You certainly don’t want your subscribers to react this way to your emails.

That’s why you need to introduce some variety to your email campaigns and deliver value even if your audience isn’t ready to purchase from you yet.

If you don’t wow them, you lose them. 80% of customers set high standards for companies — and expect them to deliver not just high-quality products or services but also extraordinary experiences.

Let’s discuss how you can educate, surprise, inform, and amuse your audience using various types of emails.

Why Do Businesses Need to Use Different Types of Emails?

You probably know that you need to use different content types to address various customer needs and keep them moving down the sales funnel.

The same is true for email campaigns. When you send diverse and valuable emails, it benefits both you and your audience.

Here’s how it works:

1. Your recipients see various facets of your brand and get a chance to learn about your culture, mission, production, team, and so on.
2. Showcase your expertise through sharing valuable content such as videos, infographics, webinars, and long-form articles in your emails.
3. Boost customer loyalty by offering true value, not just promotional content.
4. Keep your subscribers in the loop by sending them important notifications and updates.
5. Nourish and educate new subscribers at a natural pace and give them time to develop a true interest in your offer.
6. Distinguish yourself from the competition by engaging in a meaningful conversation with your target audience.
7. Your subscribers are more likely to provide you with honest feedback when they see that you put real effort into your brand communications.
8. Continually re-engage your passive subscribers and put them in a buying mood using a variety of helpful emails.
9. Share customer endorsements and use social proof to finally close the sale.

It’s a win-win situation. When you create emotional bonds with your audience and show them that you’re not just here to profit off them and leave, they respond by paying more attention to your business.

10+ Types of Emails and How to Make Sense of Them

Now let’s dive into the most useful types of marketing emails — we’ll even share tips on how to incorporate them into your email strategy. For each type, we’ll show you relevant email marketing examples and discuss what makes them steal-worthy.

These types of emails aren’t niche-specific — an international SaaS company and a local clothing store can equally benefit from using them, as long as they tell their brand’s unique story.

#1. Welcome emails

Whenever you meet a new person, you usually greet them and get to know them before diving into a serious conversation. The same rule applies to your subscribers. Using welcome emails is the best way to make your new subscribers, customers, or community members feel at home.

The magic formula is simple:

1. Introduce your brand.
2. Explain what kind of information you’ll share with your subscribers.
3. Emphasize the value of your offer and how it’ll help your audience shop/work/live better.
4. Finish your email with a call to action.

This example from Adobe shows how it’s done.

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In this welcome email, Adobe encourages its new subscribers to participate in and contribute to the Lightroom community. The email copy is very user-centric, and the CTA at the bottom is helpful rather than pushy.

There are no generic images, just real photos made by real Lightroom users. The whole email is easy to scan — the recipient won’t miss a single bit of information even if they read it on the go.

#2. Promotional emails

The way you promote your products or services also matters. A promotional email shouldn’t be too promotional — try to sprinkle in a bit of playfulness, debunk common myths, or include some expert tips to provide more value.

Fleur & Bee, for example, prefers to educate its customers before sending them to a product page.

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This visual ingredient breakdown is extremely effective for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly shows what’s inside this particular product and why it’s better than any mass-market alternatives. Secondly, it captures user attention and inevitably makes them interested in this better-for-you cosmetic line.

There are multiple CTAs here, but they aren’t conflicting with each other, thanks to the visual contrast and white space. All in all, this is an effective yet minimalistic promotional email you can learn a lot from.

#3. Lead nurturing emails

When selling a complex product or service, you can’t expect your potential customers to just grab it and leave. You want to gradually educate them and help them purchase from you with confidence. If they understand how your product or service works, they’re more likely to use and enjoy it.

Lead nurturing emails help you achieve exactly that. You share useful content such as tutorials, reports, guides, infographics, and articles with your leads to help them ripen.

That’s the strategy supplement brand Ritual prefers.

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This email introduces the Ritual multivitamin formula and describes its advantages from a scientific viewpoint. Two intuitive illustrations show exactly how all those complex particles work together.

The recipient of this email may not be ready to purchase pricey supplements just yet. But they’ll certainly digest this useful info, and it’ll help them eventually reach the conclusion that there’s no better alternative on the market.

#4. Transactional emails

This “least exciting” type of email can suddenly become quite engaging if you take the right approach. You don’t have to make your transactional emails look like long, boring receipts — keep them easy to glance over. It’ll help your customers double-check it and make sure there’s nothing wrong with their order.

That’s what underwear brand MeUndies does.

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Transactional emails from this brand are packed full of useful links. In this example, the purchase hasn’t arrived yet, but the receiver already knows where they can get help with their order or how to get the next pair for free.

But perhaps the most effective form of transactional emails are abandoned cart emails. They help you re-engage potential customers who left items in their cart without purchasing them.

#5. Special offer emails

Black Friday, shop clearance, birthday discounts, college student deals, first purchase discounts — there’s no shortage of special offer ideas. But how do you convince your audience that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

Special offer emails will help you get the message across. Let’s list their typical elements:

• Attention-grabbing headline
• Countdown timer
• List of benefits
• CTA

You can also follow this example and emphasize the value of your offer by using so-called strikethrough prices (the original retail price that’s temporarily reduced).

