30 Email Messages To Boost Sales

The big hype right now is social media marketing or influencer marketing because it brings in new customers. But what most people tend to neglect that actually converts into sales is email marketing! People who have subscribed to your list are already interested! They just need a little push from you to convince them! Building successful email marketing campaigns have never been more important than it is now. But there's a problem; most people don't know how to do it right.

Since every business is different, I've gathered a short list of email messages you should focus on and why it's important.

1. Welcome Email

Why It’s Important

Welcome emails result in "4x higher open rates and 5x higher click rates compared to other promotional emails. Keeping in mind that in e-commerce, average revenue per promotional email is $0.02, welcome emails on average result in 9x higher revenue — $0.18. And if it’s optimized effectively, revenue can be as high as $3.36 per email.”

How to Do It

• Keep your subject line conversational. Welcome messages should read as if they’re coming from a friend, not from a nameless, faceless marketing entity.
• Use your welcome message to let readers know what they can expect from you, as well as how they’ll benefit from staying subscribed.
• Include a CTA. Take this initial interaction opportunity to get subscribers to engage with you on a deeper level – even if your target action is something as simple as following your brand’s social channels

2. New Product Teaser

Why It’s Important

By creating an alluring and irresistible email campaign that teases and builds up anticipation for your project, you can create a great amount of support and succeed in your project goals.

How to Do It

• Create a story for your product. Whether you use a single teaser message or a series, build a story that draws readers in and gets them excited about your upcoming launch.
• Set a goal for your teaser. Are you aiming to capture new registrations? New leads? New pre-order sales? Figure out what you hope to achieve with your campaign, as well as how many of these individual conversions you expect.
• Be mysterious. Give just enough away to pique readers’ interest and get them to take action (slightly more if you’ll be asking them to actually pre-order).

3. Product Launch Email

Why It’s Important

The Direct Marketing Association reports that “66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of an email, which beat out social and direct mail.”

How to Do It

• Stay focused. This isn’t the time to promote a future sale or give a company update. Keep your customers focused on the goal of product sales.
• Include an exclusive promo offer. People like to feel special, and nothing makes subscribers feel more like they’re part of the “in crowd” than a unique offer that’s only available to them.
• Make your new product’s benefits clear. Ideally, you’ve done enough market testing to know what it is about your offering that appeals most to your customers. Now’s the time to put that data to work by composing a message that emphasizes the value buyers will gain.

4. Cart Abandonment Email

Why It’s Important

According to Business Insider, “Initial emails, sent three hours after a consumer abandons a cart, average a 40% open rate and a 20% click-through rate.”

How to Do It:

• Most e-commerce carts have automated abandonment emails built in, though you may need to a) turn yours on, and b) customize the look and feel of the message to match your branding.
• Be sensitive to the timing and frequency of these messages. Customers abandon carts for all different reasons, and they may or may not welcome automated emails encouraging them to return and shop. Test the number of emails you send and your reminder intervals for best results.
• Or offer an incentive to bring them back. Show your interest in them and that you would love for them to be part of what you are doing.

5. Partnership Promotions

Why It’s Important

On the MarketingSherpa blog, Adam Sutton shares that Delta Faucet was able to extend the reach of its email marketing campaigns by 30% through partnership promotions.

How to Do It

• Choose partners that don’t directly compete with your brand, but that still target the same demographics (as in the case of Birchbox and Rent the Runway).
• Offer to handle the creative development yourself. You’ll find prospective partners are more receptive to your proposed promotions if you volunteer to create the message, set the timing, and send it from your account.

6. Customer Feedback

Why It’s Important

“Successfully utilizing customer feedback is a must for any business looking to provide users with the products they need. Feedback guides and informs your decision-making and influences your product roadmap. It’s also essential for measuring customer satisfaction among your current customers. Getting a handle on how customers view your product, support, and company is invaluable.”

How to Do It

• Use tools like SurveyMonkey or Qualaroo to administer your surveys.
• Keep surveys relatively short. Few people will sit patiently in order to wade through a 30+ question quiz.
• Remember the limitations of customer surveys. Customers may not know how they’d really respond to hypothetical prompts (such as, “How much would you pay for a product with [xx] feature?”), while relying too closely on survey data prevents you from understanding the nuance behind customer responses. Pair survey data with in-person feedback gathering, if possible.

