Okay, so there are a whole bunch of reasons why you’d want to send an email out. It could be a promotion, it could be Black Friday, for example. It could be that you’ve done something that you want to tell the world all about it like you’ve launched a product, a special offer, that kind of thing. Generally, I’m breaking this down to a generalisation, there are five types of email that people send and really you want to kind of look at when you’re sending an email, where does your email fit into this?
So, the first one is a newsletter. A newsletter is generally a monthly one, it’s a roundup. Now, there’s a whole thing about newsletters being dead. I would probably argue that they are, I think email campaigns are alive, and email newsletters are dead. Because if you think of a traditional email newsletter when email marketing first became a thing in, say, the nineties. Newsletters were monthly roundup emails; they weren’t generally promotions. Sharon’s won this HR award, we’ve been featured in the local Gazette. And they were very, kind of, inward-looking, company inward-looking. They’re almost like an internal newsletter, but sending it to your customers, like your customers care. I would argue that they don’t, so why, why are you sending it? But I guess there are certain industries and certain reasons why you still want to send the newsletter. Even if it’s just a roundup. If that’s the only email you are sending, I would say that’s probably a no-go. You really want to fill in the blanks and send a lot more often. But if you’re just sending a monthly newsletter, I’d probably say knock that on the head and actually use your email marketing a little bit more effectively. Save that stuff. Like the general public doesn’t care that you’ve won an award or that Sharon’s won an HR award, or you’ve been featured in the local Gazette like it’s all company stuff. Like why, why would your customers care about that? And that’s something to bear in mind, what your customers actually want to see and read.
The second type is a promotional campaign and that could be you’ve launched a new product, a sale on a particular sort of product line. These are particularly with e-commerce. And e-commerce and email marketing go hand in hand really well. So, the promotional campaign has kind of overtaken the newsletter in terms of popularity.
The third type is a seasonal campaign. So, Christmas, Valentine’s, Black Friday, things like that. So, they’re kind of hotspots throughout the year and it’s a good idea to have a calendar of what those hotspots are. Pick the ones that are relevant to your business. Now, if you go on, I think it’s daysoftheyear.com, every day there is something, it’s like, eat chocolate day, that kind of thing. Chocolate brownie day, that sort of thing. Every day there’s going to be something.
Now it depends on what your tone of voice for your brand is, but you might want to jump on the bandwagon for some of these events and just gives you an opportunity and an excuse to send more emails, which you should be doing. So that’s the seasonal campaign.
Triggered emais are the fourth. So here we’re kind of looking at automation. So, in Mailchimp they’re called customer journeys. They can be called automations, drip campaigns, flows, different terminology, same thing. These are kind of triggered by an event like somebody entering your email list, a positive behaviour like somebody doing something like opening an email, or a negative behaviour for win-back campaigns such as they don’t engage in your emails and you want to kind of re-engage with them and promote special offers to them to try and get them re-engaged and to buy, you know. Triggered emails are automated emails that just sit in the background and just run all the time and generate money for your business. So again, if you’re in an e-commerce business, I would say promotional campaigns, seasonal campaigns, and triggered emails are the way to go.
The last one, again for e-commerce, is the transactional email. So transactional emails are, thank you for purchasing this product, shipping updates. This is where SMS kind of feeds in as well. A lot of platforms like Klaviyo have SMS marketing, meaning that you can kind of use SMS as also a way to sort of confirm orders, get people to order and give people status updates on things. So, the transactional email again is an automated email, but it’s based on a purchase or an action in that sense. So, they’re kind of the five general types of email that you can be sending.