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The side-by-side comparison erases any lingering doubts. The recipient of this email can clearly see how Freshly’s offer stacks up against typical meal kits. Strategically placed CTA buttons, mouth-watering visuals, an eye-grabbing headline, and convincing copy — that’s what makes this special offer email work.

#6. Seasonal emails

Celebrate the autumn pumpkin craze, share Christmas gift ideas, or do a virtual Easter hunt to entertain and engage your subscribers. Sending festive seasonal emails is a great way to tap into your customers’ emotions without looking overly sentimental.

Your business doesn’t have to react to every imaginable awareness day or local event — you can simply choose occasions relevant to your niche and add them to your content plan.

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Here’s a seasonal email example from Lush featuring their spooky and witchy bath bombs. Witty email copy immediately puts the reader into the right mood, and the atmospheric background photo helps deliver the message.

You can send seasonal emails even if you don’t have any limited-edition products to feature in them. Think about introducing a seasonal promo code, running an end-of-season sale, or curating a themed collection of items, say, for Mother’s Day.

#7. Announcement emails

Keep your audience in the know by sending them milestone emails, important updates, and news and describing how those changes will affect their customer experience. This way, you’ll make your announcement emails about them, even though they are technically about your brand.

Let’s look at this announcement email from Allset:

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Allset takes a very customer-centric approach when describing its new features. This update email is informative, exciting, and fun to read — we immediately see what’s new and how to use it.

#8. Newsletter emails

Start sending regular curated emails where you share industry news, valuable insights, inspiration sources, expert advice, in-depth blog posts, videos, and so on. Not only will they hook your subscribers, but they’ll also help you strengthen your own authority in the field.

Email newsletters are way more shareable than any other commercial emails, so it’s also a surefire way to spark positive word-of-mouth.

Sketch follows this practice and shares tons of insights with its subscribers every month. Here’s just a snippet of it:

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If you want to share more useful content with your subscribers but don’t have enough capacity to produce new stuff every week, consider trying HOTH Blogger. We’ll deliver high-quality articles for your blog to boost your SEO and content marketing game. This way, you’ll never run out of fresh content.

#9. Feedback emails

Customer feedback is the driving force behind customer service improvement — you can’t make changes if you don’t know what’s missing. But customer feedback can also benefit your business directly, through positive testimonials.

To increase your response rate, make sure to mention in your survey email:

1. Why you are collecting feedback.
2. How long it’ll take to complete your survey.
3. What’s in it for your audience.

These simple details will prevent your emails from being ignored or marked as spam.

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Once again, customer empathy is a must here because your task is to convince your recipients to spend time answering your questions. Nokia checks all the boxes in this example by saying how long the survey takes and what it’s for.

#10. Thank-you emails

This type of email shouldn’t be brushed off — thank-you emails contribute to the overall shopping experience you provide. In this example from Classic Specs, we see an elegant thank-you email that contains everything a customer might need, from estimated delivery times to a customer service email address.

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You can also enrich your thank-you emails with an FAQ section or a couple of post-purchase tips.

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It’s the little things that make a big difference. By answering frequently asked questions, you’ll ease the burden on your customer service team and show your target audience that you want them to be satisfied with their purchases.

#11. Recommendation emails

Personalized recommendation emails can help you establish customer trust and increase their loyalty to your brand. It’s your way of showing that you are ready to go the extra mile to make them happy.

Brooks certainly knows a thing or two about creating genuine recommendation emails.

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You can also share additional tools or tips in your recommendation emails to help your customers find what’s right for them. Most email automation platforms have audience segmentation tools that can help you target the right contacts.

#12. Last-chance emails

No one likes having FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), and your customers are no exception. Use last-chance emails to show them fantastic deals they can’t miss and encourage them to act before someone else outpaces them.

Here comes a spicy last-chance email example from Saxx:

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This email is witty and memorable, and it does create that sense of urgency all marketers are after. At the same time, it doesn’t look like clickbait, thanks to the tasteful product photos and clean design.

#13. Re-engagement emails

This type of email helps you remind your passive subscribers about your business and bring them “back to life.” The goal is to incentivize them to give your offer another try, and here’s how you can do that.

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Clear is a secure ID platform allowing travelers to go through airport security and venue entrances faster and safer — and that’s exactly what this re-engagement email illustrates.

In short, your recipient needs to see what they’re missing out on. Try to sum up all the recent positive changes your product or service has gone through, and top it with a powerful call to action. You can also send abandonment cart emails to re-engage buyers who didn’t proceed with their purchases.

Supercharge Your Email Marketing With More Variety

Going beyond promotional emails alone can help you engage with your prospects and build relationships that turn them into loyal customers in the long run.

If you need help building your list in the first place, we can provide you with engaging, SEO-optimized copy for your website so you can attract laser-targeted leads at scale.

HOTH Web Copy is our content-writing service created with busy marketers and business owners in mind. We can capture the essence of your brand and put it into professionally written copy search engines will love.

The post 13 Types of Emails Your Business Can’t Do Without appeared first on The HOTH.

But, that doesn’t mean email marketing is easy. Marketers have tons of email metrics they can use to measure a campaign’s performance. Among the most important of these metrics is email deliverability.

