The Entrepreneur's Guide to Email Marketing

Email Marketing Strategy Basics: Everything You Need To Know

You may have heard claims that email is a dead and forgotten channel. Perhaps you’ve found yourself thinking, “Do email marketing campaigns work anymore? Should I even bother?”

They sure do, and you certainly should.

Studies consistently show that when you learn how to create an email marketing strategy that actually works, you can see incredible ROI.

An eMarketer study showed that email had an ROI of 122%… more than 4 times the ROI of other tactics like social media, direct mail, and paid search.

Kurt Elster, Shopify Plus Partner and host of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, believes email marketing isn’t just helpful – it’s necessary.

Kurt Elster, Senior Ecommerce Consultant

Not having an email marketing strategy is the single biggest mistake I see small business owners making, putting them at a massive disadvantage in today’s world.

Email marketing is critical because it keeps your brand top of mind with the average consumer who checks their email daily, often several times throughout the day. Because of the volume of email we receive, the key to successful email marketing is relevance.

Today’s email tools employ brilliant marketing automation. By sending emails automatically triggered based on what customers do or don’t buy, or when they do or don’t return, you’ll ensure that each customer gets the right message at the right time resulting in more sales, more often.

So we can gather that, frankly, the ones who say email marketing is dead are just doing it wrong.

In this ebook, I’ll try my best to make sure you’re one of the entrepreneurs who does it right.

From jargon definitions to basic email best practices to step-by-step how-to’s, we’ll cover everything you need to know about building an email marketing strategy that grows your brand and boosts your sales.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• A definition of email marketing
• The 3 key phases of an email marketing campaign
• Laws and regulations you should keep in mind

Let’s dive in!

1.1. What Is Email Marketing? A Definition

When you’re looking to answer this question, you’ll come across a few email marketing definitions. That’s because email marketing is a broad term that covers many different ideas and activities.

Essentially, email marketing is a subset of internet marketing (also called digital marketing) that involves a business using email to:

• Promote its products and/or services
• Advertise and/or sell specific items
• Build and nurture relationships with potential or existing customers

You can think of it as direct mail for the 21st century. Instead of wasting all that paper and waiting for traditional snail mail to get to their physical mailbox, you’re sending mail directly to their email inbox.

Benefits of Email Marketing Strategy

When you focus on building an email marketing strategy that really caters to your industry and audience, you can reap some serious benefits.

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These include:

• Low costs. In comparison to other marketing channels like paid ads, running an email marketing campaign is one of the cheapest options.
• Huge reach and targeted leads. The nature and ease of email marketing mean you can reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of high-quality leads just by clicking the “Send” button.
• High engagement. Especially when you send to people who have voluntarily opted-in to your list, you’re sending direct messages to people who are interested in your brand. This email marketing contact strategy is gold for getting quality engagement.
• High sales, conversions, and ROI. Because your recipients are already interested, and you’re (hopefully) sending them targeted messages and offers, they’re more likely to make a purchase.
• Easy to implement. There are plenty of tools and platforms that can help you with developing, building, and launching an email marketing campaign without any coding expertise.
• Easy to integrate. It’s just a few extra clicks to integrate your email marketing strategy with other efforts, like social media and content marketing.
• Easy to measure. If you use tracking and measuring functionality, you can know exactly how each email is performing. Many email marketing campaign tools and platforms have this feature built-in.
• Easy to track ROI. Once you know your KPIs and how much you’ve invested into each element of your email marketing strategy, it’s easy to connect different tactics and the revenue they generated.

How Do Email Marketing Campaigns Work?

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Generally, there are 5 key elements of email marketing strategies that work:

1. Defining the purpose and details of each campaign and email before you build them
2. Testing your finalized emails to make sure they’re displaying as intended
3. Sending emails out to your mailing list
4. Measuring the performance using the email marketing KPIs we’ll discuss in Chapter 2
5. Reporting and analyzing your results to see strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement

1.2. Phases of an Email Marketing Campaign

I like to break down the email marketing campaign lifecycle into 3 main phases or segments: emails for prospects, first-time buyers, and repeat customers.

If a first-time buyer or repeat customer doesn’t make a purchase for a while, they’re considered lapsed (also called idle or latent).

Here’s a visual of the types of emails that can be sent based on activity:

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These broad segments, and their corresponding emails, apply best to an email marketing strategy for ecommerce. But when you take out the shopping element, it can apply to other types of businesses too.

Let’s go over each of them briefly. And then in Chapter 3, we’ll break down these segments and types of email marketing strategies a bit deeper, along with plenty of email marketing examples and tips so you can build them yourself.

Prospects

These are people who have discovered your website but haven’t made a purchase yet (or haven’t otherwise become a customer of your business, if you’re not an ecommerce brand).

The ultimate goal is to turn prospects into first-time buyers, which can include emails like:

• Browse abandonment: When they were browsing your website but they stopped and left without making a purchase
• New subscriber: “Welcome emails” for people who just joined your mailing list
• Cart abandonment: When they have items in their shopping cart but didn’t follow through to buy them

[highlight]Turning point to next phase: When a customer makes a purchase, they become first-time buyers. You may wish to start an email welcome series to build a relationship.[/highlight]

First-Time Buyers

After they’ve made their first purchase, they’re officially a first-time buyer. Hooray!

Ideally, these customers will keep buying from you regularly and become repeat or loyal customers. However, in some cases, they’ll become lapsed customers.

The goal here is to turn first-time buyers into repeat customers, which can include emails like:

• Cross-sell and upsell: Recommending different products to them based on their purchase
• Feedback review request: Asking for input on their experience, so you can improve it for them and future customers – first-hand feedback is incredibly valuable, so get it whenever you can
• Replenishment: Reminding them to repurchase items that need to be replenished regularly, like shampoo or vitamins

[highlight]Turning point to next phase: When a customer makes their second purchase, they become a repeat customer.[/highlight]

Repeat Customers

Keep those sales rolling in! Once you’ve gone over the hump of a customer making a second purchase, it’s a great sign that they might stick around to be an “active repeat” customer, aka loyal customer.

Just like the first-time buyer stage, you’ll want to beware of the risk of them becoming a lapsed customer.

The goal here is to keep them around for life, which can be accomplished through the same types of emails that you’re sending first-time buyers, in addition to:

• VIP: Special perks, offers, and appreciation for customers who have a high lifetime value

[highlight]When a certain amount of time passes after the last purchase from a first-time buyer or repeat customer (say, 6 months), they move to the lapsed customer phase.[/highlight]

Lapsed Customers

It’s up to you to determine the time window for when a customer becomes lapsed. Businesses typically choose windows ranging from 3 months to a year.

You might also want to create different emails for different “levels” of lapse. This might show as one email for any customer who hasn’t made a purchase in 3 months, another email for when it becomes 6 months, and another email for when it becomes a year or longer.

Emails to lapsed customers might include:

• Replenishment: Reminding them to repurchase past items
• Win-back: Enticing them to come back to your site, like through a special offer or reminder

The Power of a Returning Customer

Email marketing campaign segmentation like this is 100% mandatory for a good strategy. Not only does it help you personalize your communications, but it also helps you to identify the customers that are most valuable to your brand.

And while you’ll need to have your A-game for winning over new customers, you should treat your existing customers like royalty.

Research shows time and time again that businesses can make much more money by satisfying existing customers as opposed to spending all their resources and time on finding new ones.

Conversion rates can be as high as 60–70% for existing customers, as opposed to 1–3% for new ones.

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A powerful email marketing strategy during this phase can make a massive difference in your company’s bottom line.

Now that you have a basic email marketing strategy checklist, let’s discuss some of the (dun dun dun) legal issues that you need to follow.

1.3. Laws and Regulations to Look Out for

If you start getting reckless with your email marketing strategy and tactics, you won’t just annoy (and potentially lose) important customers and contacts – you might also get yourself into legal trouble.

This is especially true after the European Union (EU) enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018.

Even as a US-based business, you’ll still need to pay attention to the GDPR. This is particularly important if you’re an ecommerce company that ships internationally.

And of course, you’ll definitely need to pay attention to the US email marketing campaign laws.

Let’s go over some of the key requirements of the US’s CAN-SPAM Act, as well as the EU’s GDPR.

US CAN-SPAM Act

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The CAN-SPAM Act was signed into law in 2003 by George W. Bush. It applies to any business that’s “promoting or advertising a commercial product or service through electronic communication.”

Pssst. That’s your company’s email marketing strategy and tactics.

If you violate any part of the act, your business can be fined up to $41,484…

For Every. Single. Email.

It’s a horrifying thought. But don’t worry, the rules are very straightforward and simple to follow.

Here are the 7 requirements:

1. Tell your readers who the email is coming from.

You must include your name or business name in your routing information and in your “From,” “To,” and “Reply to” labels. Your website domain name and email address must also be accurate.

For example, in their email marketing newsletter campaign, Coinbase writes “The Coinbase Team” as the sender, and sends the email from no-reply@updates.coinbase.com.

No confusion there.

[highlight]While this is okay legally, I recommend ditching the “no-reply@” email address. It suggests that the sender wants to have a one-way conversation instead of engaging with their subscribers and customers. For bonus points, send your emails from the account of someone on your team, preferably customer support. That way, recipients can voice questions or comments, and you can show off your stellar customer service to strengthen the relationship. Win-win.[/highlight]

2. Avoid deceptive subject lines.

Make sure your subject lines are an accurate preview of what the email actually contains. You can’t have a subject line that says “50% Off Sale Today Only” and then the body of the email is just talking about your new product line, with no mention of a sale.

Sticking with the Coinbase example, their subject line is clearly related to the intent of the message: to help newbies learn the ropes of cryptocurrency.

3. Acknowledge that your message is an ad.

The law gives a lot of leeway here. But generally speaking, if your message is an advertisement, you must disclose that it’s an ad in a clear way that’s easy to identify. The point is that readers can easily see that it’s an ad and not a personal email from their sister.

You can keep it simple the way Coinbase does here:

4. Give readers an easy way to opt-out.

The best way is an “unsubscribe” button or link at the bottom of the email, but you can also get away with listing an email address they can use to contact you to opt-out. I think this is a bit shady though, and I recommend the easy opt-out button.

5. Tell your readers where your business is located.

You must include your company’s valid physical postal address. It can be your personal address, a post office box that’s registered with the US Postal Service, or a private mailbox registered with a commercial mail receiving agency (that follows Postal Service regulations).

6. Honor every single opt-out request immediately.

You must opt them out within 10 business days, and you must be able to process opt-out requests for 30 days after each email is sent. If they choose to opt out of your email marketing campaign lifecycle, you can’t require them to pay a fee or give you any extra information. You also can’t sell or transfer their email address to anyone, except to a business you hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

7. You’re still responsible even if you hire someone else.

If you hired a person or company to take over your email marketing strategy, monitor what they’re doing. You’re still legally responsible for all of their actions even if you’re not writing and sending the emails yourself!

[highlight]If you’d like to learn more, check out this CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as some candid answers to CAN-SPAM questions.[/highlight]

EU GDPR

You might recall a one or two-month period around April 2018 where your inbox was flooded with privacy policy changes from practically every international business you’ve ever given your email address to.

Yup. That was because of the GDPR.

The main purpose of the GDPR is to protect the data privacy of EU citizens. In a nutshell, it takes “ownership” of a customer’s private data and shifts it back into the hands of the customer – and it’s not just about basic email marketing strategy. It’s about any use of personal data.

Businesses that violate this policy can face fines up to a whopping €20 million, or 4% of their annual revenue – whichever is higher.

Of course, the GDPR was designed for EU businesses serving EU citizens.

But the thing is: if your business serves just one European citizen who’s in Europe when you collect their data, you’re subject to GDPR requirements.

This is why I recommend staying informed and playing it on the safe side. Not only would it cover you legally, but it would also help to make your data safer for you and your customers.

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Since it’s a fairly complex set of regulations, we’ll just go over a few of the key elements as they relate to mass email marketing strategy.

Essentially, EU businesses must:

• Get explicit consent before sending someone a marketing email

[highlight] This is one of my biggest GDPR-related recommendations for US businesses: don’t enroll anyone in an unsolicited email marketing campaign. I’ll cover this more in Chapter 3 when we discuss list building strategies as part of our email marketing best practices. [/highlight]

• Uphold an individual’s rights, which include:
  • “Right to Erasure” or the “Right to be Forgotten” by a company – the right to have all of their information deleted forever
  • “Right to Be Informed,” or to know who’s collecting their information and what they’ll use it for
• Report data breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK within 72 hours
• Make sure the average person can read and understand data policies, and that they’re not hidden in the legal fine print that no one reads anyway
• Hire a Data Protection Officer to help them comply
• Ensure that any entity that processes customer data complies with certain requirements (not just the entities that control data, like the laws before the GDPR)
• Carry out a “Data Protection Impact Assessment” to look at high-risk activities

[highlight]Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are considerations and exceptions to what we’ve listed above. For comprehensive details on the GDPR, visit the European Commission’s website. You can also check out non-official resources like Think GDPR and the EU GDPR Portal.[/highlight]

Now that you have a rough definition of email marketing and a basic understanding of the key phases and global regulations, let’s discuss some core email marketing KPIs to look at when building your strategy.

