9 excellent examples of email marketing campaigns

Email Marketing is an important component of marketing. It is a rewarding strategy that boosts sales, earns new customers, and helps in retaining them. 

Email marketing generates the highest ROI compared to any other marketing strategy.

According to Campaign Monitor, “AN EFFECTIVE EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN ROI IS 4400% – RETURNING $44 FOR EVERY $1 SPENT ON MARKETING.” 

Email marketing campaigns can fulfill different purposes when designed with a certain goal in mind. It can help you with:

Traffic Generation

— More traffic equals more conversion. Email is a powerful conduit for promoting the high-value content you publish and drive traffic to your website.

Brand Awareness

—Every subscription may not result in a sale. In such cases, you can use email marketing to remain engaged with the prospect by providing relevant content. This way you will always remain at the forefront.

Nurturing Leads

— Identify the leads with the highest buying intent and create personalized and conversion-focused emails that can nurture your leads towards a sale or make them sales-ready.

Revenue Generation

— When planned properly with a clear goal in mind, the revenue generated from your emails can multiply. You can try different approaches such as creating attractive emails, sending target emails to specific audiences, etc.

• You can push upsell (a more expensive purchase) and cross-sell ( relate purchases to the primary purchase ) chances to your existing clients through email marketing campaigns. 
• You can construct campaigns to capture sales conversions from leads who are on the verge of making a purchase decision. For example, you may create “abandon cart” efforts to regain missed sales conversions.
• You can also give offers that can urge your customers to purchase from you. For example, you can offer a discount coupon valid for a limited period such as a 30 percent discount valid for 7 days.

Hence, email marketing would be the best shot for a business that wants to build a good relationship with its clients, increase its conversion rate, and grow faster.

All the above achievements are possible once you know how to create an effective email marketing campaign that stands out from the hundreds of emails being shoved into people’s inboxes every single day.

The success of email marketing campaigns depends on how well you plan and craft your campaigns. Here are a couple of things you should focus on:

Understand your target audience.

If you water down your message to make it applicable to your entire audience, you’re losing an opportunity to create high-value, specific, relevant material that speaks directly to the receiver.

Understanding your audience and using email segmentation & personalization to guarantee you’re sending the right email to the right people at the right time is the key to an effective email marketing campaign. If you can incorporate this into your approach, you will be able to be more creative and particular with your emails.

Establish a campaign goal.

Even if email marketing is a low-risk, high-reward activity, you don’t want to send emails just for the sake of it.  In other words, simply crossing anything off your to-do list will not make you successful.

Instead, be deliberate about what you want to achieve out of your emails since this will help you create the right emails for your target audience.

For example, if you want to nurture leads from MQL to SQL, you can establish a segment of MQLs and generate instructive and convincing content to take them closer to a purchasing decision.

Be smart with the subject lines.

First impressions are important. Subject lines are a small yet very important part of emails. People judge an email by the subject lines. It urges people to click on your email and read it. 

If you want your email to be clicked on, opened, and read it is critical to come up with smart, creative, clear, and crisp subject lines that grab people’s attention at once.

Create good content:

Content is the king of your marketing campaigns. If you want people to pay attention to what you are saying and go through your entire email then you need to develop content that is clear, crisp, and to the point. Also, have in mind that the way you end an email can increase the reader’s attention and a will to keep engaging and communicating with your brand in the future. 

Good content with good visuals will be the best way to win over your audience and make them stay with you.

Use Call-To-Action (CTAs):

Remember to focus on what you want your customers to do next. CTAs guide the customers to take the next step, which increases your email campaigns’ effectiveness.

The purpose of the CTA will differ depending on the customer’s journey stage and what you want to achieve with your email campaign. You might simply want to engage them more with another piece of content, or you might want to persuade them to make a purchase and direct them to your app or website.

A good email marketing campaign typically features one main CTA with the option of a secondary CTA. The CTA buttons embedded should be clear and powerful, without overpowering or detracting from the message itself.

Update your leads:

People often forget to check if their leads are valid or not before sending out their email campaigns. This leads to the low performance of any campaign. Validating and verifying your email list filters out any invalid, dormant, temporary, suspicious email addresses, helping you ensure that your emails are reaching the recipient’s inbox and reducing your bounce rates making the success rate of your campaigns higher. You should validate your email list every few months to see how much value the list holds and if it is worth sending out emails to those email addresses.

You can use email validation tools to maintain your email list hygiene. It will save you from unnecessary costs, bad sender reputation, and low deliverability rates. 

Test your emails to be compatible on all devices:

Once you are done with your emails, double-check them before sending them out. Your emails should be suitable for all devices like desktop, tablet, and mobile on which users are likely to read them. Try sending test emails to your colleagues and across different devices and email clients to ensure they are ready to be sent to your prospects and customers.

