How Will Knowing the Types of Email Help Your Marketing Strategy?

It should seem obvious that businesses need to focus on sending different kinds of email to their contact lists. This is not only meant to build and maintain a relationship with their customers and leads, but it also helps plan out an email marketing strategy.

After building an impressive email list, sending mobile-friendly emails, and personalizing your email content, it's now time to see which emails you should be sending and what you need to know about each.

Need to know how to upload your email list? Check out our article below.

We will go over the top five types of emails, but what specifically should you keep in mind when you design all of your emails?

Table of Contents

• How Will Knowing the Types of Email Help Your Marketing Strategy?
  • The Importance of a Header or Subject Line
  • The Importance of Content
  • The Importance of Servers
• Newsletter Email
• Lead Nurturing Email
• Milestone Email
• Promotional Email
• Emails with Surveys
• What to Look for When Building These Email Types
• How Can This Help with Hosting, Such as with Wordpress?
• Platforms for the Different Emails
• What's Next?

The Importance of a Header or Subject Line

An email is like a piece of writing with many different headers. Just as a well-formatted introduction, body, and closing sentence make your letter more readable, well-formatted email headers make your email more appealing to recipients. Every type of header has its own purpose and uses.

What is important to note about headers and subject lines is that each header should speak to your audience with either a pain point, such as "Having Back Problems? Our New Muscle Cream's the Best!", or have a call-to-action, such as "Grab Our Last Bottle Today for the Lowest Price."

The Importance of Content

What kinds of content can you include and how does it capture your audience's attention?

Email marketing is most effective when your email includes appropriate and engaging information. An email without content is nothing more than a form letter, which means it's not likely to be read.

However, businesses often send out the same generic emails to millions of people. For example, an email might advertise a new product or feature that will be available soon. This is especially valuable content if you have interactive buttons to take your subscribers to each product.

The Importance of Servers

Email servers are like post offices that store and deliver your messages to their recipients. Every time you send an email, it’s delivered to one or more email servers, until it gets to its intended recipient. This is because it depends on where the email is being sent.

Servers are mainly used by companies to allow many people to use the same mail server, rather than having one mail server per person. These types of servers use an application called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP to send all types of emails to email addresses. 

There are two main types of email servers- POP3 and IMAP. When an email is sent, it is first downloaded to a client computer before being delivered to its destination mailbox on the client computer's hard drive, which is usually then deleted from the server. 

There can be hundreds of different routes for a message sent on the internet, but the key is that it passes through one or more email servers. This is why you want to make sure your email message is not being sent to hard-bouncing addresses or have any other issues. 

Want to make sure your contact list is clear of any errors? Find out how to fix any problems below.

Newsletter Email

Newsletters are designed to deliver concise information to your customer in a simple manner. Newsletters provide customers with:

• tips and advice about the products or services
• new services on the website
• sales
• discounts
• and events you may be holding in future.

Newsletters also provide a great way for customers to sign up for regular updates from you. The most successful newsletters include short articles that tell a story and have an attractive banner or photograph at the top to draw people in.

These types of emails address each subscriber in order to inform them of the business's updates. A business newsletter can include anything from advertising the latest blog post on a business's site to giving details of upcoming events. 

One important thing to remember about newsletters is they are sent on a consistent schedule. Whether your business wants to send newsletters every week or month, they should be sent around the same time every time. 

Newsletter Email Example

The newsletter example below shows how a newsletter can give valuable content, such as a blog article or list of new articles.

Lead Nurturing Email

Lead nurturing is about the idea that your audience isn't ready to buy... yet. Since your subscribers aren't ready to purchase anything from your business, you have to build trust first. A lead nurturing email's goal is to carry them down the sales funnel.

This means that your lead nurturing email is actually a series of emails sent at particular times, whether it's once a week or once every few days. 

The lead nurturing emails approach is to send relevant content to a possible customer, such as marketing emails that offer discounts for new customers. These may also be preceded by an email to welcome the lead to your subscriber list.

Lead Nurturing Email Example

You'll notice this example of a lead nurturing email from Lynda.com is a welcome email with a field or call-to-action for a new subscriber to interact.

Milestone Email

Think about the milestones you may have gone through a business or software company. You've probably received several emails with a certain type of campaign, but you've probably also opened emails with your name on them to congratulate you for racking up loyalty points with a business, wishing you a happy birthday, or to offer you a coupon code to shop on a website for becoming a new subscriber.

Milestone emails are largely personalized, which means having a proper email product that allows you to send personalized messages automatically is so important.

Milestone Email Example

Topshop does great email marketing and never forgets to offer value to their customers or subscribers by emailing them with a short amount of content for their birthday message while also offering a discount to celebrate the occasion. 

Promotional Email

Promotional emails could be part of your lead nurturing email series, but it's much more than a simple discount you send to customers or leads. In fact, most of your marketing emails will be promotional.

There are branches of promotional emails that range from promoting a new product or service to giving a discount for a particular holiday or weekend. But should these emails feel like a promotion? No.

You can promote a product by giving value to the subscriber right away, such as:

• highlighting it in blog post that you promote
• giving customer stories, testimonials, or reviews of the product or services
• showcase the updates or improvements of a whatever you're promoting

Because promotional emails can be overwhelming, you don't want your subscribers to unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam. To avoid this, monthly promotional emails are safe, while once-a-week emails could also work for your business.