Email Marketing KPIs: Which Metrics Matter?

Perhaps you’ve heard terms thrown around like “conversions” and “bounce rate.” If you’re not familiar with this kind of marketing jargon, it might as well be a different language.

And while it may seem appealing to ignore these and go straight to building emails, setting up your campaign is only half the battle. To find out if people are actually opening, reading, and taking action from your messages, you have to turn to email marketing KPIs.

Email marketing metrics and KPIs show how well your emails are performing and if you’re meeting your objectives. Think of them as a grading system for your emails. Being able to see what’s working and what isn’t can help you modify and improve your campaign (when it matters the most).

But they can be a little tricky to understand, especially if you’re new to email marketing. And in the time-strapped world of entrepreneurship, which KPIs for email marketing matter? How do you even know what’s working?

Email marketing strategist Val Geisler believes that the process of finding effective strategies never actually stops.

Val Geisler, Email Marketing Strategist

Here’s the cold hard truth about email marketing: all the data in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you’re not implementing new strategies and evaluating the results often.

What works for one brand may not work for another.

The approach you take when you start your email marketing journey might look nothing like what you do when you’ve been at it for a while, testing and trying out what works on your audience.

And that’s a good thing.

So we can see that measuring, testing, and evaluating email marketing KPIs is a process that should be built into your whole strategy. The kind of thing you do just as regularly as sending the emails in the first place.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• Key terms and definitions you’ll need to know to measure your performance
• Tips and advice to make sure you’re constantly improving each of these KPIs for email marketing
• The basics of how to perform A/B testing to apply and analyze these email marketing metrics

2.1. Glossary of Terms

Here’s a handy email marketing KPIs glossary to dissect some of the most important email marketing metrics and learn how to improve them.

We’ll look at:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Bounce rate (hard and soft)
• List growth rate
• Forward and sharing rate
• Average order value (AOV)
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Gross profit margin
• Return on investment (ROI)

[highlight]Note: Most email marketing KPIs are expressed as a percentage.[/highlight]

Let’s do this.

Open Rate

The open rate is a metric that tells you how many successfully-delivered emails were opened by recipients. You calculate it by taking the number of emails opened, and dividing it by the total number of emails sent (minus the emails that cannot be delivered). A high open rate basically means your email’s subject line resonates with your audience.

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In 2017, the average email marketing open rate benchmark was 24.7%. So if your open rate is 25% or above, your campaign is doing well.

How to Improve Email Marketing Open Rates

• Test subject lines: Strong email marketing open rates mean your subject lines are resonating with your audience, but you’ll want to test other variations to see if you can get better results. Draft a couple of subject lines that are slightly different, like: “Home-based business ideas for female entrepreneurs” and “Women love these home-based business ideas.” Then compare the results.
• Cull your mailing list often: A stale mailing list full of disengaged subscribers will automatically mean lower open rates. To combat this, check to see which subscribers are opening and engaging with your emails, and delete the ones who haven’t engaged for a while. When you get rid of the ones who aren’t engaged, your open rates will practically improve overnight.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Regarded as one of the most important email marketing KPIs, the click-through rate tells you what percentage of recipients have clicked on the links in your emails. It’s calculated as the number of clicks on links in your emails divided by the number of emails opened. Then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

Good CTR email marketing performance implies that your contacts are engaging with your messages and want to learn more about your brand.

According to email marketing stats from 2017, the click-through rate average was 3.42%.

However, CTR varies across industries.

Another email marketing metrics study revealed a click-through rate average of more than 4% for Consumer Services, Nonprofits, Computer Hardware & Telecommunications, and Associations & Government industries.  

If your campaign’s click-through rate is high, or more than 4%, your emails’ content and calls-to-action (CTAs) are working.

How to Increase Click-Through Rate on Email

• Create enticing content: To increase your click-through rate for email campaigns, you’ll need to produce content that’s interesting and relevant to recipients. If they enjoy what they read in an email, they’ll want to learn more by clicking the links inside that email.
• Test personalized CTAs: You can try modifying the CTA link text in your emails to cater to different types of customer segments. Create 2 different CTAs to use with the same link, like: “Click here for more information” and “Learn more about XYZ’s benefits.” Then see if specific phrasing leads to an improvement in the overall volume of clicks.

Conversion/Conversion Rate

Email marketing conversion measures the percentage of recipients who opened your message and completed the desired action. That action could be a visit to a specific webpage, a purchase of a product, or something else – it all depends on your goal.

You calculate the conversion rate by taking the number of recipients who completed a desired action, and dividing it by the number of emails delivered. Like the other percentage-based KPIs, multiply that number by 100 to get your percentage.

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What is a good email marketing conversion rate? The percentage varies depending on the type of email sent. For example, the average conversion rate is 1% for newsletters. It’s 5% for follow-up emails (emails that remind people to complete an action). Sumo estimates the average email conversion rate is 1.95%.

If your email marketing conversion percentage is higher than 2%, it means your campaign is successful in generating interest.

How to Get a Better Email Marketing Conversion Rate

• Offer value: Make sure you’re offering enough value in return for the action you’re expecting people to take. For example, you could work on making personalized recommendations for different customer groups, and catering your offers to them. It’s important to consider that real value will be different for different people, and your data can help bring you closer to finding that value.
• Avoid misleading claims: There’s nothing more frustrating than arriving on a webpage through an email only to find out that your experience is different than the claims made in that email. Don’t disappoint people with false or exaggerated statements – be genuine instead.

Unsubscribe Rate

The term “unsubscribe” means to remove your email address from someone’s mailing list. In the context of email marketing metrics, the unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opt out of your email list. Unsubscribes are an indication that they don’t wish to receive any further communications or emails.

[highlight]Remember, you’ll need to include an easy unsubscribe option in every email. Otherwise, you may face penalties through the US CAN-SPAM Act, like we noted as part of our email marketing strategy discussion in Chapter 1.[/highlight]

/ebooks/email-marketing/email-marketing-strategy

The email unsubscribe rate formula is the number of unsubscribes divided by the number of messages delivered. Multiply this number by 100 to get a percentage.

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The average unsubscribe rate for email largely depends on the industry you are in, but anything below 0.5% is considered desirable.

How to Reduce Unsubscribe Rate

• Update your mailing list: Make sure you’re only emailing people who agreed to receive messages from you and continuously refresh your list by adding new, interested contacts and deleting old, inactive ones. New subscribers are typically more open to receiving news and special offers.
• Make your emails responsive: Email marketing open rates on mobile are skyrocketing. So if you’re not optimized for mobile, this could be a contributing factor for a high unsubscribe rate.

Bounce Rate (Hard and Soft)

The bounce rate for emails refers to the percentage of emails that were not delivered. Undelivered emails go back to the sender. Typically, the bounce rate is split into 2 categories:

• Hard bounce: When an email address is wrong.
• Soft bounce: When there’s a temporary delivery issue. Perhaps a server is down, or the recipient’s inbox is full.

You can calculate your bounce rate by dividing the number of bounced emails by the number of emails sent. Multiply the answer by hundred to express it as a percentage.

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The bounce rate is one of those email marketing KPIs that you’ll want to keep as close to 0% as possible. However, the average bounce rate for email marketing varies for different industries.

How to Get a Lower Bounce Rate for Emails

• Clean up your email list: Many bounces occur because the email addresses are no longer valid. See if you can spot any contacts you haven’t gotten any opens, clicks, or engagement from in a while, and remove them from your list. Your email marketing automation tools can likely help with this.
• Make sure your email isn’t marked as spam: Ensure your templates are up-to-date and don’t have any traits that can land you in a spam folder. Tools like mail-tester.com can help you avoid sending spammy emails.

List Growth Rate

As the name implies, email list growth rate shows how quickly your email list is growing. It also takes your unsubscribes and invalid emails into account. List growth rate is one of the most important email marketing KPIs because a healthy email campaign needs to be refreshed with new subscribers.

If you stick to the same email marketing list, it will naturally shrink as people change jobs, switch email programs, or stop using their account altogether.

To calculate your list growth rate, take the number of subscribers you’ve gained. Then subtract the number of subscribers you’ve lost, as well as the number of invalid emails. Divide the answer by the total size of your list. Then multiply the result by a hundred to get a percentage.

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It’s estimated that you’ll need a positive list growth rate of 25% or higher per year to maintain the same amount of subscribers. That’s because an email marketing list experiences a natural decay, expiring by about 22.5% each year. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to focus on growing your email list and reducing the number of unsubscribes.

How to Increase Your Email List Growth Rate

• Host a contest: A great way to capture more addresses from those who are interested in your product or service is to host a contest. For example, you could ask people to enter their email address to become eligible for a free giveaway. The winner is picked at random.
• Get feedback on unsubscribes: It’s an email marketing rule to offer recipients a way to unsubscribe. But you may not know that you can get feedback while doing it. For example, when the user clicks “unsubscribe,” you can present a multiple choice or text box asking the user to provide feedback. Feedback will help you identify the reasons behind unsubscribes so that you’re able to reduce the unsubscribe rate and have a positive impact on your email list.

Forward and Sharing Rate

Your campaign’s forward and sharing rate tells you how often your subscribers forward your emails to someone else. It’s one of those email marketing KPIs that can also reveal when users click on a social share button within your email to share its content on channels like Twitter or Facebook.

This metric is valuable not only because it reflects the level of enthusiasm for your messages, but also because it reveals if you’ve gotten any referrals.

[highlight]Getting referrals is one of the best ways to add new, high-value subscribers to your email list. If your existing subscribers are forwarding or sharing your emails, that means they’re actually referring you to others and potentially generating new subscribers for you.[/highlight]

You can calculate your forward and sharing rate by looking at the total number of forwards and shares you received through your sharing or forward button (SFB). Divide this number by the total number of emails delivered. Then multiply the answer by hundred to express it as a percentage.

According to Return Path’s email marketing metrics report, the average email forward rate was 0.02% across all industries.

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How to Increase Your Forward and Sharing Rate

• Enhance personalization: The more personalized the email, the more likely the recipient will forward it to their peers. Put anything related to the recipient (photos from an event they attended, one of their Facebook comments, etc). in the email to make it personal. In such a context, it makes perfect sense that subscribers would forward that email to others, as it gives them a chance to boast a little about themselves.
• Integrate social media buttons: By planting a social share button in your emails, you can empower your subscribers to share enticing content via email directly to the inboxes of friends, family, and coworkers, which should increase your campaign’s visibility and list growth rate (new subscribers also impact your list growth rate, remember?).

Average Order Value (AOV)

Average order value (AOV) measures the amount of money your subscribers spend as a result of your email marketing campaign.

You should want to increase your AOV as it makes your email marketing spend justifiable, enabling you to continue reinvesting to improve your company’s profitability. Higher AOVs show that you’re making more money from each email campaign, making your business more profitable.

To calculate your average order value from email campaigns, divide total revenue by the number of customers referred via email.

[highlight]When calculating this metric, keep in mind that AOV reflects the revenues earned per email campaign, not per customer.[/highlight]

According to Klaviyo’s industry performance benchmarks, the average order value for ecommerce email marketing was $99.80 across all industries.

As a best practice, compare AOV from email campaigns to overall AOV to see if emails bring higher quality conversions and customers.

How to Increase Average Order Value

• Offer free shipping to your subscribers: One of the best ways to increase average order value from email campaigns is to offer a free shipping threshold to your subscribers. For example, “Free shipping on all items above $100.” Once you’ve determined your AOV, add 20% to it. So if your average AOV is $100, it becomes $120. That can be the new number for your free shipping threshold, where you’d offer free shipping on all orders over $120, covering costs and encouraging subscribers to buy.
• Give first-time deals: If you’ve just added new subscribers to your email list, most of your prospective customers will be first-timers. Offering deals to them can help increase AOV. For example, you can provide this new audience a special discount when they buy your product in a higher-than-normal quantity or exclusive bundle deals for new subscribers.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value in email marketing refers to the total monetary value a customer contributes to your company over their entire lifetime as a result of your email marketing campaign.

The longer a customer continues to buy from your company, the higher their lifetime value becomes. So instead of analyzing the total purchases made by customers, you shift your focus to individual buyers and their overall contributors to your revenue.

To calculate CLV, take the number of orders a customer (referred via email) has placed in a year. Multiply this by their AOV, and then multiply by the number of years they remain your customer. For example, if a customer buys 3 things in a year averaging $100, and they do this for 5 years, their CLV would be $1,500.

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How to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

• Offer exclusives: You can set up an email campaign with exclusive offers just for customers with a higher CLV. There are many ways to appreciate these customers, such as offering VIP experiences, insider access, and special discounts.
• Consider bundles and subscriptions: Do you offer a product that has a lot of complements? Think about creating relevant bundles to generate higher order values. Search for your product on Amazon and browse the “Frequently bought together” section to get ideas. For example, a PlayStation 4 console can be bundled with a matching wireless controller.

Gross Profit Margin

Your gross profit margin tells you how much profit you’re making outside of the cost of your goods sold. This is an especially relevant KPI for email marketing because a lot of tactics include discounts of some kind.