7. Digest/Content Roundup

Why It’s Important

The Skimm founders Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg used the content roundup format to build an email list of 3.5+ million subscribers that boasts a 40% open rate, all since 2012.

How to Do It

• Identify the authoritative blogs and websites within your industry, and then add them to an RSS reader.
• Periodically, review the new content that’s been published and select the best pieces to include in your content roundup.
• Make it a value-add for your subscribers. Anyone can compile a list of articles; why should your subscribers take the time to peruse yours? Weisberg sums this up with the basic thesis behind The Skimm: “Let’s make it easier to be smarter. That’s really what Skimm does – it makes it easier to be smarter in a way that already fits in with your daily routine.”

8. Content Announcement

Why It’s Important

“72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email,” according to Earnest Agency. Kick off this sharing by seeding your email marketing messages with your latest high-quality content pieces.

How to Do It

• Make sure any content you promote this way stands on its own as a valuable resource for your audience. Your subscribers won’t be impressed by your middle-of-the-road efforts – and they certainly won’t share them.
• It’s okay to promote individual content pieces multiple times via email. Not all of your subscribers open every message; mentioning your best content in several messages maximizes the chance that they’ll see it

9. Social Notification

Why It’s Important

“Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources,” per the QuickSprout blog.

How to Do It

• Be on the networks your customers are most active on. This goes for all marketing, really, but you’ll waste time trying to get email subscribers to share your content on networks they aren’t invested in.
• Target your most socially-shareable content. It’s unlikely that all of your content pieces will be well-suited to social promotion. For maximum effect, deploy this type of message only when you have something your social audience is sure to love.

10. Come Back Emails

Why It’s Important:

Research shared by Kevan Lee on the Buffer blog suggests that “the average inactivity for a list is 63 percent, meaning that once someone joins they are less likely to ever follow-up with your follow-up emails. What’s to become of that inactive 63 percent? Re-engagement campaigns are an excellent place to start.”

How to Do It

• Be noticeable. Lee shares the subject line “This Is Not An Email From 2006” from a Digg re-engagement campaign as an example that caught his attention.
• Be clear, but not needy. Let inactive subscribers know what they’re going to miss out on if they’re booted from your list, but don’t be so needy that they head immediately for the “Unsubscribe” button on their own.

11. High-Value Content

Why It’s Important

Your email messages don’t always have to feature promotions or pitch CTAs intended to drive reader actions. Sometimes, it’s best to simply send helpful educational content that your subscribers will find valuable – as Mailchimp did in this sample message.

How to Do It

Think about what your subscribers need to know, and then send content that answers their questions. The more information you can provide, the more they’ll come to rely on your company as a source of expert information.

12. Customer Retention/Lost Customer

Why It’s Important

The Digital Marketing Association reports that “[e]mails triggered by behavior were responsible for 30 percent of revenue in 2014, up from 17 percent in 2013.” Though “behavior” can be defined broadly, there’s no doubt that customer retention series can make a difference in energizing your list and driving conversions.

How to Do It

• Unlike a “Come Back Email,” a “Lost Customer” message is intended to be your final salvo in your subscriber relationships. Because this is your last chance to retain a subscriber, pull out your big guns. Offer the biggest promotion you can afford to do profitably, based on the benefits that are most likely to appeal to your subscribers.
• Be firm, but clear. Whether you do this over a single message or a series of emails, be clear that you will be removing the subscriber from your list in order to prevent miscommunications.

13. Confirmation Emails

Why It’s Important

Experian found that “confirmation emails had average click-through rates from 12 to 20 percent, approximately five times the rate of bulk mailings. The same trend held across any email metric including open rates, revenue-per-email and transaction rate.”

How to Do It

• Don’t be boring. Customers expect to receive confirmation emails, but they expect them to be dry and boring. Surprising them leads to greater engagement.
• Build recommendations into your confirmation messages (either manually or using an automated tool). Health and wellness company Isabella saw an 111% higher conversion rate by building in product recommendations over their existing sales and alert messages.

14. Top Customer Emails

Why It’s Important

eMarketer data suggests that “81% of online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email.”

