available? More importantly, what will suit your strategy the best?
The answers to those questions are relatively straightforward, considering the potential audience you have access to. A Statista report states that global email users are projected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025. In short, as long as you adapt to shifting market sentiments, you can effectively deploy promotional material using any of the variants mentioned in this article.
Interested to know what they are? Well, let’s dive right in!
9 Types of Emails That Will Help Scale Your Marketing ROI
While the types of email variants you need to incorporate into your marketing strategy can seem a little daunting initially, they are critical in helping you convert or retain your prospects. And if executed properly, implementing them can enable you to connect with a wide range of customers.
Having said that, here are 9 types of emails that will help you achieve marketing success:
1. Welcome Emails
If you examine all the different types of emails available at your disposal, you will notice that welcome emails are a unicorn in terms of the ROI they offer. According to HubSpot, they have a 50% open rate, meaning they are 86% more effective than standard newsletters.
So, why is this the case? The answer is simple: Your prospects expect confirmation once they have subscribed to your email list. And once they get it, they naturally want to see how excited you are to have them as subscribers.
It’s basic human nature.
With that out of the way, let’s look at an example of an excellent welcome email:
Lyft’s welcome email follows a simple and clean format. More importantly, it tells you two critical things about the brand: What it’s doing now and its plans for 2030.
That’s what you need to remember.
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the habit of making a welcome email into a long and drawn-out ‘thank you’ note. But your subscribers are looking for something else. They want something concise that tells them what they just signed up for.
In short, keep it minimal, informative and, above all, relevant to your brand and prospects.
2. Special Offers and Promotions
From coupons and discount offers to VIP programs and limited-time deals, there’s nothing that email offers can’t deliver.
However, there are two fundamental ideas you need to stick to here: Exclusivity and Scarcity.
Yet, that’s a seemingly impossible challenge when your team is sending out different types of emails en masse.
So, how do you incorporate those two elements into your email marketing strategy?
Audience segmentation.
As such, when you divide your prospects into decisive categories, you gain valuable insight into behavioral and spending patterns. From there, you can design a limited-time deal that appeals to specific audience groups.
The basic premise here is to foster personalization while paying attention to even the minutest details.
Some other tips you could implement while curating offer emails are as follows:
- Schedule the email ahead of time and try to set it to seasonal events or holidays
- Be specific about the terms and conditions without seeming overly restrictive
- Ensure that the copy is appealing and relevant to the prospect group in question
If done right, a targeted promotional email will increase your sales volume and build better engagement around your product or service.
3. Newsletters
As per research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, among all the different types of emails in B2B marketing, newsletters are the most popular. 81% of respondents state that they prefer them over other variants.
And, even though email newsletters may not have as high of an open rate as welcome emails, they do one thing significantly better—deliver updates on a product or company while engaging prospects. You could even repurpose your blogs and include them in any outgoing material.
Yet, you have to be mindful when curating such marketing material. In other words, it helps to structure the content so that your audience is compelled to go through it.
To try and understand how that works, let’s look at what Fitbit does:
This is an excellent example of how a newsletter can be subtly promotional while being helpful to your existing clientele. Simply put, Fitbit is not blatant about things. Instead, it focuses on bringing actionable information to its users while centering everything around its product.
Remember, when executed properly, email newsletters can build a relationship between you and a prospect while increasing visibility around what you offer.
4. Milestone Emails
Milestone emails are an excellent way to celebrate what you offer and your audience base. More importantly, they build a connection between you and your prospects, which is incredibly rare in B2B marketing.
However, creating such material takes quite a bit of effort. In fact, there is an art to writing milestone emails. While the specifics can vary based on the industry and the market you cater to, the general rule is to highlight how your product has helped your consumers.
More importantly, like all the different types of emails, these variants perform exceptionally well in some situations and fail miserably in others. And, even though it does not fit the bill perfectly, let’s consider the example of ‘Spotify Wrapped’ to understand what that means.
At its most fundamental level, the concept behind ‘Spotify Wrapped’ is the same as a milestone email – it’s meant to mark the users’ achievements. Yet, the idea does not work if the release date for the program is pushed up to the middle of the year.
Do you see where this is going?
Simply put, timing is everything when it comes to a milestone email. Without it, your marketing efforts are neither here nor there.
5. Curated Content Emails
It can often be challenging to differentiate between newsletters and curated content. After all, both are a collection of informative material. However, the distinction between the two is significant.
Newsletters can comprise a wide range of topics. Curated content emails, though, are limited to just one. In addition, the chosen context for such messages has to be relevant and of exceptional quality, more so than any other variant you send out.
Now, this is easier said than done. So, to help you get a head start, here are a few questions your team must ask itself before deploying such content:
- Does the prospect in question have any concerns related to the chosen topic?
- Is there sufficient empirical evidence or data to support the email’s content?
- Will the expansion of the material help strengthen the market perspective on your product?
- Does the material offer anything unique?