Unfortunately, many merchants make losses because the discounts they offer regularly exceed their gross profit margin. This is why it’s key to understand what your gross profit margin is and how your discount strategy relates to that.

Your gross profit is your total sales revenue, minus your cost of goods sold. But this cost should also include any ad spend that directly relates to a purchase.

Let’s look at an example. Say you’re selling a product for $100 and the cost of goods is $70. You ran a Facebook ads campaign, and it ended up costing $20 to get a customer. This means your profit is $10. If you were given a 10% (or $10) discount, you’d make $0 profit. If you discounted more than 10%, you’d actually lose money.

To calculate your gross profit margin, divide your gross profit by your sales revenue. Multiply this number by 100 to get a percentage.

How to Increase Gross Profit Margin

• Go easy on the discounts: Make sure you understand what you’re bringing in before you offer discounts and deals to your customers. Keep in mind that you can incentivize customers without offering big discounts, like rewards programs, bundles, or freebies on low-cost items.
• Build a value-based brand: If your customers start depending on you to heavily discount your items, you’re in trouble. Try building value into the core of your brand through quality products, stellar customer service, and an easy and enjoyable shopping process. One study shows that 8 in 10 consumers will pay more for good experiences.

Return on Investment (ROI)

This is one of the most important email marketing KPIs to measure because it tells you how cost-effective your emails are. Simply put, ROI is a measurement of the overall revenue generated by an email marketing campaign, measured against the cost of managing that campaign.

This should also include the cost and salary of the individual doing the email marketing. Positive email marketing ROI means you’re earning more from your campaigns in comparison to how much you’re spending to run them.

How to calculate email ROI? Just take the amount of sales generated by a campaign. Subtract the total cost of setting up and running that campaign. Then divide the result by that same cost number. Finally, multiply the answer by a hundred to make it a percentage.

How to Increase ROI

• Segment your email list: Segmenting your email list allows you to send personalized messages to each subscriber. It categorizes each subscriber into distinct groups based on similar interests such as on-page behavior, personas, pain points, etc. By sending targeted messages to each separate group, you can increase your chances of making a sale and subsequently increase ROI. We’ll give some segmentation-based email marketing examples and tips in Chapter 3.
• Schedule emails for optimal days and times: Ideally, you want your emails to go out on the days when your subscribers are most likely to click and read them. To find the best time and day to send your email, try tracking your open and click-through rates to compare and measure the results. While Tuesday mornings may be a good time to send informational emails, Friday afternoons may work best for special offers.

2.2. How to Do A/B Testing

We’ve learned that the best way to see how your campaigns are performing is to look at the cold, hard data. The numbers don’t lie.

While looking at your email marketing performance metrics will give you good insight into how you’re doing, figuring out how to improve these KPIs is a whole different story.

For example, studies show that in some scenarios, a detail as small as the color of your buttons can impact how many people click it.

But how can you know what changes you should be making on your own efforts?

This is where A/B testing shines.

In email marketing, A/B testing (also called split testing) is the process of taking one element of an email, making 2 different versions of it, and comparing which version gets the best results.

These elements and results can be anything you want to accomplish, like comparing two different:

• Subject lines to see which gets the best email open rate
• CTA button colors to see which gets the most sales revenue
• Email layouts to see which gets the highest click-through rate
• Email send times to see which one gets the most engagement

[highlight]You can do A/B testing on other marketing efforts too, like different elements of your website and your paid ads.[/highlight]

How A/B Testing Works

A/B testing is done by randomly sending the first version to 50% of your audience, and sending the second version to the other 50%. Then, you can see which of the two versions has the best email marketing metrics.

You can choose to only send to a portion of your email list or segment, then send the best-performing version to the rest of them. Or you can include your entire list or segment in the test, and then use the results to build future emails.

But whatever you choose, it’s important to keep in mind that the bigger your audience, the more reliable your results will be.

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You can look at A/B testing as a 5-step process:

1. Determine which email marketing campaign metrics you want to improve. Do you want to increase your email marketing open rates? Try testing subject lines. Do you want to boost click-through rates? Try testing your calls-to-action (CTAs) to see if you can use more effective wording.
2. Hypothesize the impact your test will have as you build your second version. What do you think the results will be and why? Do you think that your second subject line will get more opens because you were more descriptive about what’s inside the email?
3. Identify exactly what you want your second version to look like, then build it. If you’re using a special tool, you can build it right inside the platform.
4. Run your test. Your A/B testing tool will figure out all the details of who to send each version to (it will be as random as possible). It will also track all the results, so you can sit back and relax.
5. Measure your results. How did the second version perform? Did it match up to your hypothesis from step 2? Are the results statistically significant? (Keep reading for more info on statistical significance, which is an important part of A/B testing).

What’s the Deal with Statistical Significance?

Of course, there’s no 100% certain way to tell why one version performed better than another version (because we can’t read people’s minds… yet). It could be because people genuinely reacted to your change, or it could be a total fluke.

This is why A/B testing relies on a concept called statistical significance. If one of your A/B tests is statistically significant, it means that your results were likely to be caused directly by your changes instead of by chance.

This number is represented as a percentage. For example, if your test has a 95% statistical significance, it means that there’s a 95% chance that the results are reliable.

There’s a lot of complex math involved with statistical significance, which is why I strongly recommend using a specialized platform for A/B testing.

These platforms will give you advice and guidance on how to read your test results and ensure that they’re statistically significant. This way, you’re not wasting time and effort on making changes that aren’t even effective.

Running an A/B Test

First, decide what to test. Here are some ideas and examples of what they might look like:

• Subject line: “Special Sale for Our VIP Customers” vs. “Thanks for Being a VIP – Take an Extra 10% Off”
• CTA: “Shop Now” vs. “See Sale Items”
• The content, length, and language in your headline, main body copy, and closing copy
• Content of special offers: “Buy 1, Get 1” vs. “Free shipping”
• Message layout: single column vs. 2-column, image on left vs. right, etc.
• Visuals: different images, fonts, colors, etc.
• Testimonials: which ones to include, or if you want them at all

Setting Up the Test

As for setting up the campaign, your A/B testing software should be straightforward and helpful.

Let’s run through a quick example from Campaign Monitor.

First, choose which element you want to test.

Then build your two versions.

Then, select other details, like how many people you want to send your test versions to, which email marketing success metric you want to choose the winner based on, and how long you want to measure the results.

Campaign Monitor offers a cool feature where you can choose a small portion of your list to test on, then it will automatically send the winning email version to the rest of your list based on the other details. (Keep in mind that if your list is small, this might not be a good idea, as a small group will decrease your statistical significance). 

When the test is over, it will show you a simple email marketing metrics report for how they both performed.

Easy peasy.

Keep in mind that every tool will have different features and benefits, and this was just an example to give you an idea of how the process works.

If you do it right, A/B testing can be a great way to make sure you’re performing on all of your email marketing campaign KPIs. So don’t skip out on this helpful addition.

[highlight]Chapter 4 will be all about email marketing tools, which will include some top A/B testing tools.[/highlight]

At this point, you’ve got the hang of what you should be looking for in your email marketing – and overall business – performance. You’ve also got an idea of some tips, advice, and testing you can perform to make sure you’re doing your best.

Now, let’s dig into what it takes to build an awesome email marketing strategy, including all the latest tips, examples, and best practices.

Anatomy of a Killer Email: 18 Email Marketing Examples To Copy

You know how an email marketing campaign works, the laws you’ll need to keep in mind, and how to track and measure your success. Woohoo!

Now it’s time for the good stuff.

This chapter will be loaded with best-in-class email marketing examples, tips, and best practices to show you winning campaigns in action.

Chad S. White, Research Director at Litmus and author of “Email Marketing Rules,” points out that one of the most effective email marketing tips is to embrace the age of automation.

Chad S. White, Research Director at Litmus

Automated emails are becoming central to email marketing success. Already, more than 13% of brands generate the majority of their email marketing revenue from triggered and transactional emails, according to Litmus’ 2018 State of Email Survey of 3,000 marketers worldwide.

That number will only continue to climb. All companies should be looking to address the moments that matter with automated emails like welcome, cart and browse abandonment, and re-engagement emails.

And once those emails are created, brands should regularly update, A/B test, and optimize them to ensure maximum performance.

Today’s email tools give us incredible opportunities to do things we never even dreamed of when we were sending emails manually from our AOL accounts. (Shoutout to everyone who remembers AOL!)

We have the power to slice and dice our customer lists, give them highly personalized offers and experiences, and do it all in a perfectly-timed series that keeps them engaged and excited about our brands.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• The anatomy of a top-performing email
• Various types of marketing emails and campaigns, from welcome to abandoned cart emails
• How to build and segment your marketing list for optimal results
• More tips, like optimizing for mobile, avoiding spam filters, and recycling your content

3.1. Anatomy of a Killer Email

The #1 ingredient for a killer email is interesting, relevant, and engaging content. There’s no way around it: bad content will get bad engagement. Take the time to really look at the unique value that each of your emails will offer, and how well you’re communicating that value and captivating the reader.

As you do this, make sure that each email’s voice and tone supports your brand and ethos. Consistency and authenticity are key, especially in an age where brand identity can make or break your business.

A Lucidpress study shows that companies saw a 23% increase in average revenue when they presented their brand consistently.

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Once you have this framework in mind, you’re set up to focus on the key elements of building a good email: the subject line, body content, and call-to-action (CTA).

Let’s look at some best practices for email marketing design as it relates to content and layout.

Subject Lines That Convert

Think about that feeling you get when you’re checking a full inbox first thing in the morning. You skim through the sea of email subject lines, figuring out which ones are the priority and which ones will go straight to the trash.

Some argue that your subject line is the most important element of your email – and therefore one of the top tips for email marketing content – because that’s how people will decide if they want to bother opening it in the first place.

One study shows that 47% of email recipients will decide to open based on the subject line alone, and 68% will use subject line as the only factor in deciding when to report an email as spam. Yikes.

And subject lines are especially important in the earlier stages of the customer’s lifecycle, when they haven’t yet built trust and loyalty for your brand.

So how do you ensure that you’re capturing your reader’s attention?

Here are a few basic tips for email marketing subject lines.

1. Tell them just enough

There’s a sweet spot: you want to tell them what’s inside the email, but don’t overdo it. Too many words risk diluting your message and getting cut off in their inbox preview. One study suggests that about 6-10 words is this sweet spot with a 21% open rate, as opposed to a 16% open rate for 0-5 words, and a 14% open rate for 11-15 words.

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Of course, this isn’t a hard rule, so don’t overthink the word count. The key is to be straightforward and honest about the content while still being concise and interesting.

Here are some examples of good email marketing subject lines that hit the sweet spot:

• Ready for summer? So are we – See our new swimwear line
• Join Our Loyalty Program to Get an Extra 10% Off
• Get more kitchen space with these 5 quick fixes

2. Make them feel special

Going back to the theme of personalization, make your readers feel appreciated. Use their name, tell them they’re a valued customer, give them “exclusive” access, “sneak peeks,” and special privileges.

Examples of good email marketing subject lines to make them feel warm and fuzzy:

• We’re so glad you joined us, Nicole
• Members Only: Access Our Cyber Monday Deals 24 Hours Early!
• Xavier, your private invitation expires tomorrow.

3. Show your brand’s personality

Like I mentioned earlier, consistency is key. If your brand is quirky, don’t be afraid to show it! Be self-aware, light-hearted, and crack a joke or pun if that’s your style.

Examples of good email marketing subject lines that keep it fun:

• Are you breaking up with us? Say it ain’t so…
• Woohoo, Your Order Has Shipped!
• 5 authentic Indian food recipes for naan-believers

4. Create a sense of urgency and personal investment

I don’t recommend to always create a sense of urgency, but it can be a great motivator when the time is right. For example, time-sensitive offers, events, and reminders can get people off their butts and bump you up their priority list.

Additionally, try appealing to their sense of accountability for themselves and their goals. For example, email marketing tips for B2B (business-to-business) companies might include asking a compelling question to get a business owner thinking about their customers or their company’s performance.

Examples of good email marketing subject lines that motivate and inspire:

• Armando, your prescription is expiring. Time for new contact lenses?
• Final Notice: Buy One, Get One on Mother’s Day Bouquets!
• Are you avoiding these common customer service pitfalls?

5. DON’T GO CRAZY WITH CAPS, emojis 😱💩🙅🏻 or punctuation!!!

I don’t know about you, but to me, caps = yelling. Don’t yell at your recipients. It might feel like you’re standing out and getting their attention, but you’re probably just annoying them. Same goes for excessive punctuation.

As for using emojis and special characters, that’s a matter of preference and catering to your audience’s natural communication style. Experian found that subject lines with symbols got an impressive 56% higher unique open rate, so they’re definitely something to consider. That said, don’t overdo it.

Here are some bad email marketing examples when it comes to being obnoxious:

• ONE-DAY ONLY SALE!!
• Caitlin, Don’t You Want Your FREE Personalized Tote?!
• 🌟We know you’ll love 😍 this deal like we do 🙌🏻🎉💯

Putting it all together, take a look at some of the great subject lines from Ramit Sethi, New York Times best-selling author of “I Will Teach You How to Be Rich.”