This metric measures if your emails are reaching your subscribers’ inboxes or if they’re just ending up in spam folders.

To help you gain a better understanding of email deliverability, we break down exactly what it is, why it’s important, and how to improve your deliverability in this article.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability of your promotional emails to reach the recipient’s inbox. It’s a complex metric showing you the quality of your email lists and email campaigns.

You can measure your email deliverability by looking at your inbox placement rate. It’s the number of emails delivered to the inbox out of the total emails sent.

The terms email deliverability and email delivery rate are not interchangeable — an email may be delivered but marked as spam and thus discarded. Inbox placement rate gives a more accurate picture.

Less than 20% of marketers can brag about having a 90% or higher inbox placement rate. The rates of 89–69% are far more common. But the average spam rate is only 0.01%, so it’s not the picky users that don’t want to receive any commercial emails.

It’s marketers not ensuring their email deliverability before hitting “send.”

The three elements of email deliverability

There are several external and internal factors that influence your deliverability rate. It all boils down to what you are sending, how you are sending it, and who you are sending it to.

These are the three key elements of email deliverability:

• Relevant and optimized email content: Bulky or clickbaity emails have a lower chance of landing in the inbox and being opened.
• Safety and sender reputation: Email services flag or filter out emails from unauthenticated or compromised domains.
• Engaged audience: Your recipients have to express consent and be interested in getting emails from you. Otherwise, they’ll ignore or report your messages.

Now, let’s dig a bit deeper.

Why Should You Care About Email Deliverability?

It’s frustrating to pour your efforts into an email campaign just to find out that it was ghosted by your target audience. But there’s more to it than mere sentimentality. Improved email deliverability can benefit your business on many levels.

#1. Strengthen your customer relationships

Ensure smooth, interruption-free communication with your customers to boost their interest and loyalty to your business.

Did you know that 37% of consumers prefer hearing from their favorite brands over email? Also, more than half of shoppers say that they look for seamless and personalized interactions with businesses.

Combine these two, and you’ll get a solid chance to generate repeat customers and devoted brand fans who would enjoy regularly receiving your email campaigns.

#2. Beat your competitors

Email is considered one of the most competitive and valuable channels — nine out of ten marketers use it to distribute content.

So, businesses can’t afford to treat it casually. By working on your email deliverability, you prevent your competitors from outpacing you.

Mastering email deliverability doesn’t require big investments or highly technical skills — it’s more about paying attention to details. And by doing that, you can succeed where others may fall short.

#3. Get higher ROI

When your email deliverability is lagging behind, it’s slowly turning your email marketing into a money-sucking machine. You’re forced to spend time and money on developing and setting up campaigns, email tools, and content creation, but you don’t get your investments back.

Improving email deliverability means improving ROI and gradually freeing up the resources needed for growth. You get a clearer picture of how your core audience reacts to your emails and what you can do to monetize their interest.

Common Factors That Hurt Your Email Deliverability

Here’s a list of the factors that are extremely likely to harm your inbox placement rate:

• Single opt-ins: If visitors can just sign up to your list through the form without having to confirm their subscription, spammers and fake-email users will take advantage of it and ruin the quality of your email list.
• No dedicated sending domain: Sending emails from a general domain everyone in your company uses isn’t recommended since you can’t control your sender reputation.
• High bounce rates: A high number of rejected or flagged emails tells email service providers that you have a low-quality email list that may have been bought or stolen.
• No custom authentication: Email users and service providers prefer to deal with senders who care about safety and are ready to go the extra mile to prove their legitimacy.
• Unclear unsubscribe options: If you don’t leave your subscribers an option to stop receiving your campaigns in one click, they’ll feel cornered and most likely mark your emails as spam.
• Image-heavy emails: Spam filters don’t like suspiciously heavy emails because they are more likely to carry malicious attachments.
• Spikes in email traffic volume: An unnaturally high sending volume from a previously inactive domain is an absolute red flag — email services expect commercial senders to grow their numbers gradually.
• Lack of personalization: Customers grow weary of generic marketing emails that have nothing to do with their real needs and simply stop opening or engaging with them.
• Repeat complaints: If you keep sending emails your recipients mark unsolicited, email service providers will do everything to lower the number of inboxes your campaigns reach.
• Poor engagement: The fact that your current emails are being ignored by your audience can negatively influence the deliverability of your future campaigns.
• URL shorteners: Shrinked, hard-to-read URLs are often used by scammers — that’s why they can make an otherwise legit email end up in the spam folder.
• No-reply email address: If your customers see that they can’t reply to your emails, they’ll quickly lose interest in one-way communication with your business.

Chances are, you ticked at least one of the boxes. But there’s no need to worry — we’ll address these and other issues and discuss how to fix poor email deliverability.

How to Boost Your Email Deliverability

We’ve briefly touched on five key areas that impact email deliverability rates:

1. Sender reputation: What email service providers “think” of your sending domain.
2. Authentication: How you prove that your emails are authentic and not forged or spoofed.
3. Content: What you put in your emails and subject lines.
4. Logistics: How you deliver your messages.
5. Audience: How your recipients interact with your emails.

