Email marketing tip #4: The 4 most important email marketing types

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

Email marketing – just like any other marketing channel – is finely nuanced based on various goals, which are achieved using very different approaches and processes. Right now, I am going to show you the 4 most common email marketing types and objectives:

1. Sales generation and customer acquisition

Not surprisingly, is the most common and well-know marketing email, designed to directly produce new revenue by either convincing existing clients to make additional repeated purchases or by finding and converting new potential prospects into paying customers. I know, eventually, any marketing email has the very same purpose of generating more sales and new customers, but as I already said, each strategy or email marketing type involves different approaches and processes …

When you are focusing on customer acquisition and direct revenue generation, you are going to concentrate your efforts on three target groups:

• Potential new prospects who have never been exposed to your products or services earlier.

• Potential new customers represented by people who signed up for information about your products or services, but haven’t made any purchases yet.

• Current clients who may be interested in additional follow-up purchases.

The typical content of these emails may include product information, sales offers, discounted offers, etc.

2. Customer retention

Once you have acquired some new customers, you’ll have to make consistent efforts to keep them at your side. This is where customer retention email marketing comes in play. Your obvious goal is to keep them interested ans satisfied, continuously giving them more and more new reasons to revisit your website and to make new, additional purchases. These retention emails are designed to maximize your actual revenue and usually they are focusing on specific products or highly targeted information, being considerably less generous in nature than a sales generating email.

The most typical content of a customer retention email will contain new targeted and/or discounted offers, free gifts, various incentives, product announcements, etc.

3. Customer win-back

No matter how efficient your marketing is, sometimes you are going to lose your customers. This is how businesses work. The term is very straightforward: your goal is to “re-acquire”, to “win back” clients who were once customers, but for some reasons have abandoned you. Understandably, this is the email marketing type with the lowest response rate, but you should always keep in mind, that winning back a former customer is much more cost effective than it is to acquire a new one! This is why customer win-back email should always be an important part of your email marketing.

If you have a huge list, over time you may have a quite impressive number of “disloyal” customers. In such situations you’ll have to categorize them into different groups based on how long it has been since their last purchase or their last interaction with your company. Why? Because clients who haven’t had interest in your business in a shorter amount of time (let’s say three months) will require a less aggressive approach than customers who haven”t interacted with you in a longer period of time (for example, six months or more). Having a well-segmented list of inactive customers will allow you to create truly efficient, laser-targeted win-back campaigns.

The typical content of a win-back email should include generous offers, free gifts, attractive incentives, free shipping or other compelling, exclusive offers and opportunities that are not available to the general public.

4. Brand building

Constantly keeping your brand in the mind of your clients is one of your most important and most powerful marketing methods. The purpose of these brand building emails is to have your customers feel like they are building a trusted, fruitful relationship with your company. To put it bluntly: this is how you are going to increase and to maintain your customer loyalty. This email marketing type may not have an instant or direct revenue value for your business, but a strong brand awareness and a trust-based relationship will help you to keep your customers for longer, and as a result they will spend more money with you over the long term.

The ideal target group for brand building emails is represented by your most active clients and those, who have recently become inactive. The most common content type for brand building emails is the good, old newsletter content that will include helpful or entertaining information, company status updates, holiday and birthday greetings, etc.

One final thought

An ideal email marketing plan should integrate all these 4 email marketing types, but obviously, you’ll have to objectively evaluate what role email marketing will play in your overall marketing mix, and which email marketing type is more important for you, for your business and for your customers over the long term.