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Body Content: Layout, Copy, and Visuals

There are no hard-and-fast rules for what a good email looks like. Some brands like fancy, stylish designs while others just use plain text and hyperlinks. This is all up to you, and it’s an important part of telling your brand’s story and building visual recognition.

But there are some basic email marketing design tips that you should keep in mind. We made a handy dos and don’ts chart that highlights key qualities that high-converting email marketing templates tend to have in common.

Our chart looks at 3 important elements of your body content: layout, copy, and visuals.

Keep these dos and don’ts in mind as you read this whole ebook. These points will be a recurring theme as we look at examples and best practices in email marketing.

CTAs and Buttons

A call-to-action (CTA) is what you want the user to do after reading your email. You can think of it as the ultimate goal or reason you’re sending the email to begin with. This could be asking them to use a discount, check out a new product, read your newest blog post… pretty much anything you can think of.

The CTA is usually displayed as a button that leads the reader to a webpage (called a landing page) where they can complete this action.

One of the best email marketing call-to-action tips is to focus on a single CTA in each email. By giving one clear instruction, there’s less distraction – which means more action.

Home appliance company Whirlpool learned this first hand. They decreased their CTAs from 4 down to 1 and saw a 42% increase in clicks.

[highlight]If you can’t manage just one CTA, choose a primary and secondary. Beware of having more than 2 CTAs, because data shows that this will dilute the message and can ultimately lower your engagement rates, as well as the overall performance of your campaigns.[/highlight]

Email Marketing Call-to-Action Examples

This email from City Slickers wants readers to shop for loafers. They’ve made it simple and perfectly clear with their “Shop Loafers” CTA button.

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Airtable includes a straight-forward “Browse the gallery” CTA button to direct customers to their company’s template gallery.

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BuzzSumo keeps it super simple, with minimal design and visuals to promote their platform’s Reddit engagement data. This draws even more attention to their “Subscribe Now!” CTA button. As an added bonus, their custom graphic shows the BuzzSumo mascot hanging out with the Reddit mascot to further illustrate the partnership. Good stuff.

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Now that you have an idea of the individual elements that make a great email, let’s look at some lifecycle email marketing examples that help turn separate emails into full campaigns.

3.2. Types of Marketing Emails

The exciting part about email marketing is that you’re only limited to your imagination. While you should definitely watch and learn from the top email marketing examples out there, I strongly encourage you to get creative with your ideas, offers, and engagement strategies.

That said, we should start at the beginning. The best path to success is building your strategy around email marketing tips that actually work.

That’s why I can’t stress enough that you must personalize each user’s experience. This means that you’ll need to segment your list based on specific user details like their demographics and what they do on your website. Then send emails that cater to those details.

Data shows that triggered and autoresponder emails (including welcome and transactional emails) get higher open rates and engagement rates than your standard newsletter.

That’s because these types of emails are a direct response to a recipient’s unique behaviors and actions (which you’ll accomplish through segmentation). This shows the recipient that you really “get” them, and that you’re just as invested in their satisfaction as they are.

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Let’s look at these simple email marketing examples to help personalize your messaging and nurture relationships with prospects and customers:

• Welcome emails
• Transactional emails
• Personalized recommendations
• Abandoned cart emails
• Customer loyalty emails
• Win-back emails
• Promotional and informational emails

For each type of email, we’ll go over the basics, as well as some more advanced tactics. These will include things like creating a related email series, and unique strategies to set yourself apart from competitors.

Automation and Creating an Email Series

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: automation is a must-have. When you invest in an all-in-one email marketing automation platform, you can send the right emails at the right time with just a few clicks.

[highlight]We’ll dive more into the technical side of automation in Chapter 4, where we’ll go over top email marketing tools and recommendations for building and delivering strong campaigns.[/highlight]

In the meantime, we’re going to explore the strategy and best practices behind sending different types of marketing emails. This includes how you should incorporate these various emails into your email marketing efforts, including one or more series.

An email series (also called a campaign) includes several automated and triggered emails that are sent over the course of several days, weeks, or even months. They can vary greatly because it all depends on your goals and how your customers interact with your brand.

Common types of email series include a welcome series, cart abandonment series, and win-back series (also called re-engagement series). Stay tuned for details on each.

Email Marketing Frequency Tips

When you’re prioritizing your email marketing best practices, frequency should be at the top of your list. Whether it’s a broad campaign or a specific type of email series, be sure that you’re not overwhelming your customers with too many emails. This can damage your reputation and the customer’s trust in your brand.

Throughout this chapter (and the whole ebook, for that matter), we’ll discuss a few options to help make sure you’re sending just the right amount of emails. These techniques include segmentation, mapping out email flows for your primary segments, and consolidating as much as possible into one app or platform.

Welcome Emails

Research shows that sending a welcome email has brought businesses an incredible 320% more revenue per email than standard bulk emails. Plus, welcome emails boast a far, far better open rate than standard ones. It’s a simple email marketing tip, but it packs a huge punch.

Welcome emails are generally the first message you send after you receive someone’s email address. They can be sent after a user takes an action like:

• Signing up for your newsletter
• Creating an account on your website
• Joining a club, program, or utilizing another incentive
• Making their first purchase

It can be a single email or a welcome series.

In this first contact, aim for a specific call-to-action (CTA). For many ecommerce stores, this takes the form of a special discount or promotion. In this welcome email, fashion retailer Kate Spade offers a discount code for 15% off an online or in-store purchase.

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If you’re not an ecommerce brand (or you’re just not ready to shell out a discount yet), you can try a different approach. Tell them about a program or offering that makes your brand unique, or direct them to some great content.

Drift, a conversational marketing platform, takes a super minimalist – and very self-aware – approach, with a simple list of their most popular blog posts and a quick promotion of one of the platform’s features.

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InVision, a digital product design platform, directs users to some tutorial videos to help them get started with the platform.

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Welcome Series Tips

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Say a customer just made their first purchase. A welcome series could have these 4 emails:

1. 1–3 hours after purchase: Introduction. Showcase your company, team, and what you’re all about. You can even give behind-the-scenes info and photos to make it more personal.
2. 3–5 days: Social discovery. Build on your intro email and show the customer how to connect with your brand online – whether that’s social media, your blog, or other channels.
3. 2 weeks: Product discovery. Shift the message from your brand story to your top offerings. Show off your brand and why people love you. You can also make personalized product recommendations for items related to their purchase (more on this soon).
4. 3–4 weeks: Incentive email. Send a discount or other incentive to encourage their second purchase if they haven’t made one yet.

Transactional Emails

Like the name suggests, you’d send a transactional email after a transaction occurs. They’re typically one-off emails instead of a series or campaign.

One of the most popular types of transactional ecommerce emails is when a company sends an order confirmation and purchase receipt after someone buys a product on their website.

The subject line of these emails is typically straightforward like “Purchase Confirmation” or “We’ve received your order.” The email body gives main order details, like:

• Confirmation or order number
• Date purchased
• What exactly was purchased
• Cost of items and total paid
• Payment method
• If there’s a delivery, a note about the arrival
• Shipment tracking number, if possible

Other transactional emails can include:

• Welcome emails (which we discussed above), since signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase are considered transactions
• Download confirmation, similar to how a purchase confirmation works
• Password reset emails, sent to a user after they request to change their account password
• App or website extension emails, which reinforce actions from the app or website (for example, when you get a LinkedIn email to confirm a connection request from the platform)
• Surveys or requests for feedback based on a purchase, going to an event, or other experiences the user had with the brand

[highlight]These are considered triggered emails, because they’re automatically triggered by a specific action from the user. Technically, any email can be considered a triggered email if you set up your email marketing platform to automatically send an email based on an event (like an abandoned cart email, for example).[/highlight]

Here’s a simple survey and feedback request from the airline AirAsia, sent the day after a customer’s flight. It provides a clickable 1-10 rating scale:

Then, when the customer clicks a number, they’re taken to a landing page where they have the opportunity to write extra feedback. They have 4 comment choices: suggestion, complaint, compliment, or other.

This is an excellent email marketing example of a brand using a transactional message to be attentive and caring toward its customers in a fast and easy way. At the same time, it’s gathering information to improve the company’s performance.

In unfortunate cases of disgruntled customers, this feedback gives valuable opportunities to identify who they are, why they’re upset, and how the company can repair the relationship and bring them back for future business.

Everyone wins.

Personalized Recommendations

Personalized recommendations are among the best email marketing tips to increase sales. I recommend including some type of personalized recommendation in all of your campaigns and email series, because they’re just downright effective.

To do these right, you’ll need to dig into your existing customer and visitor data to see what they’ve been doing on your website. But at the starting point, all you need is to know what a customer recently bought or looked at.

When you know this, you can recommend related products. You’ve seen these kinds of recommendations everywhere – from Amazon to Netflix to Spotify and so many places in between.

One Forrester analyst suggested that Amazon might get up to 60% conversions to sales as a result of all of its integrated recommendations.

…Whoa.

In the ecommerce email marketing realm specifically, Salesforce data shows that personalized product recommendations account for only 7% of clicks, but an incredible 24% of orders and 26% of revenue.

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This data (and loads more) suggests that repeat customers are the most profitable, and they just love it when you understand what they want.

Give them what they want.

Let’s look at 3 main types of personalized recommendation emails for customers who have made a purchase:

• Cross-selling related products: Encouraging a customer to purchase a product that complements or enhances their original purchase
• Upselling related products: Encouraging a customer to “upgrade” to a better version of their purchased (or soon-to-be-purchased) product or service to increase the total order value
• Replenishment (also called reorder): Encouraging a customer to repurchase an item that needs to be replenished regularly

Cross-Selling Related Products

Here’s an example of a classic cross-selling email by Williams Sonoma, suggesting more baking supplies for someone who’s purchased a similar item. To sweeten the deal and encourage a higher order value, they added a promo for free shipping on orders over $49.

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Upselling Related Products

Upselling is when you’re increasing the value of a certain order. This means that it technically doesn’t occur as often via email in ecommerce, because most emails are in response to a completed purchase. Upselling is more commonly seen on the website itself during the purchasing process, where a brand can make recommendations to upgrade items that they’re interested in.

An exception to this is subscription-based products, like digital software and memberships to online services. Here, note-taking and organization app Evernote offers an incentive to upgrade, offering 6 extra months when customers buy a year membership to one of their 2 premium versions.

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As a unique ecommerce example, Beard Brand brilliantly upsells its customers who are enrolled in their monthly subscription box program.

Here, they remind the customer of their upcoming box, and suggest some products to add in before the box is shipped – thus upgrading the box and increasing its order value.

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Replenishment (Reorder)

There are all kinds of everyday staples that need to be replenished, like:

• Food and beverages (for ourselves and our families, as well as our fur babies)
• Vitamins and supplements for general or specialized use
• Toiletries and personal care products, like makeup and razors
• Household items, like dish soap and toilet paper

If you sell these kinds of items, take note of how long each product should last based on regular use, and compare it to the dates that customers purchase them.

Purina did just this, taking note of serving sizes and feeding frequency to calculate when their customer’s special blend of dog food would run out. If you can make these calculations accurately, you’ll have a convincing argument to encourage a reorder.

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[highlight] The strategy behind cross-selling and upselling is an art and a science. Read this blog about 8 psychological principles that can boost your sales while building an army of happy, satisfied customers. [/highlight]

Abandoned Cart Emails

Statistics show that about 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, meaning that shoppers clicked on the “Add to cart” button, but never followed through on actually purchasing the item(s).

Why is this number so high?

There can be a lot of reasons. For example, the shopper was just “window shopping” or making price comparisons and never had the intention to buy in the first place. Others might abandon because of an issue with the process, like a technical glitch on the website, issues with payment, or unexpected fees.

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In any event, it can be seriously profitable to put effort into bringing these customers back to make the final clicks on items they’re already interested in. After all, having them shop at your store in the first place is half the battle.

A cart abandonment email should contain:

• A reminder of what exactly is inside their cart, preferably including a product photo of the item(s)
• An easy link to take them directly to the purchase page
• An added incentive to get them to buy now (optional, but effective)

To boost conversion rates and stand out from your competitors, get creative.

You can add product ratings for a one-two punch – it uses the incredible power of social proof, while igniting their FOMO by reminding them that they’re missing out on a 5-star product.

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Beauty accessory company ClipinHair used this strategy and saw a 36% increase in cart recovery in one week!

The example below shows an upgraded abandoned cart strategy. Here’s what makes it so good:

1. It chooses its best-seller blueberries as the star. This helps to avoid overwhelming the customer with too many focus points. Plus, it’s a good strategy to pick a top-selling item to focus on.
2. It includes a beautiful, appetizing photo of the blueberries. Quality food photography really sells, folks.
3. It uses 3 concise USPs (unique selling points) to remind the customer why this product is so darn good and why they need it in their life.
4. It includes customer testimonials about related products to enforce the quality of the brand and its products.

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You can add an incentive, like a discount or free shipping to get them to take action. Or, if you have a rewards program, you can try reminding the customer of their rewards points balance, then direct them to use those points to go toward a purchase.