Just a heads up, all of these areas are interconnected — so by improving, say, your opt-in strategy, you’ll also positively influence your sending reputation.

Let’s unpack each of them and see how you can improve these areas, step by step.

#1. Sender reputation

Your ability to reach the inbox depends on the reputation of your domain and the IP addresses associated with it. Email services score them based on your sending volume, whether they’ve been blacklisted, and so on. High unsubscribe rates, spam reports, bounce rates, and engagement rates also play a big role.

Here are some tips to improve your sender reputation:

1. Regularly monitor your IP reputation using tools like SenderScore.
2. Adopt an email list hygiene routine and remove invalid addresses and subscribers who haven’t reacted to your emails for months.
3. Develop sending consistency over time and gradually increase your sending volume instead of taking an “all or nothing” approach.
4. Reduce spam complaints by making sure you send only solicited and personalized emails.
5. Avoid spam traps by validating new email addresses before starting sending them campaigns, especially if there’s a sudden surge in email subscriber conversions.
6. Prevent blacklisting by making sure everyone in your company vigorously sticks to these tips.

#2. Authentication

Authentication is your way of showing email service providers and your recipients that you are a trustworthy sender and that your emails aren’t forged or spoofed.

There are three ways to make it happen.

SPF

Verify your sending domain via SPF (Sender Policy Framework). This framework allows you to authenticate domains that you or your business own and control.

For that, you need to create an SPF record — a list of servers that can send emails from your domain and instructions on how to handle requests from your domain.

To find or create an SPF record, you need to follow the instructions from your email software provider. If you can’t find them, contact their support. Then, you’ll have to add that record to your domain TXT records. If you don’t know where your DNS records are located, reach out to the person that manages your website or email address for help.

By adding an SPF record, you vouch for your emails’ authenticity. That’s how you tell email services who’s allowed to send messages on your company’s behalf.

DKIM

Use DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to digitally sign your emails in a way that can be verified by your recipients or, more precisely, their email services.

DKIM consists of two elements: the DKIM record, which is stored in your domain records, and the DKIM header, which is attached to the emails you send from that domain. You, as a sender, get a private key to sign your outgoing messages, and your recipient gets a public key to verify your signatures.

This signature verification process works like a seal — it helps both parties ensure that your emails have actually been sent by you or your company and have not been changed in transit.

Encryption

Commercial emails may contain sensitive customer data such as their contact information, address, or order details. To prevent email data breaches, check whether the email software of your choice supports email encryption.

More often than not, services like Zoho Mail or Sendinblue support TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption that prevents unauthorized access to an email when it’s in transit, but only if the recipient server supports TLS.

If the other server doesn’t support TLS, your email will be delivered using a standard SMTP protocol.

#3. Content

When your email content doesn’t match your subscribers’ expectations and needs, you get a drop in engagement and, subsequently, lower email deliverability. Spam filters can also penalize you for sharing unsolicited or suspicious content — even if you had no intentions to spam.

Here are some potential cures:

1. Create personalized and relevant content. Use advanced audience segmentation and dynamic content in your email campaigns to press all the right buttons.
2. Perfect your email layout. Create a clear visual hierarchy, break your layout into easily scannable chunks, and sprinkle it with a moderate amount of CTA buttons.
3. Prioritize mobile-friendly design. Make sure your emails are easy to read, even during a hectic commute.
4. Go easy on large file attachments. Email service providers want to prevent their users’ inboxes from being overloaded, so they may filter out especially bulky emails.
5. Keep a reasonable text-to-image ratio. Fully image-based emails can also be considered spammy, even if they contain some text. It’s better to maintain a 60/40 ratio or something along those lines.
6. Avoid spammy subject lines and all caps. A clickbait-like message is an immediate red flag for any email service filtering system.
7. Run A/B testing. Test different images, layouts, and buttons to find the right formula and increase your open rate.

Need some help creating better content for your emails and website? HOTH Blogger can help.

#4. Logistics

The way you deliver your messages matters. Make sure to follow these tried-and-true practices if you want to give your email deliverability a boost.

Choose dedicated domains and IP addresses when you can

Use dedicated domains instead of free or personal email addresses. A custom domain immediately creates a professional impression, but it’s not just that. If your company sends all sorts of messages from the same domain, its reputation will eventually suffer.

When you use a dedicated domain for your marketing communications, only your practices determine your sending reputation. And you gain more control over your inbox placement rate. The same is true for IP addresses, although to a lesser extent.

A dedicated IP is easier to whitelist. Also, using it means having sole responsibility for DNS records. But you don’t need to invest in a dedicated IP if you are a very small business — mistakes will also cost you more, and there won’t be enough sending volume to even them out.

Include a plain text version

Provide your email subscribers with a great user experience in both your HTML and plain text emails — it’ll incentivize them to always open messages from you. Including a plain text version may also help your email avoid the spam folder since spam messages often don’t have a plain text version.

Plain text is more accessible to screen readers. It looks more natural, almost hand-written, which makes your email communications feel less commercial. Also, this format allows you to display all your links and paragraphs correctly if your recipient’s app can’t show the HTML version of your email.