Granted, the answers to those questions can be difficult to dissect. So, a few things you can do to make things easier for yourself are as follows:
- Gather feedback from industry experts
- Review opinion pieces and other related content from reputed publications
When you adhere to the tips listed above, you automatically expand upon your expertise on the subject. And this is especially relevant when you want to gain access to specific industries or sectors. Essentially, at that point, you are saying, “Don’t take my word for it. Here are some other people who will tell you the same.”
6. Review Requests
Based on an article by Qualtrics, 91% of individuals aged between 18 to 34 put as much faith in online reviews as they do in personal recommendations. What’s intriguing here is approximately 93% of respondents state that online reviews influence their purchasing habits.
In short, you need to build positive feedback around your product or service line. Doing that enables you to:
- Understand prospect pain points
- Identify any existing market gaps that your product can cater to
- Build visibility and confidence in your services
Now, requesting reviews can be a simple process. You can reach out to your existing audience and directly ask for one. It also helps to keep things to the point while providing an incentive.
Here’s an example of what an appropriate review request email looks like:
While on the topic of creating the perfect review request, it’s also critical to note that a significant chunk of your current audience may not appreciate you bombarding them with a message after every purchase or order.
Thus, it’s best to space things out with different types of emails in between. You can even send a request that consolidates the last 2 to 3 purchasing orders to mitigate the possibility of your emails being marked as spam.
7. Product Announcements
A well-known fact in the B2B marketing space is that attracting new prospects is significantly more expensive than retaining them. What’s missing in that statement is the disparity in costs. According to Invespcro, converting a new lead takes 5 times the financial resources than holding on to your current audience base.
This bit of information is especially relevant when it comes to product announcement emails. In other words, always inform your current consumers about new projects or product lines before you pitch to other potential leads.
Now, it is vital to identify the foundation of an announcement email. And the most straightforward answer to that is social proof.
As such, testimonials not only motivate potential buyers to act but also give them the security of knowing that your product works and works well.
But how do you quickly gather positive feedback on something that has just hit the market?
You provide exclusive access to the product to a select few before deploying it.
This may sound concerning to you initially. After all, what if the sample group decides that what you offer is not worth it?
Yet, you also have to consider that the feedback you receive can help streamline your development pipeline. In other words, unlike all the other emails, product announcements serve a two-fold purpose: Providing helpful feedback and building excitement around upcoming launches.
8. Progress Reports
Throughout this article, there have been repeated mentions of including social proof, evidence and other substantiated material in your email marketing campaign.
And the reason behind it is that every organization or prospect in the B2B sector values numbers and trackable metrics.
And, among all the different types of emails, nothing is better suited to provide trackable metrics than a progress report. Still, let’s pause for a moment and examine that statement. What is the one factor that’s helping you retain your existing audience?
Success.
More specifically, the success your prospects achieve with your product or service.
That’s what progress reports highlight. They let you track key metrics for your buyers and emphasize how you have helped their business. The idea here is to position what you offer as being indispensable.
That doesn’t translate to just listing generic numbers and values. Instead, it would be best if you personalized them to an extent.
For example, say you offer an online platform that connects buyers to other merchants. Now, your focus should be on pointing out the amount of time you’ve helped eliminate from the pre-lobbying phase.
9. Confirmation Emails
Historically, confirmation emails were rarely used in B2B email marketing campaigns. Instead, they were more prevalent in the B2C industry. That trend has now changed entirely.
Why, you ask? Well, confirmation emails are an excellent way to pitch related products or services. They also enable you to direct your prospect to other sales funnels they may engage with.
For instance, suppose you have just closed a bulk order with a recently converted lead. Now, you can send an order confirmation message that includes a subtle by-line or footer text about a different service.
Of course, this also means that you need to build up on introducing a separate range of products before your lead makes a purchase. This can be tricky to accomplish, considering it risks overflowing a conversion funnel with other distracting elements.
So, to circumvent this, you can deploy different types of emails early on in the process to help familiarize potential buyers with all that you have on offer. Newsletters, milestone emails, curated content—anything works here.
Then, when the prospect finally commits to the purchasing act, you can subtly include a CTA for whatever you introduced to them earlier. This strategy is highly effective as it is based entirely on subliminal messaging.
How Do You Strike a Balance Between Promotional and Value-Based Emails?
With all the different types of emails that you are now familiar with, it can be tempting to launch simultaneous marketing campaigns. Yet, that is one of the most common mistakes that B2B organizations make.
Instead, the focus should be on creating a balance between offering valuable information and pitching a product or service. A simple rule is to co-relate the frequency of both with the current trends in engagement rates.
Of course, these are dynamic. So, your best bet is to analyze the performance of your campaigns in a given period.
For example, if Monday offers the best open rates, it’s better to deploy value-based emails on that specific day. Conversely, if Tuesday has the best click-through rates, you would be better off with promotional emails as they typically require your prospect to jump through a few hoops.
Shifting Trends, Flexible Strategies
It’s essential to note that, despite the effectiveness of all the mentioned email templates, they will invariably need adjustments with time.
That’s not to say that they will become redundant. Not at all. These are tried and tested formats that work well across almost all global industries and markets.
In other words, you can use all the listed email types for as long as you want. The only effort on your end will come from making contextual alterations based on prospect expectations and current market trends.