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Abandoned Cart Series Tips

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Let’s say you want to send a few emails to ensure that you successfully recover an abandoned cart. Here’s a model for a 3-email series:

1. 1 hour after the cart is abandoned: Ask for feedback to figure out why they abandoned the cart. You can then use this feedback to improve their specific situation, as well as possibly make improvements to the whole shopping experience.
2. 1 day: Include a discount or some other type of special incentive to draw them back in. Tell them this offer will expire in 3 days.
3. 3 days: Remind them of the discount you sent as email #2, and that the discount will expire today.

Customer Loyalty Emails

Like I said before, repeat customers are the best – and most profitable. A little bit of love goes a long way in building brand loyalty.

And interestingly enough, the customers who appreciate this “little bit of love” are the ones who are the most loyal. One study shows that customers who value personalized experiences are 10 times more likely to be top revenue-generators, making up to 15 transactions per year.

The moral of the story is: love them and they shall love you back.

To do this, use email to build and promote a customer loyalty program (also called a customer retention program) that rewards and shows appreciation for frequent shoppers.

Some ways to do this include:

• Sending them special VIP discounts, offers, and promotions
• Celebrating them, like birthday and customer anniversary emails with special offers included
• If you have a rewards program, offering opportunities to get rewards points even if they haven’t made a purchase, like points for filling out a survey
• Incentivizing purchases, like offering a free gift with their 5th purchase (you can send this email shortly after their 4th purchase)
• Incentivizing referrals, like offering them a discount, points, or account credit when they refer friends and family

Here, ModCloth sends a simple $5 discount as a 1-year anniversary gift.

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Win-Back Emails

Win-back emails are sent to lapsed customers, or customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while. The timeframe that defines a lapsed customer is up to you. Depending on the nature of your brand, this might be 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or even more.

Some elements of a good win-back strategy include:

• Asking them for feedback to learn more about why they haven’t been around in a while (and if you do receive feedback, taking action to try and solve any problems ASAP)
• Remind them of the best features, offerings, and USPs of your brand
• Offer them a discount or other incentive to make another purchase

Data from MarketingLand showed that when participants offered a dollar-off discount, it performed 2x better than offering a percentage-off discount.

Crocs does this by offering $10 off the customer’s next purchase of $50.

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Asana sends a win-back email that promotes recent changes to the platform as a method to lure the customer back in.

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Win-Back Series Tips

Here’s a model and timeline for a win-back series that’s carried out in 3 emails:

1. The day the customer becomes inactive: Offer a small discount or other incentive for them to make another purchase. Show emotion, tell them you miss them!
2. 1 week: Remind them of the discount you sent a week ago, and offer them some personalized recommendations based on their past purchases. If they had an abandoned cart, you can use that too.
3. 2 weeks: Increase your discount amount to show them that you’re dying a little inside without them in your life. Create a sense of urgency, too – tell them the offer will expire in 24 or 48 hours.

Promotional and Informational Emails

As opposed to the emails above, promotional and informational emails aren’t as closely related to a user’s actions. So in many cases, they’re not considered triggered emails.

They typically fall into the “newsletter” category, so they can still be incorporated into an automated campaign for people who’ve signed up to your newsletter. (If you haven’t caught this by now, I encourage you to incorporate every email you send into an automated campaign.)

These emails are geared at educating and informing recipients, no matter where they are in their lifecycle or what kind of engagement they’ve recently had with your site. They can cover a broad range of topics, like:

• A general sale or discount you’re offering to everyone on your list
• New content you’ve created, like blog posts, ebooks, videos, infographics, etc.
• Periodic round-up or “digest” of your content, on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis
• Special events you’re hosting or involved in, including sponsorships
• New offerings or added features to your existing products or services
• Interesting and newsworthy changes within your company, like programs or initiatives
• “Behind-the-scenes” content to show personality and build a stronger relationship

This fun email from Tattly celebrates its 5-year anniversary in a personal way, sharing an interview with the company’s founder. The photo is a great touch.

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[highlight]Stay tuned for Chapter 5, where we’ll give you 20 marvelous newsletter examples that you can add to your top email marketing templates and ideas.[/highlight]

Ecommerce Starter Campaign: Post-Purchase Series

A post-purchase series is a good full campaign to start with as you explore the nooks and crannies of email marketing automation. This is because it’s a generalized marketing strategy that can apply to anyone who has made a purchase (though you’ll still want to personalize certain details, like the item(s) you offer as a cross-sell).

This series puts several different email types and effective email marketing tips into practice, giving you some well-rounded experience. You’ll also collect some solid performance data to measure, analyze, and apply to future strategies.

Source

Let’s go through a post-purchase series that lasts 4 weeks and includes 6 emails:

1. 1. Immediately after purchase: Confirmation and purchase receipt. This is a standard transactional email to confirm their order. Adding a discount to the receipt email can be massively successful, so consider this too. Set the expiration of the discount anywhere up to 2 weeks.
   2. 3 days after purchase: Get feedback. If they bought a physical product, be sure they’ve received it in this window so you can ask them about their purchase and delivery experience. Are they unhappy? Learn why and try to make them happy again. Are they happy? Use that data for a testimonial!
   3. 1–2 weeks: Product reviews. Send this one after they’ve had enough time to actually start using the product or service they bought. Direct them to a dedicated web page where they can review the product.
   4. 1 day before discount expiry (2 weeks): Discount reminder. If you offered them a discount in their purchase receipt email, remind them that they’ve only got 24 hours left to use it.
   5. 2–3 weeks: Cross-sell. Send 1–3 personalized product recommendations based on their purchase.
   6. 4 weeks: Loyalty. If they’ve made another purchase, send a loyalty email, like offering an added discount for referring a new customer.

Now that you’ve seen a load of awesome email marketing examples, let’s talk about how to build your email list outside of people who have made a purchase on your website.

3.3. How to Build Your List

Obviously, before you send emails, you’re gonna need some email addresses. And as we discussed when we covered email marketing strategy in Chapter 1, you should aim to get explicit consent from each person before you start popping up in their inbox.

So how do you get more addresses and build up a strong list? Let’s go through some options for building in-person and online.

But first…

Transparency, Ethics, and Getting Good Results

You may have heard tips like getting email addresses from business cards or buying email lists from other companies. Some people raise ethical issues here, but my main objection is: honestly, there are better techniques out there.

You can try sneakily adding people to your list once you get your hands on an email address, but you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as effective as when people sign up by choice. Because those people are actually interested to begin with… which means you can be truer to your brand and your mission, while maximizing your email marketing efforts.

There, I said it. Now we can get to the email marketing list building tips.

In-Person List Building Tips

If you have a physical store or otherwise promote your business offline, try these methods:

• Put out a signup sheet anywhere: your store, trade shows, street fairs, and local or national networking events and conferences – incentivize by offering VIP benefits
• Host an event locally, like a networking lunch or fundraiser, which people can RSVP for using their email address
• If you’ve used snail mail, send a postcard asking for their email, which you can incentivize as an entry into a contest, giveaway, or special online offer
• See if your email software has cool features, like Constant Contact’s Text-to-Join, where you can add a number to a flyer or other promotional material and users can text a keyword to a set number like 39337 to automatically join the list

[highlight]Some of these methods can be less straightforward about how you’ll use their email address once you have it. To stay 100% transparent, make a note that you’ll add them to your email list. You can also send them an opt-in email where they can confirm if they want to keep receiving emails from you.[/highlight]

Online List Building Tips

You can certainly have success building a list in-person if these techniques mesh well with the nature of your business. But doing it online brings a whole new world of opportunities.

Here are some email marketing list building best practices:

• Use different opt-in forms on your website to keep it simple and snag engaged visitors – see below for more
• Plaster your signup link everywhere: your social media posts and profiles, email signature, etc.
• Incentivize signups by offering a freebie, like providing their email in exchange for a download of premium content like an ebook – then promote on your site and social media channels
• Host a giveaway or content via your website, which they can sign up for with their email
• Incentivize current recipients to refer others (which we discussed in the customer loyalty section above)
• If it fits with your brand, host a webinar to share your knowledge and tips, which they can sign up for with their email
• Refresh an old, stale list by sending them an opt-in request: ask them to click a button to confirm they want emails, and tell them you’ll remove them if they don’t respond
• Partner with other brands – join forces for a contest or webinar, or trade promotional space in each other’s newsletter

Website Opt-in Forms

Your website is a playground for creative ways to get email addresses. Opt-in forms can be as complex as you want them to be, with the most basic saying something like “Want to keep in touch? Enter your email to subscribe.” Then provide a single field for them to type it in.

Granted, most people aren’t dying to join an email list. So adding incentives can go a long way here.

You can put an opt-in form pretty much anywhere, but top methods include different types of popups and embedded forms in sidebars, headers, and footers on various pages of your site.

Here are some general tips to keep in mind for all types of opt-ins:

• Keep them in-line with your branding: colors, fonts, visuals, etc.
• Make your messaging clear and concise, and never be misleading
• Don’t be obnoxious with giant fonts and flashing visuals
• Ensure a visual flow that fits in with your other content on the page
• Use A/B testing to test out different variations of colors, visuals, sizing of all elements, CTAs and copy, timing (for popups), etc. – keep what works and ditch what doesn’t

Let’s explore some opt-in email marketing examples. Here’s a pretty awesome infographic that we’ve snatched examples from below.

Popup Forms

While some users find them annoying, the data doesn’t lie that they just work. Social Media Examiner says that 70% of its subscribers came from opt-in popups, and their lists would be much smaller without this technique.

[highlight]Keep in mind that your popups should be easy to close out, or you run the risk of frustrating your visitors. Which is the opposite of what we’re going for here.[/highlight]

One popup technique is the exit overlay. When they go to close out of a page, a popup entices them to stay. This is often in the form of a discount or special offer.

Another example is the light box. You choose a timeframe for how long a visitor has been on a particular webpage, say 2 minutes. After this point, a light box pops up asking them to sign up.

Another option is the slide-in. The name is pretty straightforward here… it just slides in from the bottom or side of the page. Set the slide to be triggered by a user scrolling on a webpage, which shows that they were engaged in your content to begin with.

One of the more simple email marketing tips. For a classic approach, you can embed an opt-in form in a static position on the site, like a sidebar or footer. These don’t attract the most attention out of all your options, so you’ll need to make sure you have a good design and CTA message. Also ensure that it fits well into the page’s design and layout while still standing out.

A bar allows you to keep the opt-in form in a noticeable place, as opposed to having it hide away on the side or bottom of the page. You can place these anywhere on the page, but try to keep a natural flow with what’s happening in the content.

Another embedded technique is a signup form to access special content or events, like a content download or registration for a webinar or course. If you benefit from knowing more about your registrants than just their email, you can ask for other details.

But avoid adding too many fields here, as research shows users can be turned off if they’re asked for too much personal info. One study found that decreasing the number of fields to 4 or less resulted in 160% more conversions.

3.4. Segmenting Your List

This is one of the most important best practices in email marketing.

You. Must. Segment. Your. List.

There’s loads of data confirming that you’re messing up big time if you’re not segmenting.

There’s no one right way to segment, and it will look a bit different for every business. But let’s go through some email marketing segmentation examples and ideas that you can start from.

Classic market segmentation strategies go by 4 main categories:

• Geographics: where they are
• Demographics: who they are
• Psychographics: what they like
• Behavioral: what they do

You should take all 4 of these into consideration, but I recommend focusing more on the last 2: what they like (psychographics) and what they do (behavioral). But here’s a secret: if you focus on what they do, it will tell you what they like. It’s also much easier to track, since their behaviors can be revealed by basic KPIs.

Apart from digging into your data, you can just be straightforward about asking them what they like. When they sign up to receive emails, ask them some personal questions in their confirmation email and welcome series.

Tasty Treats asks if the customer wants gluten-free recipes so they know what types to send.

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You can also do this with demographic questions. Like how Office asks which gender style of clothing recipients are interested in.

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In Chapter 1, we discussed the main phases or segments of a generalized email marketing campaign: prospects, first-time buyers, and repeat customers (and the last 2 can become lapsed customers).

Now, let’s dig a bit deeper and explore how we can execute these ideas.

Here’s my go-to list of email marketing segmentation examples to break them down more specifically:

• Prospects (aka potential customers): newsletter signups, cart abandoners
• First-time buyers: only 1 purchase
• Repeat customers: 2 or more purchases
• Active repeat (aka loyal) customers: 2 or more purchases, made more frequently than the average customer’s timeframe between purchases
• “At-risk” customers: Close to hitting the timeframe designated for inactive or lapsed customers
• Inactive (aka lapsed) repeat customers: No purchase in X days/weeks/months (whatever timeframe you’ve set)

Generally, an entrepreneur’s goals are to move each customer forward to the next segment (or backward if they’re at-risk or lapsed), ultimately keeping them all as active repeat or loyal customers. So the funnel goes something like this:

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And here’s a glorious chart that shows what types of emails you can send them to push them through the funnel, and a suggested schedule for doing so:

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While it may seem intimidating to do this, the right email marketing automation software will make segmentation super simple. You can define these and more segments down to the customer’s last day, dollar, or email click to make hyper-focused (and beautiful) emails that are sure to get their attention.