How to Do It

• Determine what makes a top customer a top customer. In Sephora’s case, achieving VIB status requires $350 in purchases in a calendar year; VIB Rouge members are those who have spent $1,000 or more.
• Implement necessary segmenting tools. If you track only online purchases, you’ll need a specific filter or trigger to inform your email automation program when a top customer threshold has been passed. If you sell both online and offline, you’ll need a system that tracks both.
• Make people feel special. Besides the logistics associated with running them, effective top customer promotions are all about getting customers to buy into the status they’ve achieved. Treat your top customers well, and they’ll keep coming back for more.

15. Trending Topic Emails

Why It’s Important

According to the Fluttermail blog, “Incorporating trending topics into your campaigns shows that you are fast-acting and “in the know.” It also gives your customers something popular and recognizable to equate your campaign with and can spur them into action”.

How to Do It

• Choose an appropriate trending topic. Being controversial can earn you some quick views, but it isn’t the right approach for all brands. Pick a topic that’s likely to interest your audience and drive positive brand sentiment at the same time.
• Be timely. Trending topic emails only work if you send them when they’re trending. If it’s going to take you a week to get your blast and its associated creatives through your review process, go ahead and skip this one.

16. Holiday-Specific

Why It’s Important

In 2015, holiday retail sales climbed to $626.1 billion, up 3% from 2014, according to the National Retail Federation. More people are buying online than ever before, and holiday sales emails help you reach these consumers.

How to Do It

• Make your email mobile-friendly. Marketing Dive estimates that “76 percent of Black Friday emails and 63 percent of Cyber Monday emails were opened on a mobile device” in 2015. Don’t frustrate these users with messages that only display appropriately on desktop computers.

*Make it easy for customers to buy. Brafton reports that “41 percent of retailers will use ‘Buy Now’ buttons in their email marketing,” and suggests that doing so could improve your holiday sales email conversion rates.

17. Birthday/Anniversary Emails

Why It’s Important

Experian reports that birthday emails enjoy 481% higher transaction rates than promotional emails.

How to Do It

• Offer a special coupon code. Sephora does this in the example above by adding a special birthday offer that maintains engagement and encourages purchases.
• Even if you choose not to include a gift, a simple note to a subscriber that celebrates a certain milestone helps to build brand affinity with your company.

18. Review Request Emails

Why It’s Important

According to BrightLocal, “72% of buyers will take action only after reading a positive review.”

How to Do It

• Incentivize buyers to leave comments. This strategy tends to work best with in-person review requests (as in the classic case of waitresses using mints to score higher restaurant tips), but can be communicated effectively via email as well. The key is offering a compelling enough incentive to get reviews, without giving so much away that the promotion becomes unprofitable.
• If you don’t want to use a promotion, Brian Patterson, writing for MarketingLand, suggests making the request as personal-sounding as possible. “Have the email come from a real person’s email address (even better, have it come from a name they’d recognize, such as someone they worked with).” Further, he elaborates, “[h]ave the email written as a personal request from that same person.”

19. Referral Request Emails

Why It’s Important

Nielsen researchers report that “[p]eople are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.”

How to Do It

• Leverage reciprocity. People who feel they’ve received something want to give something in return. Rewarding both the referrer and the referee drives this effect to create successful referral promotions.
• Keep things simple. If your referral scheme is too complicated, subscribers won’t take advantage. Need help getting your referral program set up? RewardStream has customizable Refer-a-Friend software built to get you more customers.

20. Thank You Email

Why It’s Important

Magdalena Georgieva, writing for Hubspot, shares the following incredible statistics: “We took a look at 21 of our existing thank-you emails and found that, on average, they generated a 42% open rate and a 14% CTR. For comparison, we then looked at the generic marketing emails we’ve sent to one group of our buyer personas. The sample used here was larger – 131 emails – which, on average, generated a 12% open rate and a 6% CTR.”

How to Do It

• Test, test, test. A thank you message is a perfect spot for an upsell or cross-sell CTA, but you’ll need to do some A/B split testing to determine which offers your buyers respond best to.
• Keep it simple. Flatspot’s thank you is undoubtedly beautiful, but don’t skip this email structure if your design skills aren’t strong. Georgieva shared the following example of a plain text thank you email that’s proven effective for her team:

21. Targeted Urgent Offers

Why It’s Important

Hubspot has seen an email opt-in lift of 8% by introducing scarcity (in this case, a limited-time-only offer) into one of its free report download landing pages.

