Email marketing is among the most effective digital strategies local businesses can employ to engage with prospects and customers while promoting their offers.
Furthermore, it also serves as the primary lead-generation source for most online marketers.
With the above in mind, email marketing helps drive customer loyalty, builds trust, and increases sales when used correctly.
Considering this, you must understand the different types of emails and their purpose before planning your email marketing campaigns.
Thus, in this post, we'll look at six types of emails every local business should utilize so you can easily incorporate them into your email marketing strategy.
Let's get started.
1. Welcome Emails
Sending well-designed welcome emails that thank new subscribers for signing up shows that you appreciate them and is paramount for success.
Fortunately, this is easy to accomplish.
With this in mind, welcome emails also let them know the types of email content they can expect in the future and the frequency with which they will receive them.
Additionally, welcome emails provide an ideal opportunity to improve your email retention rate by demonstrating the value provided in your emails.
Considering the above, you should avoid bombarding new subscribers with overly promotional emails and sales pitches.
Instead, you should strive to create a great first impression by ensuring your emails deliver helpful and valuable content.
2. Email Newsletters
Newsletters are another critical email type that all local businesses should utilize.
By all means, email newsletters nurture customer relationships and keep your brand firmly in their minds.
With this in mind, newsletters deliver numerous opportunities that include:
- Providing tips and advice that help your audience solve a particular problem
- Keeping your audience informed of upcoming product and service launches
- Offering exclusive discounts and promotions
- Keeping your audience up to date with your latest news
Given these points, ensure that your email newsletters aren't overly promotional.
That is to say, the primary purpose of your email newsletter is to deliver value to your subscribers.
3. Retention Emails
Multiple studies have shown that repeat customers spend more than new customers and often deliver more word-of-mouth referrals.
Consequently, customer retention is vital in any business.
Considering this, retention emails greatly improve your chances of ensuring repeat, long-term customers.
Accordingly, you should review your customers, identify which ones haven't purchased in a while, and then create and send personalized offers that encourage them to purchase.
You can also send helpful emails to ensure your customers understand the benefits of your products and provide tips on how to use them properly.
In essence, well-designed retention emails encourage customers to stick around.
4. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails acknowledge order receipt, show current order status, and communicate product and service delivery dates to your customers.
Consequently, failing to send transactional emails results in decreased consumer trust and confidence and increased calls from nervous buyers to your customer service team.
At a minimum, your order confirmation emails should acknowledge receipt of customer orders and provide your contact information and estimated fulfillment and delivery time.
5. Promotional Emails
As previously stated, you should limit the number of promotional emails in your marketing campaigns.
Yet, occasionally sending them is acceptable and can prove highly profitable.
To be sure, exclusivity is a clever use of promotional emails.
Considering this, you could send occasional, exclusive promotions that are available only to your email subscribers.
In addition, special discounts are also effective in encouraging new email list subscribers.
6. Lead Nurturing Emails
Lead nurturing emails, sent in a series rather than as individual emails, can gradually convert your leads into customers by nurturing and delivering helpful content to them at the right time.
In Conclusion
As shown above, email marketing is critical to an effective and comprehensive online marketing strategy for local businesses.
Granted, creating them can prove time-consuming; however, email automation software can help you save time by scheduling them efficiently.
In the final analysis, email marketing can significantly boost conversions and increase customer retention.
So, if you haven't already, get started today!
Hope this helps,
Erik
We implement creative, results-based digital and hybrid marketing strategies for local business clients.
You can visit our home page and view our service plan options by clicking the button below.