The Glory of Automation

Automation makes this whole process easy. For example, say you want to re-engage repeat lapsed customers. You can send an email to everyone who’s made 4 orders, but hasn’t made a purchase in 3 months. With this strategy, you could bring them back into “active customer” territory by offering a free gift with their 5th purchase.

This is generally very simple to do with the help of an automation platform. Let’s look at how it’s done in Conversio, to give you an idea of how the process works.

Another example: say you’re a shoe company that has just released a new, highly-anticipated running shoe model in one of your most popular collections. You can see who purchased shoes from this collection, but did not yet purchase this new product. Then you can send them an email to let them know about the new release.

If you’re inexperienced, many platforms will offer suggestions for how to define certain groups. For example, Klaviyo’s pre-set definition for an “unengaged” subscriber has 3 parts:

1. They’ve received at least 2 emails in the last 90 days
2. They haven’t opened any emails in 180 days
3. The person isn’t suppressed (meaning they haven’t unsubscribed)

Here are a few more ideas for choosing criteria:

• General loyal customer: Number of orders exceeds 10
• General lapsed customer: Time since last order: more than X days
• Replenishment email: (1) Purchased a specific product (2) Time since last order: more than X days
• Cross-sell: (1) Purchased a product from a specific category/collection (2) Time since last order: more than X days
• Sale item: Has not purchased a specific product (to ensure they haven’t already bought it)

And here’s a big list of some of the different segmentation options you might have for each subscriber, depending on the type of software you use:

Some platforms will offer recommended workflows depending on what you want to accomplish. For example, Campaign Monitor recommends workflows that target different groups, including subscribers, shoppers, first-time buyers, and repeat buyers. Of course, you can also make your own.

3.5. 5 Email Marketing Tips and Tricks

We’ve covered a whole lot of tips for email marketing content, but I’d like to touch on a few more before we close out.

1. Keep It Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

If you’re not optimizing your emails for mobile, you’re just being silly. One study showed that 3 of 5 people check their email on a mobile device, and 75% of them use their phone the most.

The best way to ensure your emails are mobile-friendly is to use a tool to test them before you send. Some automation tools will let you test across multiple devices and see how multiple email clients will display them.

2. Use Pre-Header Text

Pre-header text is basically the text that appears just after the subject line, giving a preview of what’s inside the email. You can make a big impact by setting this manually instead of letting it populate automatically.

If you don’t edit it yourself, you might just end up with something like “View in Browser” or “UNSUBSCRIBE.” And that would be a sad waste of precious real estate.

Source

3. The Spam Folder Is an Immortal Enemy

You can never outrun the risk of being marked as spam, so stay vigilant.

Email marketing best practices to avoid spam filters include:

• Use a double opt-in method, which makes a user confirm twice that they want to join your list
• Don’t rent, buy or scrape lists – it borders on an ethical issue and it’s just a recipe for trouble
• Set and keep expectations about how you’ll email them – don’t send weekly emails when they signed up for a monthly newsletter

Don’t wait too long to send the first email, or they may forget they signed up

Siva Sankar, Oberlo

My advice is: definitely use double-opt-in to have a clean email list. It will reduce the overall subscribers by 15% to 20%, but all you get is quality subscribers who are really interested in your brand. It also improves overall email KPIs, as well as helps to reduce unsubscribe rate or spam complaints. Setup Google Postmaster Dashboard and constantly monitor your domain and IP reputation. Use Litmus spam testing tools to make sure you don’t use spammy content, as well as your IP blacklist information.

4. Recycling Isn’t Just for the Environment

One of the lesser-known tips in email marketing. Recycle your emails to make sure you’re getting the most of your efforts. You can try resending emails to people who haven’t opened them, or repurposing different emails to suit different occasions.

You can also recycle some of your other types of content and turn them into emails, like sending a video you’ve made or including an excerpt from an infographic.

5. There’s a Fine Line Between Personalized and Creepy

There’s a real catch-22 when it comes to personalization, because you can quickly step into stalker territory. To prevent this, McKinsey shares a valuable equation for using personalization to create value in the eyes of the customer.

Essentially, a customer will enjoy the relevance and timeliness of an email in relation to the “cost” – how much personal info they had to share or how much effort you put in to get that info. On top of that, trust boosts the overall value, but it’s important to remember that trust can easily be lost.

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[highlight]The bottom line is: never lose sight of the happiness of your customers. They’re your company’s lifeblood, after all.[/highlight]

That’s a wrap for our massive list of email marketing tips and techniques, examples, and best practices. As you can see, there’s quite a bit to consider, and an endless amount of opportunities.

Like I mentioned earlier, I strongly recommend that you have a single tool that handles all of your email design and building, scheduling and sending, list management and segmentation, and data tracking and analysis.

If you can’t manage it all in one shot, make sure to consolidate as much as possible so you don’t have a bunch of tools talking over each other and potentially causing confusion.

Which brings us to our next chapter all about top email marketing tools and platforms.

Shall we?

16 Email Marketing Tools To Craft and Send Perfect Emails

As you’ve seen by now, all the moving parts of a good email marketing strategy can seem intimidating. This is especially true for entrepreneurs with new businesses, small subscriber lists, or less experience with email marketing in general.

In these cases, it might seem like a better idea to send manual emails as you build momentum. But there’s no need to do this!

There are great freemium or low-cost tools available for new businesses. Even if you’re launching today, it would help to start building your list immediately and at least have basic email automations in place. This frees up time to focus on other parts of your blooming business.

And as you grow and get more comfortable, you can upgrade your tools or switch to one of the big players in the email marketing arena.

This strategy will help you keep up with today’s email marketing standards – where customers expect fast, responsive, and personalized communications from the companies they do business with.

Before you choose how you’ll manage all of your efforts, it’s important to understand what’s out there and how it all may benefit you.

That’s why we’re going to discuss the ins and outs of different email marketing tools that can help. Of course, there are all kinds of marketing automation software that can help with your broader marketing efforts too. But we’ll stay on topic with specific email marketing tools.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• Some single-purpose email marketing tools, like schedulers, opt-in forms, and spam reports
• Reviews of some of the top names in email marketing automation, like Conversio, Constant Contact, and AWeber

4.1. Single-Purpose Email Marketing Tools

There are powerful email marketing tools at your disposal to ensure you keep making headway in delighting your subscribers as your list keeps growing.

Adding email marketing tools to your company’s online marketing arsenal is almost always worth the cost. The formatting, scheduling, and A/B testing capabilities of these email marketing software companions are far superior to the default capabilities of Outlook and company. The most popular email marketing tools manage critical functions for your campaigns that can save you countless hours.

Here’s a list of email marketing tools (in no particular order) that can help you take your email marketing game to the next level.

1. Boomerang

There are lots of email marketing services on the market to help you schedule, track, and manage emails, but the beauty of Boomerang is its simplicity.

It’s currently available as a browser extension for Outlook and Gmail (I tried the Gmail version). Once installed, Boomerang adds a few extra buttons in the “compose” window of your email dashboard.

For example, below “Send,” you’ll see “Send Later,” which lets you to choose an appropriate time for your messages to be sent. Additionally, there’s a checkbox you can click to return the message to your own account after a certain time period has passed, and you can tell Boomerang that you only want the email back if you haven’t received an answer.

Overall, Boomerang adds new capabilities to email clients that solve the issue of scheduling emails and tracking them after you hit the “send” button.

2. Htmlsig

It’s not always the copy within an email that makes an impression. Your prospects and subscribers may also refer to your email signature to visit your website or get in touch with you as well.

Htmlsig adds customization features to ensure your digital business card is aesthetically pleasing and always up-to-date. Connect your social profiles, add a banner for your upcoming sale, and include your headshot image.

In addition, Htmlsig provides email signature generators to ensure efficient collaboration between teams, as well as analytics that reveal the number of times recipients click on each part of your email signature. Free signatures give users access to a limited editor to take Htmlsig’s service on a test drive. These expire in 30 days unless you download your signature or upgrade to a paid plan.

With Htmlsig, there’s no stopping you from creating HTML signatures for the promotion of your brand.

3. BombBomb

It’s no secret that videos are one of the most popular types of content on the internet. Though a static email has proven itself to be capable of attracting eyeballs, adding an engaging video can often be a nice touch.

BombBomb makes the list of email marketing tools that offer a more visual alternative to the conventional email message. You can upload clips up to 30 minutes long, and send video emails directly from your inbox.

BombBomb also lets you choose a customized template for your video emails. Record footage on the spot, or upload pre-recorded videos directly to BombBomb’s platform after you’ve used free video editing software to make them perfect. For example, if you have a product demo or DIY tutorial that you need to send out to all new subscribers, this is a great way to avoid saying the same thing over and over again.

Plus, you can delete videos after you’ve sent them, which prevents your inbox from getting cluttered.

Sometimes, videos speak louder than images or words, and BombBomb is the perfect tool to set up video emails that leave a lasting impact.

4. MotionMail

MotionMail adds countdown timers to your inbox, which help you increase sales, conversions, and engagement by creating a sense of urgency. These timers are great for helping businesses encourage immediate action, as well as create anticipation for upcoming promotions and events.

There are some nice options, such as being able to modify the colors and time zone. There are four different designs for the timer to choose from. After you’ve picked a design, you can set an ending time for promotions and edit their appearance.

For international emails, the timers automatically showcase the same countdown regardless of the subscriber’s local time zone. As a result, the tool has everything you’d expect to help recipients take action.

MotionMail is compatible with most email marketing software.

5. MailMunch

Growing your email list is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. MailMunch offers beautiful opt-in forms that allow you to attract the attention of visitors as they browse through your website.

The tool provides several different forms such as Scroll Box, Top Bar, and Popups – all of which integrate with email marketing software and are optimized for mobile. Additionally, MailMunch has the capability to track mouse movements of visitors. You can also tell it to display the form when the visitor is about to leave your website to keep them around.

MailMunch works with several popular website platforms, including WordPress and Shopify. The whole package includes analytics, so you’ll be able to eliminate guesswork and choose opt-in forms that engage subscribers.

6. Grammarly

Have you ever started reading an email only to lose interest halfway? This can be caused by a lot of factors, but the sender’s word choice and tone can have a lot to do with how readers perceive an email.

Grammarly is an app that uses artificial intelligence to catch common errors. Its algorithms suggest context-specific improvements for spelling, style, punctuation, and grammar. The tool is compatible with Gmail and can be installed as a browser plugin to edit messages in real time.

The tool is color-coordinated and structured, which eases the editing flow. Once you’ve written an email, Grammarly will provide a rank based on spelling, grammar, use of passive voice, and more. Additionally, it will offer suggestions for correcting mistakes. This is especially useful for composing long email newsletters.

Besides all that, Grammarly offers an anti-plagiarism tool. It lets you know if your content is original or if it’s time to reword your emails.

7. Mail Tester

Even the most reputable brands can send emails that get blocked by spam filters.

Without realizing, you may have used words or design elements that spam filters usually block. Inserting too many visuals, unintentionally adding broken links, or using certain filter-triggering words can keep your email from subscribers’ inboxes.

Mail Tester is one of those handy email marketing tools that offer a spam report. You can send a copy of your email message to them to get one. The report highlights what you need to modify to get your email into a recipient’s inbox.

It might advise removing spam words or changing the subject line from CAPS to lowercase letters. After you make the changes, send an email to Mail Tester to ensure spam filters aren’t flagging it.

8. Revue

Want to send a newsletter that contains everything you’ve announced or read this week? Revue is the email marketing tool you need. It’s designed to curate a shareable newsletter in minutes with no friction of heavy calls-to-action (CTAs), marketing gimmicks, or other distractions.

All you need to do is drag-and-drop a blog post or an article in Revue’s bare-bones editor. Then choose the layout, title, color, description, and link for each piece of content.

Additionally, you get an option to connect your Pocket, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, Product Hunt, and RSS feeds so that it can fetch all your shared content. Revue makes this content available in the right sidebar to drag-and-drop into your newsletter. From there, you can add more dividers and sections to organize your message.

Moreover, you can save videos and articles with Revue’s browser extension. It’s one of the quickest ways to put together a weekly newsletter from existing content.

Revue is free for sending unlimited newsletters to 50 recipients.

9. Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi is a simple email marketing tool that’s focused on helping its users create emails about promotions. Instead of prominent tabs for automations and newsletters, you’ll see menus for Dashboard and Audience. These options provide you with a solid framework to integrate coupons, events, new items, sales, and other promotions in emails to share with existing and potential customers.

The platform’s email editor helps you discover stock images, the social feature lets you integrate social profiles in your emails, and the “Add Things” button allows you to add web signup forms on your website.

Animated icons tell you whether you’re moving a contact, trashing one, or renaming it. In addition, you can add new email IDs one by one or by importing them from a .txt, Excel, or CSV file.

In terms of reporting, Mad Mimi gives you a visual representation of engagement rates on several promotional campaigns. You’re able to see how they stack up against one another.

Pricing starts from $10/month for 500 subscribers and unlimited emails.