How to Do It

• Get even more granular. In the example above, Banana Republic takes things one step further, limiting discounts to specific time periods in order to increase the urgency subscribers feel.
• Though limiting your sales window could ultimately limit your total conversions, this type of email can be very effective when sent to the appropriate segment.

22. Industry News and Event Updates

Why It’s Important

Aberdeen suggests that “[P]ersonalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.”

How to Do It

• Use advanced segmentation features to personalize your messages to feature the news and events individual subscribers want to see. Many experts predict that hyper-personalization is the future of email marketing.

23. Triggered Behavior/Remarketing Emails

Why It’s Important

Forrester Research found that “remarketing emails can generate nearly four times more revenue and 18 times greater net profits compared with marketing using simply untargeted mailings.”

How to Do It

• This could be an abandoned cart, a specific product they viewed, a form that was left mid-completion, or any other trigger your marketing automation systems are able to detect.

24. Social Call to Action

Why It’s Important

Email can be used to drive the creation of user-generated content, which can be used in ads to get 4x higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click than average.

How to Do It

• Come up with a hashtag based on a UGC campaign and encourage customers to share their content with you socially.
• If you don’t have the audience yet to support such a campaign, consider partnering with influencers who can help kick things off with their followers.

25. Re-Engagement Drip Campaign

Why It’s Important

We discussed re-engagement earlier, but what if you’re afraid a single message isn’t enough to re-awaken potential customers that you don’t want to lose?

How to Do It

• Map out a series of re-engagement messages, all of which culminate in a final “ask” for continued communication.
• As with single “Lost Customer” messages, offer discount codes, promotions and more if your audience responds well. If they don’t, don’t be afraid to say goodbye.

26. Social Connection Emails*

Why It’s Important

Depending on the type of platform you run, notifying subscribers whenever relevant engagements are happening on your network can be a great way to boost connections.

How to Do It

If subscriber notification messages are likely to encourage your list members to return to your site, test different message styles and send frequencies. Some lists may prefer individual notifications, while others may prefer to see a summary of all the interactions that have occurred over a set period of time.

27. Product Education Emails

Why It’s Important

According to Hannah Stacey, writing for Ometria, “It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that effective e-commerce marketing ends with a customer buying something. The problem with this way of thinking is that it fails to take into account one major caveat: that retaining a customer is far more valuable in the long-run than acquiring a new one. And when you start focusing on retention, a customer making a purchase actually marks the beginning of the process, not the end.”

How to Do It

*Build out a value-added series that shows customers how to use the product they’ve just purchased, touching on such important issues as safe use, assembly, storage, and cleaning.

28. Apology Email

Why It’s Important

Hopefully, you never have to use this type of email, but it’s better to have one in your back pocket than to find yourself scrambling to issue a hasty apology when mistakes occur on your end.

How to Do It:

Don’t wait. Put together a template apology message now, leaving room to add in the relevant details later. You’ll be glad to have it in the unfortunate event it’s required.

29. Social/Community Activism

Why It’s Important

Karen Freeman, writing for the Harvard Business Review, asserts that “customers don’t care much about interaction with businesses – instead they feel most engaged (and buy more) when they believe they share values with the company.”

How to Do It

• Don’t do good as a company for the sole purpose of sending out this type of message (and certainly don’t lie about your company’s charitable acts); doing so will come across as disingenuous.
• Do feature your good works as part of your company’s story in an authentic way that’ll resonate with your subscribers.

30. Cross-Sell/Upsell Email

Why It’s Important

By some estimates, it costs five times more to get a new customer than it does to sell to an existing one which is why email marketing is so much stronger than social media marketing. That’s why to cross-sell and upsell messages are so important to your email marketing campaigns.

How to Do It

If your site doesn’t use a renewal model, this type of message could easily be tweaked to pitch complementary products or to encourage past purchasers to upgrade the items they’ve already bought.

Hope this helps.

I created a Facebook discussion group on my page if anyone else is interested in marketing discussions or business development.