Be wary of URL shorteners

Shortened links can harm your email deliverability, and here’s why. Scammers often use them to direct users to phishing websites and spread malware. Since all shortened links look somewhat similar, it’s harder for the user to figure out where such link leads.

Naturally, email users and providers grow suspicious of shortened URLs. It’s always better to let your subscribers know what to expect if they click your link. If you absolutely must use a shortened link, consider providing some context, or using your email marketing platform’s link shortening or tracking options.

Stay away from no-reply email addresses

For starters, your subscribers can simply auto-filter no-reply emails as spam in their inbox. This alone can dramatically affect your email deliverability rate. Also, emails from no-reply addresses are more likely to be caught by spam filters.

Besides, a no-reply email address indicates a lack of interest from your side, which is not something customers feel drawn to. What if a recipient tries to reply to your email? They’ll immediately see that your business isn’t approachable even though you do try to communicate with them. It will only confuse or annoy them.

Always use a real email address your subscribers can send a message to. It’ll empower them to engage with your emails in a more meaningful way. As a result, your email deliverability rate will go up.

Set up an email feedback loop

A feedback loop is when your email service provider notifies you whenever your recipient reports your email as spam. This process lets you clean and update your mailing list regularly and keep your sending reputation intact.

Some email services may send you the details of each spam complaint, while others provide more aggregate data that doesn’t say who specifically filed complaints.

You can find a third-party service that will do most of the work for you by checking the recipient’s email address and making sure it’s not on the so-called suppression list. If it is, the system will refuse to send them emails.

#5. Audience

This part is pretty straightforward. Treat your subscribers nicely, and you’ll get a natural email deliverability improvement over time because they won’t be able to get enough of your content.

Here are some details worth paying attention to:

1. Use double opt-ins to attract an interested, active audience and validate their addresses on the spot. Building your mailing list will take longer, but it’ll be a higher quality audience.
2. Segment your email campaigns to avoid overwhelming your subscribers with information they may not need.
3. Make the unsubscribe link visually accessible. It’ll help your recipients pause or stop your campaigns without having to block or report you.
4. Regularly “prune” your emails to get rid of inactive subscribers and avoid getting flagged for spam.

Improve Your Email Marketing Game

As you can see, creating a great email campaign is only half the battle. Taking care of email deliverability is just as important because that’s how you make sure your words reach your customers’ ears, or, in this case, eyes.

If you want to guarantee that your content is seen and heard well beyond your existing circle, consider trying HOTH Web Copy. That’s your one-stop shop for quality content that search engines love — we will create engaging copy for your website and landing pages to help you drive conversions and rank higher on Google.

The post Email Deliverability: The Ultimate Guide to Reach Your Customers in 2022 appeared first on The HOTH.

The same need for personalization applies to email marketing. Marketers have to cater to their specific audiences rather than sending generic, mass emails to everyone on their email list.

Targeted emails enable brands to provide relevant content to their audience, build a relationship with them, and improve brand credibility. This consequently can boost sales.

This article will explain what email targeting is, why marketers need targeted emails, and how you can build a targeted email campaign.

What Is Email Targeting?

Email targeting or targeted email marketing is the practice of sending personalized emails that are relevant to your target audience.

Marketers typically divide their audience into multiple segments based on demographics, buying habits, and other factors, and send emails that resonate with each segment.

Using this method, they ensure that they cater to their readers’ various preferences — so the chances of customers relating to and checking out a brand’s products or services increase greatly.

Email targeting aims to boost conversions, but brands can have smaller goals along the way, such as increasing click-through rates, improving email deliverability, or boosting email subscriber numbers.

Why Is Email Targeting Important?

Email marketing is one of the primary channels for communicating and building relationships with your customers. Here’s why most marketers personalize their email campaigns:

Address different kinds of customers

Brands often think of their customers as a homogeneous unit. Their buyer personas could be as vague as “men aged between 25 to 40 years.” Experienced marketers will know that even within that group, there are tons of different variables that affect purchases: career, interests, marital status, hobbies, location, and more.

Targeted email marketing calls for accurate audience segmentation and enables brands to actually connect with the different types of buyers they are sending emails to.

Address customers in various buyer lifecycle stages

You don’t want to send an introduction email to someone that has already completed multiple orders. It doesn’t make sense from the customer’s point of view.

With targeted email marketing, you can send the right messages to audiences in different stages of the buyer journey, be it a prospect, a lead, or a repeat customer.

Improve credibility

Sending poorly-crafted and generic emails to your subscribers ensures they don’t trust your brand, mark your emails as spam, and decreases any chances of a successful email marketing campaign.

But, with targeted emails, you can ensure that most of your subscribers are interested in what you’re sending to their email addresses. This builds credibility and brand reputation. So, even if they don’t make immediate purchases, they’ll continue to engage with your brand long-term.

Boost click-through rates

The average click-through rate across all industries is around 2.13%. While many factors affect this metric, targeted emails can encourage users to open the links in your email.

Email targeting ensures the links you send to different readers are of interest to them. For example, sending a limited-time offer to a buyer with multiple items saved on their wishlist can entice them to click through to claim the offer and complete the purchase.

Build customer relationships

Targeted emails help build a rapport with customers where they open and read what you’re sending, be it informative articles, discounts, or company updates.

