Which Email Type Works Best for Your Strategy

April 23, 2015

Email marketing has fallen in and out of fashion over the years. Before social media became popular, emails were the preferred way of reaching most audiences, but with more sophisticated inboxes that would automatically send emails to the spam folder, they became less effective than other means of marketing.

As marketers revisit the email marketing campaign and begin to develop new strategies, email marketing is coming back in a big way. With so many new designs and ways to segment an email list, emails are becoming more finely tailored for their audiences.

So which type is the best? Which email strategy is going to resonate the most with your audience and convince them to click through to your site? Here is a breakdown of the best strategies and how you should be using them.

Mass marketing emails

Perhaps the first email strategy ever created, the mass marketing email strategy is probably the least effective and the least amount of work. Its purpose is simple: reach out to as many people as possible and encourage them to click.

While this may sound like the goal for any email campaign, mass marketing emails are not personalised in any way nor do they offer a direct benefit for any certain demographic. The goal is to be as general as possible so as to appeal to every demographic.

Truthfully, these emails have a low success rate. Only about 6 percent of the emails are ever opened, which means the click-through rate is even lower.

Now that we have the software to easily organise an emailing list and divide contacts by demographics as well as purchase history, it seems silly to rely on such an outdated for of marketing. Try to avoid using this strategy, and if you find yourself sending out vague, general emails to subscribers, expect a high number of unsubscribers. Take a step back and look at how you can better target your audience.

Triggered emails

A consumer comes to your financial firm’s website and begins browsing some of the services you offer. One of them seems to pique the consumer’s interest, and the person stays on the site for quite some time. Eventually though, the consumer clicks away to a different website, but judging by the amount of time spent on your page, the consumer had a genuine interest in your company. How can you re-establish your connection?

Triggered emails are the answer. When a consumer spends a long period of time on your page or puts an item in his or her online shopping cart, trigger emails are fired off to offer more help based on the perceived needs of the individual consumer.

This option has the possibility of being more personalised than the mass marketing email, and it allows for an easy way to get back to your website. Trigger emails can also come through when a consumer completes an activity, such as signing up for your newsletters or creating an account with you. In these cases, it is best to send a brief email confirmation just to acknowledge your relationship with this consumer

While mass marketing emails can easily be sent with marketing automation software, triggered emails need a little more attention from marketers. They should be doing regular A/B tests to determine how effective these emails are and what can be done to improve them. They should also be monitoring the effectiveness of the timing as well as the frequency.

Nurtured email campaigns

In our previous example, we sent triggered emails to the consumer who was browsing the accountancy page on your website. The triggered emails received a click-through, but the consumer still has not contacted you yet. Now that you know the consumer is truly interested, how can you keep the interest alive and lead it back to your website?

Nurtured emails do exactly as the name implies. They are sent to leads that have already expressed a genuine interest in your product or service, and they illustrate the effectiveness of the product or service. The goal is to keep your business in the mind of the consumer and show them why they need your product or service.

Create emails that show off your product or service in action or keep subscribers updated with the company. They might want to make a special stop at a trade show to see you, or they might want to watch a webinar to get a little more information.

Do not be pushy with these emails. Let the consumer learn on his or her own, and make sure all the information needed is within his or her grasp.

Fill-in-the-blank emails

A single company probably has hundreds if not thousands of fill-in-the-blank, sometimes called template, emails. They are easy to customise to fit a consumer’s or a group of consumer’s needs and they can be tailored by different departments to better reach consumers.

These fill-in-the-blank emails make is easy for marketers, sales representatives and customer services representative to reach a more specific demographics within an email contact list. Other teams need a little more flexibility when it comes to email campaigns, and with fill-in-the-blanks, they have the ability to quickly change messages from one to the other without too much hassle.

For companies using marketing automation, it is important that the automation tool has the ability to not only create individual templates, but it should also have the ability to track the opens, clicks, results and unsubscribes. Your other teams need to be able to track their own progress so they can better assess their work.

Email marketing is far from being rendered useless. In fact with new technology that makes sorting a contact list easier, marketers are finding new relevance and uses for email marketing campaigns, and they are making these campaigns more personalised.

 

So the next time you want to send out a mess marketing email, remember that there are other great email marketing options available, and they just might be just what your subscribers need.