10. Sendicate

Looking for an easy way to compose letter-style emails? Sendicate might just be the email marketing tool you need. It comes with a stripped-down interface that’s entirely focused on your messages. Sendicate’s editor allows you to pick the section you want to put in your emails and insert content without clutter.

The email marketing tool also lets you draft emails in advance to double check if they appear as you want. Sendicate’s dashboard has a draft section that displays your email complete with a subject and a header photo.

Other than these functionalities, Sendicate offers smart search filters that allow you to segment your target audience. This allows you to schedule emails to be delivered to the right audience at the date and time of your choice.

And with typography-focused templates, Sendicate ensures you’re able to create letter-style emails that always look professional.

Sendicate is free for sending 1,000 messages a month to 500 contacts.

4.2. Email Marketing Software Reviews

While you can use one or a combination of the above-mentioned email marketing tools to increase the appeal of your emails, the actual delivery part comes down to your email marketing software.

The best email marketing software allows you to send highly engaging emails. It also enables you to segment your subscribers into groups, perform A/B testing, and measure the performance of your campaigns.

Most importantly, good email marketing software ensures your messages reach their intended audience.

Below are unbiased reviews of 7 of the best email marketing platforms.

[highlight]Note: Most of the names on this email marketing software list do an excellent job of getting your emails past spam filters. Best of all, many of them offer a free trial, so you can get a feel for their features before spending money on the software. [/highlight]

Constant Contact Review

Constant Contact has been around for over 16 years. The platform has over 400 customizable templates to choose from. Additionally, you get an option to code your own template directly with CSS and HTML.

Constant Contact also offers 1 GB storage for your personal files. Its built-in library lets users store frequently used images, such as watermarks or logos, for quick access. Other noteworthy features include contact management, event registration automation, and detailed reporting and analytics.

Also, the email marketing software lets you personalize and embed email signup forms on web pages or on Facebook to capture new subscribers and grow your email list.

In terms of email automation, Constant Contact only has one feature: allowing you to set up autoresponders. Autoresponders allow you to send welcome emails to new subscribers. It also allows you to create an email series for subscribers with similar interests, like people who attended an event or purchased a certain item. They’re a great way to build relationships.

However, Constant Contact A/B testing capabilities are limited. You can only test variations of email subject lines.

As for pricing, Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial membership, without requiring you to give away your credit card details. Following the trial, the platform’s price ranges from $20/month and goes up to $335/month based on the size of your email list.

Constant Contact review summary: This email marketing software has great autoresponder features. However, if you’re big on A/B testing or you’re looking for a more cost-effective solution, it might not be the best option for your needs.

ConvertKit Review

ConvertKit is a relatively young name in the email marketing services industry, and although it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles other email marketing software offer, it still offers everything a business needs to manage their email campaigns.

ConvertKit’s email creation capabilities allow you to send a series of emails. With the integration of email marketing automation, you can set up multiple sequences, save them in drafts and specify when to deliver them.

Also, ConvertKit allows you to segment contacts into distinct groups. For example, you can segment people into those who’ve already purchased a product/service and those who’ve just sent an inquiry. Other notable features include contact management, responsive sign-up forms, and analytics tools for measuring campaign performance.

The software also makes the distinct list of email marketing tools that feature a landing page creator. Using its visual editor, you don’t have to write code for your landing pages. You can change the text, upload images, and modify colors with just a few clicks.

Additionally, ConvertKit allows you to create automated workflows based on events such as new subscriptions, product purchases, and the like. Other than that, you can instruct the software to tag subscribers automatically if they open specific links in an email message. That, in turn, triggers an action such as a subscription to a newsletter.

ConvertKit also supports a lot of non-standard integrations with third-party services to maximize productivity. For example, you can integrate with Gumroad, BookLaunch, and many membership site plugins.

It’s worth noting that ConvertKit’s A/B testing capability is limited. You only get the option to test subject lines.

The price ranges from $29/month to $79/month for 0-5,000 subscribers. There’s also a 14-day free trial offer for those interested in testing the software’s functionality before committing. All of ConvertKit’s plans come with the features mentioned above.

ConvertKit review summary: Its features hint that it might be a good option for beginners and small businesses. With a 14-day trial, you can test it out to see if it works for you. However, some platforms like Conversio and AWeber offer 30-day trials, which give you a better chance to develop and test more well-rounded campaigns.

Conversio Review

[highlight]Disclaimer: I’m the founder of Conversio. I may be a bit biased that it’s a great tool, but I’ll review it just as honestly and accurately as the others. This ebook is all about you finding the best tool for your unique business needs, after all.[/highlight]

If you run an online store and currently don’t do follow-up, receipt, or abandoned cart emails, you might want to give Conversio a look.

Conversio helps ecommerce store owners to keep their prospects and customers engaged. With the app’s email marketing tools, you can design and send customized receipt emails to upsell and build repeat customers. With a staggering open rate of 70.90%, receipt emails are a potential goldmine, and Conversio makes sure you treat it as such.

The email marketing software also offers data-backed intelligence that allows you to send personalized follow-up emails. These are based on events and triggers that you specify. Conversio offers 7 tried-and-tested templates for these emails.

Besides that, you can set up smart campaigns for different visitors, whether they are a repeat, inactive, or first time buyer. And based on what it learns about your customers, Conversio automatically puts them into different segments.

Those who want tighter control over who receives each email can design their own customer segments. You can use these segments to send the right kind of emails, to the right people, at the right time.

Additionally, Conversio provides a range of marketing modules for your emails, including shipping discount, order discount, latest post, refer-a-friend, and more. These can be used with any of the emails – newsletters, cart recovery emails, or follow-ups – and do a great job at increasing customer engagement rates.

However, you can’t conduct A/B tests with Conversio at the moment.

Pricing starts at $20/month and is based on your number of customers. If you grow, Conversio grows with you. All of Conversio’s features are included in every plan with unlimited emails and subscribers. Plus, when you sign up, you automatically begin a 30-day free trial, with complete access to all of Conversio’s email marketing tools.

Conversio review summary: Designed exclusively for ecommerce stores, it has a number of specialized tools and features to help store owners get better sales, conversions, and engagement. Easy automation and customization allow for a more personalized, targeted approach to getting and keeping customers.

AWeber Review

AWeber has been in the email marketing game since 1998, with more than 100,000 customers. It’s known for its exceptional autoresponder functionality, standing out from a range of other email marketing platforms.

It offers more than 150 customizable templates and allows you to choose where, how, and when your emails will be delivered. For example, you can set up an email series that delivers messages to all of your new subscribers automatically.

Users get a drag-and-drop campaign builder, which makes it easy to create automated sequences. AWeber also offers triggered automation based on the emails your subscribers open and the links they click inside emails.

The platform allows you to grow your email list with over 700 sign up forms. These will enable you to attract thousands of prospects as they can be placed on your company’s blog, Facebook page, and website home page.

Additionally, AWeber offers a list segmentation feature that makes managing contact lists easier. You can use it to put customers in different categories based on their purchase habits, or how long they have been your customer. AWeber allows you to create segments for VIP customers, new clients, those who refer your product/service frequently, etc.

While AWeber’s software does not offer a dedicated A/B testing feature, it’s relatively easy to classify customers into different segments and send out personalized emails.

The software’s pricing is straightforward. All packages include the exact same features, so you can select the one that accommodates the number of users on your email list. The most inexpensive one is $19/month for unlimited emails and 500 subscribers. Also, AWeber offers a 30-day risk-free trial that lets you access all its features.

AWeber review summary: AWeber doesn’t offer A/B testing, but it has an otherwise full range of functionality for creating successful campaigns. The platform has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, beautiful templates, and robust automation features that lessen the work you have to do to run your email marketing engine smoothly.

GetResponse Review

GetResponse is one of the most popular email marketing tools out there. It features an email editor that lets you design emails from scratch or choose from 500+ pre-designed templates. There’s also an “Inbox Preview” feature that allows you to see how a template looks on different desktop and mobile devices. Besides that, you also get an option to save elements like buttons and images as snippets for later use.

GetResponse also offers autoresponders based on specific factors, such as an email open, a subscription to a particular list, or any other goals you may have specified. Choose between subscribed, clicked, opened, goal reached, or time-based autoresponders.

For example, for someone who subscribes to your newsletter, you can schedule a welcome email to go out right away, followed by a discount email scheduled for delivery in a week’s time.

In addition, GetResponse makes the list of email marketing tools that offer marketing automation. With GetResponse’s marketing automation tools, you can create scalable workflows based on a customer’s journey.

Ready-to-use blocks make it convenient to set up intuitive workflows that act as conversion paths for your subscribers. Use marketing automation to react to abandoned carts, recent purchases, important web page visits, and more.

Moreover, GetResponse enables you to perform a series of tests that can help you identify the most effective emails in your campaign. This is achieved through A/B testing that lets you try different subject lines, newsletters, time of delivery, email content, and several other factors.  

For those who want to test GetResponse before investing in its email marketing software, the company offers a 30-day free trial. After that, costs range from $15/month to $1,199/month for its Enterprise plan.

GetResponse review summary: GetResponse offers a wealth of features that can fulfill the needs of both small and large businesses. As an added bonus, it doesn’t impose message sending limits like some of the other email marketing platforms.

ActiveCampaign Review

ActiveCampaign is an easy-to-use email marketing software that’s targeted toward small and medium-sized businesses. It stands out from its competitors by tying its email marketing capabilities into a versatile marketing automation platform.

With ActiveCampaign, you can do things like:

• Send targeted emails to particular groups
• Set up a series of emails for new contacts
• Send emails to recipients at varying times based on the date
• Send emails the instant someone subscribes to your list

When it comes to marketing automation, the platform offers numerous pre-built workflows that can be customized to suit a user’s needs. The automation builder is drag-and-drop throughout the entire process. Workflows are activated when you select a trigger (someone opens an email, it’s the customer’s birthday, etc.).

ActiveCampaign lets you build emails directly within the workflow without needing you to change between the campaign and automation dashboards. It also gives you the option to dynamically segment your email list within automation workflows.

Additionally, the email marketing platform gives you an option to conduct A/B tests. Users are able to test sender information, body content, and subject lines, as well as determine how many recipients get each version of the test. After a bit of testing, users can send the winning version 14-day to the majority of their recipients.

ActiveCampaign offers a risk-free 14-day trial that gives you access to most of its features. Following the trial, ActiveCampaign’s price starts from $15/month and goes up to $279/month. ActiveCampaign’s charges are based on the size of your email list.

ActiveCampaign review summary: ActiveCampaign has robust marketing automation capabilities. It also offers excellent email automation and segmentation features. However, the absence of a landing page creator and order forms makes it just shy of making the list of “all-in-one” email marketing software solutions.

Now that you’re equipped with an arsenal of email marketing automation platforms and various tools to pick-and-choose from, let’s look at 20 email marketing examples where brands are doing newsletters right.

20 of the Best Newsletter Examples to Learn From

There’s a question that often lingers in the mind of the modern marketer: Does newsletter marketing work? The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that you’ll need to cover a few bases to really be effective. While there’s no tangible list of newsletter templates that work, the best ones keep their subscribers in mind 100% of the time. They offer real solutions to the pain points and problems their subscribers face, while entertaining and engaging them. All while building trust and confidence in the brand.

Great newsletter design examples are interesting, captivating, and functional. Sometimes this means bright colors and breathtaking photos, and sometimes it means minimalism and simplicity to focus the attention on what’s most important.

The best brands are always searching for new, relevant marketing newsletter content ideas that go outside of predictable sale announcements and boring confirmation emails.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• Some newsletter templates and ideas for all sorts of purposes and occasions, from welcome emails to company news to content round-ups
• Newsletter format tips to get maximum engagement from your layout, design, and visuals
• Creative newsletter design examples, as well as some classic, traditional, and “safe” examples
• Impressive newsletter campaign examples from ecommerce and non-ecommerce companies

[highlight]Note: Check out ReallyGoodEmails.com for thousands of beautiful newsletter examples and inspiration. You can even edit an email’s HTML code if you want to fiddle with how to format a newsletter. If code isn’t your thing, stick to an email builder or automation tool to handle all that for you.[/highlight]

5.1. Ecommerce Newsletter Examples

Let’s look at 10 real newsletter examples that were sent by ecommerce brands.

1. Harry’s

You don’t always have to push your products (in fact, you shouldn’t). Men’s shaving and grooming products company Harry’s sends an instructional, educational email that’s relevant to its business line. Instead of trying to outright sell stuff, Harry’s provides a value-add by telling its customers how to better take care of their skin and get more from their shaving experience.

It’s all done in a clean, simple newsletter format that gives white space the love it deserves. They use the company’s signature brand font, which is easy to read and digest while still being unique and reinforcing the Harry’s brand.

Subject line: Are you doing this AFTER you shave?

2. Tailor Brands

Online branding and marketing solutions company Tailor Brands uses a classic incentive strategy to get subscribers to fill out a survey. (Because sometimes, you just gotta bribe people to get that coveted feedback!)