Sending customers the right content at the right time builds trust. This trust is crucial for building and maintaining customer loyalty.

Better customer retention

All of the above factors keep customers coming back for more. When your email campaigns are targeted to address your audience’s specific needs, it shows you know what you’re doing.

Increased rapport and credibility make readers more willing to give your products or services a chance. One successful order and more great emails later, you have a repeat customer that believes in your brand.

How to Create an Effective Targeted Email Marketing Campaign

So, now that you know why you need to personalize your emails let’s focus on the how. Here is a 6-step guide to get you started:

#1. Collect the right data

To set up the foundation of a targeted email marketing campaign, you need to collect the right data sets. Typically, the data you collect will be a mix of general customer information and more detailed statistics about their buying habits.

Many brands struggle with data collection, with 43% admitting that getting accurate customer data for personalization is challenging.

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You can set up data collection via forms and surveys in emails, use tracking pixels on your website or eCommerce store, or set up social media listening.

You can also host contests or giveaways, where customers fill out a basic information form to enter the competition. You can also regularly send feedback surveys to current customers.

If you’re just starting out, then competitor analysis is also a great avenue. Analyzing the top performers in your niche and seeing who their customers are and how they behave can help you better understand your target audience.

The real trick here is to unify all these various data sources into a single email marketing platform or CRM that supports email automation and advanced personalizations.

CTA: Need some help figuring out your email marketing strategy? Schedule a free call with our digital marketing specialists today.

#2. Use data for audience segmentation

The first set of data you need is demographics — your customers’ average age, location, income, education level, gender, etc.

Then, you dive in deeper to understand their interests, the devices they prefer to shop on, when they’re more likely to open your emails, and the types of emails they like.

All of this data is combined to construct a buyer persona, a fictional customer that represents a group of buyers. So, for example, you can have a buyer persona representing “high-earning married women over 30”.

Most marketers create multiple personas for each section of their customer base. Once these personas are built, it’s easier to understand audience pain points and create content to address them.

The goal of audience segmentation is to create multiple versions of the same emails so that they appeal to a majority of your subscribers.

For example, office supplies and furniture brand Poppin segments emails by the income and tastes of their audience.

Here’s their email for the “$75 essentials”:

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And their email for “$500 essentials”:

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While the layout for both emails is the same, the language used is different. The first focuses on functionality and affordability, while the second is focused on helping customers build their dream work-from-home setup.

#3. Create relevant content for each segment

Content for marketing campaigns is based on keyword research, market research, the target audience, and overall content marketing goals.

You can use different types of emails across the customer journey to build relationships with new leads and repeat customers alike.

GetResponse estimates that triggered automated emails have the highest open rates.

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Automated emails, such as an abandoned cart or transactional ones, are personalized automatically, with the user’s added products or preferences. However, marketers send many other types of emails, including:

• Newsletters: A weekly or monthly newsletter with personalized content.
• Promotional emails: Emails with relevant offers to a specific audience segment.
• Informational emails: Company updates, product updates, etc.
• Feedback: Asking customers for feedback about a particular service or the entire company.

All of these emails must be crafted with the target audience in mind. For example, promotional offers for slim-fit skinny jeans may not be ideal for audience members over 50. Promotions geared towards older groups should feature language and items they will be interested in.

#4. Test your campaign

Before fully launching your campaign, test the emails to see if they work on every major device and resonate with the target audience.

Your emails need to look good on desktops, mobiles, and tablets while maintaining formatting and design.

A/B testing is the ideal method to test email layouts on multiple devices. In an A/B test, you create two versions of the same email and send each version to different subsets of your audience.

Each version can have different names, subject lines, preview text, body copy, images, and call-to-action buttons.

Track each version to measure relevant metrics. For example, if the goal of your email marketing campaign is to boost email marketing revenue, then click-through rates via the CTA buttons are what you need to compare.

Testing can also determine ideal email frequency, which days of the week have the best open and click-through rates, and more.

Test your emails before and during a marketing campaign to identify opportunities for optimization.

#5. Choose a powerful email marketing platform

An effective email marketing campaign requires the correct tools. You need software that helps you with research, email creation, distribution, automation, testing, and analytics at scale.

You can use all-in-one platforms like MailChimp, Litmus, or HubSpot to manage every element in a single place or rely on standalone tools that perform one function but do it really well. MailGenius, for example, is a free tool that analyzes your email for possible triggers that could send it to the spam folder.

If you’re not sure about your writing skills, you can outsource the copywriting to web content experts.

If you’re using an all-in-one platform, ensure it has integration and automation capabilities. Automation speeds up marketing campaigns by relieving marketers of repetitive, mundane work.

Triggered welcome and transactional emails are examples of how automation can help streamline your email marketing.

According to BlueShift, email triggers lead to a 468% higher click rate and a 525% higher conversion rate.

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#6. Monitor and optimize

Monitor your email marketing campaign to ensure you’re effectively targeting your audience.

Performance metrics like overall open rate and click-through rate can be helpful to measure progress towards the broader campaign goals, but you also need to see if your targeted emails are working.

If the emails you’re sending to a specific subset of your audience fail, then A/B testing should help you figure out the difference between the multiple versions and help you understand why metrics aren’t up to the mark.

