You’ve built yourself an impressive list of qualified leads primed for outreach. The question now is, what type of email marketing campaign should you use for each segment?
The correct email marketing campaigns can help your business generate more revenue, nurture leads further down sales pipelines, and automate emails based on lead activity.
By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to understand the fundamentals of email marketing, what’s needed to run a successful campaign, and examples you can get inspiration from.
But first, we need to learn the following:
- The definition of email marketing
- Different types of email marketing
- Use cases and examples for each type
- Best practices to consider to optimize and streamline campaigns
What is Email Marketing?
An email marketing campaign is a series of automated emails sent to specific lead segments. Each campaign serves its purpose.
For example, you can run a “Welcome” email campaign for new newsletter subscribers. Or, you can run a re-engagement campaign for leads who haven’t replied.
But even though campaigns serve their purpose, marketers must remember that email marketing must be aligned with a specific business goal.
Email marketing is an integral part of the overall sales process. It can nurture leads, automate transactional emails, or even promo/discount campaigns.
The possibilities of email marketing are almost endless. It can be tailored based on specific business needs. You just need to learn the different types of campaigns you can utilize.
Different Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
Even businesses within the same industry can have vastly different email marketing needs. But for most use cases, you’d find the following types of email marketing campaigns:
Welcome Email Campaigns
Welcome emails should be a standard across all industries. Welcome emails should be sent when a lead subscribes to your newsletters, buys a product, or makes an inquiry.
According to studies, welcome emails have the highest open rates among all types of email campaigns. So, make sure to use welcome emails strategically to supplement other campaigns.
Here is an example from Cloudways. They use welcome emails to start nurturing leads and immediately ask for customer feedback.
As you can see, the email isn’t that fancy or has flashy graphics. This is probably because of two things. The first would be using plain text vs HTML to improve deliverability.
Secondly, the email is simple enough that being straightforward was the best route. It only asked for feedback on key pain points and a guide to get started with their service.
Promotional Marketing Email Campaigns
If you have a new product, updated features, or events you need to promote, email marketing can help you be in front of your target audience.
Popular promotional emails with high open rates include discounts, freemium trials, or anything that adds immediate value. But ensure that your promotional emails are personalized.
If not, you might end up in the “Promotional Tab.” For the highest chance of getting into a primary inbox, warm up sending accounts to improve deliverability.
Here is an example of promotional marketing from SEMRush for their Black Friday Sale. They combine discounts and FOMO (fear of missing out) to entice leads to purchase.
We all know that SEMRush provides robust tools to help SEO. That can cause a lot of information overload.
What’s good about this promotional email is the focus on benefits rather than features. The CTA they used (Grow Big in 2024) also aligns with the benefits they highlighted.
Follow Up Campaigns
Follow-ups aren’t a suggestion. They should be a standard. No matter your email marketing campaign, you need to send follow-ups.
This is especially important when you’re doing cold email campaigns. You won’t be able to close a sale after your first cold email, but sending follow-ups drastically improves reply rates.
The chances of conversions also improve when you use an automated email follow-up strategy. These emails can be used for a variety of campaigns.
All you need is the right email follow-up software. They can even be used to answer lead inquiries, qualify leads, or trigger based on user action.
Here is an example from author Jaime Wheal’s newsletter subscription for their Flow Genome Project. It was a simple follow-up asking if I had received my initial content pack.
This follow-up stands out because it includes an opt-out option but provides immediate value (invitation to the “Flow Fundamentals” class).
Trigger-Based Email Sequences
You won’t be able to realistically track each of your leads and the emails you’ve sent to them manually. That’s where sales tracking tools or CRMs come in.
When using tools like Instantly, you’d also have access to sales tracking on top of an intuitive email outreach tool.
That means you can set up automated email sequences based on user engagement. Setting this up Instantly is relatively easy.
Newsletter Campaigns
Newsletters are one of the best examples of lead and customer nurturing with email marketing. Ensure that the content you’re sending out is relevant to your audience and provides immediate value.
You can set it up to be sent weekly to a select segment. With the right strategies, your newsletters can help keep you top-of-mind, build relationships, and improve conversions.
Here is an example from Music Production Youtuber Navie D. Each week, he sends out a newsletter covering basic principles of music production that’s perfect for beginners.
But he’s not just doing this to give free value to his subscribers. He also intends to convert his newsletter subscribers to paying customers for his music production course.
His model for this email marketing campaign is simple: nurturing with free, immediate value. Then, he presented himself as the ultimate solution or the “next big step.” This model can also be applied to almost any product or service.
Re-engagement Campaigns
Email subscribers can lose interest in our brand, products, or services. That’s an unfortunate truth that we have to live with. However, we shouldn’t remove them from our lists just yet.
We can’t speculate on why subscribers haven’t engaged with our emails. Instead, we can just segment them into a re-engagement email list.