Now that you know how to skillfully wield a campaign, it is time to learn from the marketing experts. Here are 9 brilliant examples of email marketing campaigns crafted by the talented marketing gurus that you can inspire from before getting started with your campaign:

• Welcome Campaign by Michaels:

Welcome emails are important and people expect one from every brand they sign up for. The relationship between the brand and the customer starts with these emails. 

Michaels has started with a Thanks email to express that they value their customers joining them. They have spoken about what their customers should expect from them in the future and how they can improve the customer experience by learning about their preferences.  Michaels has also cleverly grabbed the opportunity to pocket a sale by offering a discount coupon in their welcome mail.

• Promotion Campaign by loft:

Loft created an extremely basic yet fun email marketing design with a banana graphic and simple text saying “Don’t Let This Sale Slip Away.” You might slip on a banana, but don’t let this opportunity slip away. It is a great way of notifying people about the running sale: fun and at the same time creating a sense of urgency!

Such humorous emails are often liked and remembered by the customers.

• User Re-engagement campaign by Dropbox:

User re-engagement campaigns are important to show that you value your customers and want them to be with your brand. Dropbox created a super cute “ come back to us” email to simply remind people that they exist and how they can be helpful. The copy is short, simple, and in no way intended to intrude. 

In such emails, an incentive can be added at the end to remind people to come back to using your services. You can also add a limited period offer or discount especially for them.

• Product Renewal Campaign by Warby Parker:

In this email, the folks at Warby Parker clearly showed that nothing complements a new prescription than a new pair of glasses. This email is a very good example of personalization based on the need of the specific customer. 

The email used the subject line “Uh-oh, your prescription is expiring” which is smart and urges the recipient to go through the email. 

The email also co-markets about consulting an optometrist in case the recipient is not sure where to renew their prescription from, which is again a very clever tactic to get your customer closer to making a purchase.

• Promotion Campaign by Litmus:

This is a great example of using animation for making an attractive email campaign.

The swipe motion employed provides an “under the hood” look of the tool that is eye-catching and motivates the receivers to go through the rest of the content. The copy of the email is also to the point and crisp stating the purpose of the email clearly.

The color, content, and the design of the email used work great together making the campaign interesting and a success.

• Triggered email campaign by Topshop

Triggered campaigns are a series of automated emails generated in situations like abandoned carts, any content download, any purchase, etc. Triggered campaigns are responsible for generating 75 percent of email revenue. 

Topshop here has set an example of how to remind your customers about their unfinished orders subtly and smartly. The line “We’ve got your bag!” has been cleverly crafted not only to remind customers about the abandoned items but also to demonstrate that they have kept their luggage safe all this time.

The content of the email template has also been kept simple and short with the list of the items added to the cart.

• Update Campaign by Trainline:

This simple update trigger campaign by Trainline is one of the best performing campaigns in the industry. ‘Trainline” is a travel company that informs its customers about their approaching trip by reminding them to pick up their tickets, providing weather information, and providing other crucial information.

They also encourage users to download the app and keep up to date with new information. This is a great way to market their app when there are high chances that people will download the app for a better experience and receive updates easily. This form of interaction raises the brand’s worth in the eyes of the customer.

• Newsletters by Trulia:

Newsletters are one of the best ways to gain customer’s trust in you by becoming their source of knowledge. Trulia is an expert in the real estate business and it shows clearly from their emails. 

The subject line used in this campaign – “Why aren’t millennials moving?” is to the point and intriguing. It makes the readers eager to learn more about the subject leading to a high open rate. 

Even Though Trulia won’t benefit from the readers who are not going to move it still has an upper hand. The informational newsletter will allow them to be at the top of the reader’s mind and showcase they are up-to-date with the affairs of the industry.

• Date Trigger Campaign by Overstock:

Many times a customer may provide incomplete details while setting up their account or in some cases, their provided phone numbers/ email addresses may no longer be in use. It is important to stay updated with your customer’s personal details to be able to reach out to them in the right way, and also for personalization & segmentation the personal details of the user like their date of birth, location, preferences, etc are required.

Here, Soybu has used one of the best ways of advising their customers to update their profile details by offering freebies, discount coupons.

Soybu skillfully entices customers to update their profile information by promising them a special surprise on their birthday, and who doesn’t like a gift on their birthday? This is a great way of retaining loyal customers and gaining new customers as well.

These were some of the best-performing email campaign examples to learn from. Now you can sketch out your own brilliant email campaign with all the help of these inspirations and tips. 

Aastha Shaw is immersed in creating & developing content at Clearout & ClearoutPhone, SaaS products used for email verification and phone validation respectively. She has been creating content for websites, blogs, and videos for marketing. You can reach out and connect with Aastha on LinkedIn.