In many cases, your open rates could be great, but click-through and conversion rates could be lower. In the first scenario, it indicates customers want to see content from your brand, but the content they’re seeing is not persuading them to make a purchase or visit your website.

Measuring conversion rates is more complicated since it also depends on each product, its pricing, and other external factors like shipping time or cost.

Based on A/B testing and performance metrics, you must optimize your campaign content and then test again to measure effectiveness.

Grow Your Customer Base and Increase Profits with Targeted Email Marketing

Email targeting is an effective way to boost email marketing revenue and profit. If done right, your emails will leave a happy impression on your audiences, build credibility, and encourage customer loyalty.

Of course, if you’ve got no one on your email list, that’s a different problem altogether. The HOTH’s marketing experts can help you create targeted SEO and PPC campaigns and high-converting landing pages to build your lists more effectively.

The post How to Increase Open Rates With Email Targeting appeared first on The HOTH.

Since then, it has grown beyond personal electronic mail to become an integral part of business and marketing strategy, offering all sorts of features to improve communications over the internet.

One of these is the email distribution list — allowing you to send the same email to multiple people in one click.

In this article, we’ll discuss email distribution lists and what they’re used for. Then, we’ll walk you through creating them on Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail and go over some list management best practices.

What is an Email Distribution List?

An email distribution list is a group of email contacts you can create to address as a single recipient. This allows you to contact several people with one email.

According to Statista, there were 4 billion daily email users in 2020. That number’s estimated to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.

That’s a lot of email users, making something like an email distribution list a handy tool.

Also, unlike carbon copy, you don’t have to enter each recipient’s email address manually. Writing to the distribution list sends the email to everyone on it automatically.

For instance, imagine you wanted to send regular emails to 50 people. Instead of writing 50 emails or writing one email and entering all 50 email addresses, you could add their address to an email distribution list.

Every time you want to email these individuals, just write to the distribution list, and they’ll all get the message. It’s perfect for internal communications like emailing teams or entire departments at your company.

Benefits of Email Distribution Lists

Unlike many forms of marketing, email is inherently personal. You’re showing up in someone’s private inbox.

A distribution list helps you maximize these benefits. Here are some ways it does so:

Saves time

The most obvious benefit of email lists is the time you save. You don’t have to add recipients manually every time you need to send a specific group of people an email.

Just pick the distribution list, write up your email, and click send.

Easy solution for contacting multiple team members at once

Email distribution lists are best suited for internal communications. They make it easy to send email messages to a whole team or department at once.

But you can also use them to contact different groups of customers or clients — although this becomes difficult at scale.

Teaches you about your customers

At first, you do some initial customer research to put together a representative buyer persona that can guide your marketing messaging.

But once you’re actually marketing to your customers, you’ll quickly learn what they’re really like — especially through email.

Since email inboxes feel more personal and private, recipients may respond to your emails. Aside from helping your deliverability, these responses can be a gold mine for learning their problems and goals if you notice patterns in what they talk about.

Then, you can return to the drawing board and adjust your persona and messaging based on these responses.

Increases ROI

Email marketing offers some of the highest ROI of all marketing channels.

In 2020, email marketing firm Litmus’s State of Email survey found that email earned an average ROI of $36 per dollar spent. That’s even higher than the $32 per dollar spent that many had cited before 2020.

It makes perfect sense: email does not necessarily take a massive investment of time or money. Sending an email message is virtually free in 2022 (since you’re not paying for each kilobyte of traffic). Yet, the personal nature of the channel helps persuade your list members to take action on your emails and click through.

Builds a personal connection

As mentioned, people generally see their email inboxes as private. It is, after all, a virtual mailbox.

Therefore, email distribution lists allow you to build a personal connection with each recipient.

The key is to make your emails seem like they come “from a friend” and that you have their best interests at heart. You don’t have to know the person on the other end, but writing to them as if you’re talking to a friend feels less like a sales message and enables real human connection.

Oh, and if list members respond, that’s your chance to further an individual connection and secure their loyalty and satisfaction.

An asset you own

Your social media accounts may seem secure, but you don’t “own” them. Your followers actually belong to Facebook, Twitter, or whatever platforms you use.

You never know if the platform will change its algorithm and bury your social content — or worse, ban you from the platform for some reason.

Email’s different because, like your web content, you own your list. Your recipients are yours. As long as they opted in and you take action to avoid the spam box, you have far more control over your list than most other assets.

How to Make an Email Distribution List (in Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail)

The exact process for making an email distribution list differs depending on the platform you’re using. That said, every platform makes it relatively easy.

Here’s how to create email distribution lists with Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail.

Microsoft Outlook

Email distribution lists are no longer called that in Microsoft Outlook. Instead, they’re called contact groups — but they work the same way.

To make a contact group, you’ll first navigate to the admin center and click on the People menu. Once there, you’ll go to My Contacts and choose the folder you’d like to save the contact group in. In most cases, you’ll want to choose the Contacts folder.

Next, you’ll create the contact group by clicking the New Contact Group button. Name the group, select Add Members, and choose the contacts you want in the group.

If you don’t have someone’s email registered in Outlook, just enter their email manually.

Finally, click Save & Close, and your list is ready to go.