Either way, you can also let your subscribers choose how often they receive an email from your business, whether it's daily to once every few months.

Promotional Email Example

Here's an example of a promotional email from Grammarly. Their email marketing tactic here is to keep a short and sweet message to promote their premium services with a call-to-action button that will take the subscriber to a landing page, which will guide them through the process of buying a premium account.

Emails with Surveys

A survey email shows that your business has class and that you care about improving. If you want to label yourself as a company that sends relevant email types, you can easily include forms in your emails for subscribers to give input. 

These surveys can help you improve anything from:

• the look and navigability of your website
• the types of content you send through email
• what email marketing customers want to see in the future
• how happy customers are with certain products or services

You can figure out a percent of happy customers overall or measure your rate of conversion based on surveys. You can also offer a special discount for those subscribers who submit a survey. Or, alternatively, you can enter a subscriber into a huge giveaway when they submit a survey.

Survey Email Example

What's great about this type of email is that the customer knows it is free. It will cost them nothing to interact with these kinds of forms. Here, Kate Spade is offering a great discount for whoever fills out the survey.

What to Look for When Building These Email Types

Newsletters Need:

A newsletter email mostly requires the basics from email software, such as a text block, image upload option, and other content, such as an interactive button where you can link whatever page from your site to it. 

Most importantly, if you plan to send out a newsletter on a regular schedule, you may want email automation capabilities. You'll also need the ability to organize your list of subscribers in order to send content marketing to current customers versus leads.

Lead Nurturing Messages Need:

If you want to send a lead nurturing email, you should also make sure your email software gives you the option to segment your contact list.

In addition, this type of email marketing requires you to catch the attention of subscribers, specifically leads who could become paying customers or clients. This means a strong campaign may need more than your average text block option.

Think outside of the box for this email series, thinking about content like videos you may want to embed or gifs to draw attention to a new product your business wants to promote.

You will also want an option from your email platform to email a lead who has a product in his or her cart in order to remind them that they left something there or to entice them with a discount code they can use on the item.

Milestone Messages Need:

Email automation is key with a milestone email. You will want the ability to collect all information retrieved from your contacts, such as a contact's birthday, date a contact joined your mailing list, or date they first bought a product or service. If you have a service-based business, you may want automatic 6-month reminders for follow ups on doctor appointments or car mechanic check ups.

Make sure you have a digital marketing platform that can segment this list of subscribers accordingly. Your email program should also give you the option to recognize when an automated anniversary or special occasion email should be sent without much monitoring from your marketing team.

Promotional Messages Need:

Promotional messages can be part of your lead nurturing email series, but the content for these are more precise for each campaign. The best email platforms you can get will include email automation, of course, but what about the chance for current users to interact differently from a lead's promotional email?

If you want your list of contacts to be separate for this reason, you will need to get the right platform that can do this automatically. More importantly, you may want templates to make creating a campaign free and easy for multiple marketing team members. 

Image, videos, and gifs are also vital to these campaigns since many people are used to seeing product images or services being performed. Drag and drop capabilities with these blocks should be quick and easy.

Survey Emails Need:

Though you may get all the video capabilities in an email or even a way for subscribers to rate and unsubscribe easily from your emails because you have the best email software, your program may not have the capabilities to embed forms. 

If you send a list of surveys to your entire contact list, you should make sure you have not only great content written or shown in an image (or gif or video) but a secure form for subscribers to submit.

You can easily try many of the best email programs for free. Some programs cost a premium to access certain tools, and a form may be one of them. We can only suggest doing your research to find which software is best for you.

How Can This Help with Hosting, Such as with Wordpress?

Email marketing is tricky to understand when it comes to servers, hosting, SSL certificates for your website. All of them are actually connected if you have a growing business. Some marketers send emails haphazardly to users.

What's worse? When businesses send emails to users and don't realize they are paying an unreasonable amount to do so when they could get a program for free. It all depends on how large of a contact list you have. If you do have a long list of subscribers (good for you!), then you will likely pay something to send those promotion, special offer, and milestone emails.

That's when Wordpress comes into play. Yes, Wordpress has a hosted email solution that can give you an easy way to manage your emails using your wordpress account. Did you know you can also connect your external domain with TruVISIBILITY? Check out how below.

Platforms for the Different Emails 

We are always encouraging business owners to find the one product that will help them get the best marketing results. Sometimes people prefer to use multiple types of media and software tools to kickstart their digital marketing efforts, which is why we've collected a list below of a few to check out.

Let's see what you can get with each and which one may best fit your need.

• Constant Contact
• ActiveCampaign
• Mailchimp
• Sendinblue
• TruVISIBILITY

All of these choices have some of the best templates for email marketing. If you want to make a pros and cons list for each, go for it! Just remember what types of emails you'll likely send the most and which tools you will need for each.

What's Next?

If you already have content in mind to include in your email marketing, then you're off to a great start! Simply decide which types of emails you'd like to send to your contacts.

Keep in mind that the types of emails you choose to send will depend on the kind of business you have, such as a smaller brick and mortar store or an online market with a wide range of products. Whichever message you choose, however, you're sure to have your email out there and noticed by the right audiences.

Creative juices flowing? Now check out how you can make any type of email you like with our Messaging app for free! 

Want digital marketing solutions other than email? We've got just the all-in-one product for you here. Or try an easy way to send the most secure, HIPAA and CFPB-compliant, email with our Email app.