The email is beautifully simple, using color contrast to point your eyes in all the right directions. The green background is the perfect shade to allow for a red and white contrast for the main headline and subheadline, while still using black as the main body copy. This clever use of color puts it in the top examples of newsletter headlines.

Plus, the subject line is a fun play on a popular saying, while also making the reader curious about how much more they’re hinting at.

Subject line: Penny (or more) for your thoughts?

3. Bombas

Sock company Bombas has mastered the art of the referral email. One of the most straightforward newsletter headline examples, the email’s header leaves nothing for interpretation: “Refer a friend, get free socks.” Simple as that.

Instead of using blurbs or blocks of text, they use short numbered lists to explain how it all works. The blue subtitles create a clear distinction and visual separation as they lead down to the bright pink “Refer a friend here” button. And the “Get free socks” button in the header image leads to the same link, to avoid distracting from the main CTA (call-to-action).

All this while maintaining the cool, fun personality of the brand.

Subject line: Free Socks Are Not A Myth

4. Casper Labs

Casper Labs is the research branch of the premium mattress company Casper. In this dedicated product email, they introduce a company innovation with what I like to think of as grace and poise. They use a problem-solution framework and simple storytelling to show the reader how they solved a problem.

Simple graphics help to enhance the newsletter story format while reinforcing the company’s branding. Instead of the hard sell, the “Learn more” CTA button (as well as the play button in the header GIF) leads the reader to their Kickstarter page – the ingenious way Casper helped fund the development and manufacturing of the new duvet.

To add to their cleverness, they used a trackable URL so they could see how much Kickstarter engagement they got from the email.

Subject line: Casper Labs: Creating a Humidity-fighting Duvet

5. Toms

Here’s another dedicated product email from shoe company Toms. They have a one-two punch here: they’re using the seasonal approach to make their everyday brand relevant to Halloween, and they’re doing so by using a creative email newsletter image format.

When you hover your mouse over the slider, you can see a photo of their glow-in-the-dark shoes glowing in action. View the live version here to hover for yourself.

Interactive newsletter examples like this one are a fun way to show off your product while standing out from the crowd. The only downside here is that the shoes are designed for women and kids only. Not fair, Toms.

Subject line: These Classics glow in the dark! 🎃

6. The Hill-Side

This one is one of those rare exceptions to the rule about always staying consistent with your branding. Men’s clothing company The Hill-Side takes a supremely unique and clever approach to standing out on the most popular ecommerce day of the year: Cyber Monday. Anyone with an email account can attest that Cyber Monday turns an inbox into a battlefield.

This email is completely off-brand, using a tech theme that’s reminiscent of a hacker. Or your inner late-90s computer nerd. Or a late-90s hacker. In any event, it really hits home on the “cyber” concept while catching you off-guard (and hopefully making you smile).

This is certainly one of the more creative newsletter design examples out there.

Subject line: Cyber Monday Sale: 30% Off Everything

7. Anthropologie

Anthropologie is a women’s clothing, accessory, and home décor company that’s known for its quirky and laid-back-yet-glamorous “bohemian” style. Because of this, visuals are an important part of the company’s identity.

This email seamlessly blends being promotional and informational, advertising their 20% off sale while providing home décor style tips to guide a customer’s purchases. And they do it all with the help of beautiful product photography.

They also have a great use of fonts to add personality while still keeping it clean. On top of this, it’s one of the more naturally responsive newsletter design examples, as it uses a “mobile-first” layout that looks good on desktop, but focuses on mobile. Win-win.

Subject line: Catnaps. ZZZs. Shuteye. SALE!

8. Peloton

Peloton is an indoor exercise bike company that streams live cycling classes through the bike’s monitor. This sales newsletter format is short and simple. It uses concise and action-oriented copy, and there’s only one CTA here: get the bike.

To help encourage readers to do this, the bright “Limited time offer” banner and “Get the bike” button are a good contrast to the black-and-white of the rest of the email. This immediately draws your eyes to the most important details.

They also did a great job with the “lifestyle photo” (one of the top product photography tips), which shows the product in action while helping the reader visualize themselves using it in the comfort of their own home.

Subject line: Last Chance: Get $100 Off Accessories With Your Bike Purchase

9. Soylent

Generally speaking, if you want to send an email that builds hype for an upcoming announcement, you need to make sure it really does the job. Otherwise, it can just dilute your campaign and seem a bit spammy. However, this is one of those newsletter teaser examples that does a good job of piquing the reader’s curiosity.

Soylent, a meal replacement product company, sends a simple and clean teaser for a new mystery product in their line. The tone is casual, relatable, and self-aware, which catches the reader’s attention and perhaps makes them giggle.

Subject line: Something new is launching tomorrow.

10. Fab

Fab is an ecommerce company that sells a wide range of products including women’s, men’s, art, home, and tech accessories. In this email, they take a more personal approach by putting the spotlight on the men who designed a popular watch line.

By putting a face to the products and adding a human aspect to the shopping experience, Fab is helping to build stronger relationships with their subscribers (and therefore more brand loyalty).

The email uses a neutral color scheme that has nice visual contrast while keeping the high-end feel. Beautiful product photography and lifestyle photos show different variations in the product line as well as how they look in action.

Subject line: Designer Spotlight: MVMT Watches

5.2. Non-Ecommerce Newsletter Examples

And now for some great newsletter design examples from service-based companies, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, and some others in between.

11. MailCharts

This is one of those short-and-sweet newsletter welcome message examples that’s brilliant in its simplicity. Competitive email monitoring tool MailCharts skips the frills for a text-only welcome letter to new subscribers. It’s written directly from the co-founder and director of marketing, Carl Sednaoui.

In the letter, he sets clear expectations by telling the subscriber that they’ll receive a few emails each month. The best part: he asks them to hit “reply” to tell him their biggest email marketing challenge, and urges them to ask him any questions at all. The subject line “How can I help you with email marketing?” immediately tells readers that Carl really cares.

This is wonderful way to build trust, humanize a company, and encourage engagement. It’s also a clever way to get valuable customer feedback to help improve MailCharts services in the future.

Subject line: How can I help you with email marketing?

12. Grammarly

As we mentioned in Chapter 4’s discussion of email marketing tools, Grammarly is a writing app that helps make your messages and copy top-notch. As part of their email marketing initiatives, they send users a weekly update that summarizes their activity with the app.

The update discusses the user’s activity, accuracy, and the quality of their vocabulary in comparison to other app users. It also shows top grammar mistakes to help keep the user mindful, as well as a writing tip of the week.

It’s one of the more classic newsletter format ideas that includes a fair amount of information, but the Grammarly team does it well. They keep the copy short while using colors to help create visual separation and easy skimmability. Overall, this email is a great value-add for regular users.

Subject line: Grammarly Weekly Progress Report & Tips

13. Story Matters

Story Matters is a cool publication that’s dedicated to celebrating storytelling in all its forms. Their monthly email gives subscribers curated content like articles, poems, and podcasts, each of which contains captivating stories or a discussion on storytelling itself.

The email is pristine, with a classic and simple newsletter format. Instead of images, the header has an artistic use of fonts. The copy drops some key phrases and takeaways from the article that’s linked to the header’s clever “Waste not” CTA. Visual hierarchy leads you down the page to smaller content links, each with vibrant photos and illustrations to catch your attention.

You can tell that this publication is all about storytelling, as the copy uses powerful, descriptive – and borderline poetic – language.

Subject line: What is in the stuffing?

14. Listrak

Digital marketing automation platform Listrak has a quality newsletter template for promoting its upcoming webinar to help businesses make more money on social media. In the header, you find every detail you need to know: what it is, what it’s about, when it is, and a “Register now” button.

Keeping with the social media theme of the webinar, the main graphic shows a social media ad displayed on a smartphone. To display the key pain points that the webinar will solve, Listrak cleverly uses boxes that mimic social media posts, complete with tallies for likes and comments. Two thumbs up for this creative newsletter format.

Below the scroll, you see photos of the 2 speakers, helping to humanize the company and familiarize readers with the people they’ll be learning from.

Subject line: [Tomorrow] Beyond the Inbox: Social Acquisition

15. Wistia

Soapbox is a Wistia Chrome extension for recording and sharing videos. To announce the plugin, Wistia uses Soapbox to embed a video into the email. Needless to say, using the tool’s functionality to promote the tool is a solid idea.

The video is a helpful explainer that tells you all the basics of the extension in a little over a minute. As for the rest of the email, it’s nice and clean, with minimal copy that gets right to the point. The CTA “Get on your Soapbox” is a fun play on words of the saying “get off your soapbox.” I see what you did there, Wistia.

While background photos and patterns can be risky and potentially distracting, Wistia does a good job of choosing a light and colorful pattern that doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the message.

Subject line: Introducing Soapbox, Wistia’s video creation tool

16. Caviar

Food delivery service Caviar knows how to keep its brand relevant through the changing seasons. This email focuses on springtime US Daylight Savings, where the clocks roll forward and everyone gets an extra hour of daylight.

While food delivery has no direct relation to this twice-yearly phenomenon, Caviar makes itself relevant by offering a $0 delivery fee to celebrate the fact that dinner time is no longer spent in darkness. The clever headline tells readers they can look their food in the face now, with a GIF of some fries wearing sunglasses.

Overall, it’s a fun, quirky newsletter content example that reminds people of the brand and gets them to order some food. Especially with that bright (but still on-brand) “Order now” button.

Subject line: No eating dinner in total darkness anymore!

17. Lyft

On-demand transportation company Lyft has an engaging take on the classic New Years email. The company typically takes the opportunity to review a user’s interactions with them over the year. But this time, it shared information about all Lyft users in the recipient’s hometown.

They turned it into an awards ceremony of sorts called the Lyfties, showing things like the city’s top trending destination, as well as the most visited bar, university, event venue, and restaurant. Based on the topics, we can infer that Lyft is appealing to its key demographic of young, twenty-something adults.

This is valuable info. The kind of info that you’d want to click on and share from your social media news feed, just out of curiosity and entertainment. So Lyft includes Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons to encourage readers to do just that.

Subject line: Your 2017 with Lyft

18. Typeform

Typeform, an online form and survey tool, really knows how to get a subscriber’s attention. With a subject line like “Siri is dying,” could you resist clicking? This email keeps it simple with just one CTA, which is to visit their newest interactive article. In this article, they learn the story behind Susan Bennett, the woman who unknowingly became the voice of Apple’s Siri.

The email has a minimalist, simple newsletter template. The tech-inspired blue soundwave GIF makes a low-key-yet-interesting header image. As for the copy, there’s only a short headline and subhead, 2-sentence blurb, and a green “Listen In” CTA button. That’s it. And the great thing is: that’s all it needs.

Subject line: Siri is dying

19. 1973 Ltd

A great newsletter marketing strategy is to keep subscribers in the loop with company news. UK marketing agency 1973 Ltd does this well, using its newsletter to take them behind the scenes of the company’s recent branding redesign. The email also shares 2 blog posts – a good amount for more content updates in this newsletter template design without having too many things going on.

The subject line is classically-clickable (though a bit vague for my taste): “We’re so excited to share this with you!” The body has a good use of contrast, with white text on a dark background for the header. As an added personal touch to humanize the brand, the email includes the first name of the team member who wrote each article.

Subject line: We’re so excited to share this with you!

20. Flywheel

Like we discussed earlier, a newsletter is a great opportunity to promote your company’s premium content. Here, managed WordPress hosting company Flywheel sends an email to encourage downloads of its free ebook.

This is one of the “louder” newsletter header examples. When you open the email, you see a big, bold image that immediately draws your attention to the ebook’s cover. The larger headline shows the ebook’s title in an eye-catching bright blue color, then the smaller subhead is bold and italicized in a serif font. Then the description is in a smaller, plainer font.

This is a nice use of colors and fonts to create a visual hierarchy, which highlights the most important details first and leads you down to the “Download it now!” CTA. I also like how they mention that the ebook gives you 4 tips in 4 chapters. It’s a nice way to set expectations for readers.

Subject line: This FREE ebook has the secret to scaling your agency!

That’s a Wrap

So there you have it! Hopefully, you feel ready to start designing, building, and sending out awesome email marketing campaigns that help accomplish your unique business goals.

Throughout this ebook, we’ve covered:

• A brief definition for email marketing
• General phases or segments for an email marketing campaign
• Laws and regulations that you’ll need to keep in mind
• Some of the top terms and definitions for key KPIs
• How to use these KPIs to measure and improve your performance
• The anatomy of a successful email
• Different types of marketing emails you can send to accomplish different goals
• How to build and segment your email address list for maximum engagement
• Key tools and automation platforms that will help make the process easier
• 20 great newsletter examples from companies who get it

While this ebook was comprehensive, there’s always more to learn and experiment with. Use this as a guide to get started, but remember to always stay attentive, open-minded, and curious.

Subscribe to the newsletters of some of your top competitors and favorite brands. Pay attention to trends and new developments. Try new things, but look closely at the results.

To be a real email marketing winner, you’ll need to grow and evolve just as fast as consumerism is growing and evolving – and that’s pretty darn fast. What works today may not work tomorrow.

And that’s the beauty of it all!

Did we leave out any awesome strategies that have worked well for you? Let us know in the comments.