Alternatively, if you email the same large group of people all the time, you can create a contract group the same way, but copy and paste all the email addresses instead of adding contacts.

If you keep your contacts in Excel, you can even import the spreadsheet into Outlook to create a group.

Gmail

In Gmail, distribution lists are called contact groups — and you can create them using Gmail’s label system.

Once you log into your account and arrive at your inbox, click the Create Label plus sign button on the left of the screen. Give it a name, and click save.

Next, go to your contacts. Check the box next to each contact you want to add. Once you select the desired contacts, click Manage Labels at the top right and choose the label you want to add them to.

That’s it. From there, you can remove contacts or change the group name as needed.

Apple Mail

Apple Mail also calls distribution lists “groups.”

To make one, open the Contacts app on your Mac, then select File and navigate to the New Group option. Name your new group.

Make sure your groups are visible by clicking View>Show Groups if you can’t see them, then click All Contacts to display all your contacts in alphabetical order.

Drag and drop the contacts you want in the new group. It’ll use the most recently used email address if they have several.

If you need to add new contacts in the future, simply create a contact in the address book for them, then drag it to your group.

Email Distribution List Best Practices

Email distribution lists offer plenty of convenience and help you save time. But you have to create and use them the right way.

Make sure you follow these best practices when building and writing to your email distribution list.

Check your list before you send a message

The larger your list grows, the more you have to check over it and make sure the right messages are going to the right people.

For example, you don’t want to send a “thanks for buying” message or an upselling email to a distribution list of customers who haven’t bought yet.

Likewise, you don’t want to send welcome emails to people who have been on your list for a year.

So make sure you check who you’re sending each message to before clicking “send.”

Follow the law

Data privacy is huge nowadays, and nowhere is this more apparent than data usage regulations.

For example, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation requires you to ask for an “affirmative opt-in.” There can’t be any pre-ticked opt-in boxes, and the user has to freely and clearly give consent, per the regulation.

It also requires you to offer an unsubscribe option in every email, and instructions for unsubscribing must be clear and easy.

Keep in mind that these laws can differ depending on jurisdiction.

Make it as easy as possible to leave your list

You should make leaving your list as simple as joining it. It sounds counterintuitive, but there are plenty of benefits.

First of all, as we’ve mentioned, there are legal ramifications if you mismanage personal data.

Beyond that, allowing an easy opt-out can build trust and satisfaction with recipients. You appear more honest and transparent because you’re letting them leave any time they please. You’re not pulling a “make it hard to unsubscribe” trick in the hopes they’ll give up on it.

Clean your list regularly

You can’t please everyone on your list. Some people go cold after signing up. Others respond to you with less-than-happy messages that you can’t rectify, no matter how hard you try. Dissatisfied or disengaged recipients can harm your opens, click-throughs, and other important stats. This can carry over to your deliverability.

That’s why regularly cleaning your email list is so important. This involves purging your list of inactive accounts and you may have to kick off the occasional angry person if you can’t resolve their problem and they continue to be rude.

Yes, shrinking your email list seems counterintuitive.

But the thing is, you want people on your list that’ll engage with your emails and take action. Anyone who’s not doing so is harming vital email metrics without helping your business in any way. Removing them can actually be helpful.

Even if it’s an in-house list of team emails, you need to remove employees that leave the team or company.

Avoid attachments

You might have the best intentions when sending attachments via email, but this can turn off many recipients if they don’t know you very well.

Attachments carry a perceived risk of a virus if the recipient were to download it. Email software is more likely to move it to the spam or trash folder or completely block your message.

Even if it gets through, the recipient is less likely to trust it unless they specifically asked for it — such as if they signed up for your list to grab a lead magnet you advertised.

Additionally, attached files increase the size of your message. Too large of a file can prevent you from sending the email at all.

With all that in mind, try to use links if possible to share information.

Use email marketing software instead where appropriate

If you have a small list, you may be able to get by just emailing them manually.

But if you plan on scaling your business and list, you need to take advantage of email marketing software.

Email software solutions contain all sorts of tools that make your life easier, such as:

• Painless, legal, and automated opt-in and opt-out for all lists.

• A/B testing: To split your list into a few segments and send different versions of the same campaign or email to each segment. This helps you see which version’s better.

• Analytics: To see how well campaigns are performing.

• Automations: To build email sequences that nurture leads and sell your products on autopilot.

• Landing page tools: To build your email signup page and other relevant pages.

• Templates and drag-and-drop email builders: To help you craft emails quickly, especially if you’re struggling with ideas.

• Segmentation: To split your list up by buying behavior, pain points, and other information so you can more effectively target certain members.

Maximize Your Email ROI With a Distribution list

Email is one of your most valuable marketing and communications assets.

Distribution lists help you maintain communications with a large number of subscribers without having to write each one individually — saving you time without sacrificing the ROI of email.

The thing is, you need consistent lead flow to continue growing your list, especially if you’re purging inactive subscribers regularly.

SEO and PPC are two of the most powerful lead gen methods for email lists, and The HOTH can help you do them right. Book a free consultation today to learn how we can help you.

The post How to Create an Email Distribution List and Use It Effectively appeared first on The HOTH.