Re-engagement helps us clean our list, remove people who aren’t interested, and keep us top-of-mind, revitalizing our relationship with those who are interested in what we’re offering.
This email campaign helps us transform inactive leads into new potential customers. Here is an example from Grab, a taxi-hailing and delivery app.
This e-mail campaign helps us revitalize our relationship with inactive customers by engaging them with special offers and discounts, mail has a consistent tone and voice used in the copy. “It’s been a while, and we’ve really missed you.” They also included promo deals in their re-engagement email to entice users to use their services again.
Free Trial Nurturing
For SaaS companies, running free trial campaigns is excellent for converting leads at the bottom of the sales funnel. However, most would just offer a free trial without proper nurturing.
Free trials won’t be enough to convert. You need to supplement leads with valuable content to make them want to learn more about your products, how they can be used to address unconsidered needs, or how they can streamline internal processes.
Here is an example from Cloudways. With a simple email, Cloudways reminds you to take the next step with their free trial features. They even include a “quick guide” on how to set it up.
But it doesn’t stop with just one email. Cloudways sent nurturing emails every day during the free trial period. Each has unique insights and content regarding how to go to the next step.
On the last day of the trial, they quickly remind you that your trial is about to end and ask if you’d like an upgrade. The last email also includes testimonials and a clear CTA.
Abandoned Cart Campaigns
For eCommerce businesses, abandoned carts can become a gold mine. Sometimes, all it takes is a little reminder to customers that they have items they might’ve forgotten to check out.
Think of it this way, if a customer already has an item in their cart, chances are, they’ve already picked your products over competitors. These customers just need one last nudge.
Before running an abandoned cart campaign, remember to personalize. Consider the best time to send an email. You can even try to offer incentives such as discounts or free shipping.
Here is an example email from Casetify. They sent this a week after leaving some items in the cart.
Upselling and Cross-Selling Email Campaigns
One of the best sources of untapped revenue is your existing customers. They already trust your brand and the products you sell.
It’ll be easier for you to sell them something they might need based on previous purchases. This is where upselling and cross-selling come in.
For example, if a customer already bought “dry kitten food,” you could send an email saying, “People also bought “kitten milk” with “dry kitten food.”
Upselling and cross-selling can improve customers' average order value (AOV). However, you’d need a powerful CRM for eCommerce to make this email marketing campaign truly effective.
Best Practices for Running Email Marketing Campaigns
No matter what type of email marketing campaign you will run, these best practices ensure you’re making the most out of each one. Here’s what you need to know:
Use Email Marketing Software
You can’t realistically run an email marketing campaign without the proper email marketing or email sequencing software.
Go for an email marketing tool that offers automated warm-ups, trigger-based sequencing, and robust analytics. Instantly covers all that and more!
With Instantly, you can even track leads using our Dealflow CRM. You don’t need to switch between two to three apps just to run your marketing campaigns.
Instantly also offers personalization at scale using merge tag and spintax generators.
Focus on Automated Personalization Using Spintax
Sending the same email to hundreds or thousands of people on your email list can quickly get you banned or considered spam. We don’t want that to happen.
That’s why the best marketers use Spintax. It helps you create variations of email copy, subject lines, or CTAs. You can even create your own Spintax using ChatGPT email prompts.
Warmup Emails Before Running Campaigns
Email warmups help protect new sending accounts from the negative effects of email marketing. Let’s say you sent over 1000 emails, and only ten responded. That’s a 1% reply rate. That doesn’t look good in the eyes of email service providers.
With email warmups, your sending accounts get consistent positive replies from a pool of verified email addresses. This ensures a positive engagement rate and improves your deliverability rates.
Always Include Opt-Out Options
Including an opt-out or unsubscribe option is necessary for every campaign. The last thing we’d want to do is leave a bad impression.
Leads that opt out of our email lists can benefit us in the long run. This ensures that our email lists are clean and only include leads that are interested in our offering.
We don’t want to waste time and resources on leads that aren’t fit for our business. Opt-out options also protect us from any legal issues as well.
Segment Your Email Lists
Segmenting lead lists allows us to streamline personalization in bulk, and it’s a requirement in any email marketing campaign. Remember, each campaign has a goal in mind.
The leads or subscribers included in each campaign should align with that goal. For example, you don’t want to include abandoned cart users in your “welcome emails.”
To streamline segmentation, you can build your ICPs and buyer personas and use email searching tools to gather contact data.
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is a versatile tool every marketer should have. As a quick recap, here are the things you need to consider to make the most out of your email marketing campaigns:
- Remember to segment your email list. Each list should align with your campaign.
- Use email marketing software to track and manage campaigns at scale.
- Warm up your sending domains to ensure high deliverability rates.
- Always include opt-out options for your subscribers.
You need the right tool to launch and manage an email marketing campaign successfully. That’s where Instantly comes in! Try it out for free today!
