7 Types of Emails That Drive Sales

This new age of marketing is all about personalization. As a small business owner, your top priority should be connecting and building relationships with your customers. You don’t just want loyal customers— you want loyal brand advocates. People who love your brand and who will spread that love to their friends and family.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to do this, while also helping increase your website traffic and drive revenue. 

If you’re strategic with email marketing, you can use it to improve customer retention, improve buyer trust, and increase conversion rates. Email is easy to personalize, automate and reach customers wherever they are. As a retail business, you should be using multiple channels for marketing, but email should be on top. In this blog, we will break it down for you with the 7 emails you should be using to consistently engage your customers.

Does Email Marketing Work?

Before we get started, it’s important to know the facts. Why is email the best marketing platform for retail businesses? Honestly, the list of benefits is endless...but here are a few major reasons.

1. Get The Best ROI

• For every $1 spent on email marketing, it generates an average of $38 in your return on investment (ROI) and gives you the broadest reach compared to other marketing channels.
• 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email compared to 17% who prefer social media.
• Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social.

2. Email vs. Social

• Social media is necessary for business, but it’s difficult to target customers directly— email can be more personal and individualized for each customer.
• With social channels, you are typically limited to one post, or a certain amount of characters— with the email you are free to send out larger, more substantial messages including photos, information, and promotions.

3. Personal AND Automated

• Email Service Providers allow you to personalize emails and automate them so you don’t have to spend extra time manually creating emails for each customer.
• Automated emails allow you to have multiple touch-points with new customers and loyal customers.
• Emails that are personalized and automated bring in substantial ROI because they can be sent based on a customer’s behavior or based on time.

The Seven Emails to Send 

Now that you know why email is so important, let’s get started! Remember, you can get creative as you want with your email marketing—actually, the more creative, the better. Here are seven basic ideas to help kick things off. 

1. Welcome Emails

There’s a lot of research showing that when the majority of customers visit your site, they aren’t ready to buy...yet. However, they came to your site for a reason, so they are interested in your brand and will be more likely to sign up for your email list before purchasing something. A Welcome Email is a warm greeting to touch base as soon as they sign up. You can show them popular products, a new line, or even give them a special promotion to get them started!

2. Email Confirmations

This type of confirmation email is used to confirm your customer's email address is correct— which is huge. This can also be integrated into a welcome email. When a customer submits their email address, it’s always a good idea to let them know their action was successful. You can bypass a lot of customer frustration by ensuring they gave the right email address and will receive all of your upcoming promotions. These emails can also include important information and give directions for next steps. All types of confirmation emails have high open and click-through rates, which gives you more up-sell opportunities as well.

3. Regular Promotions

As stated earlier, the majority of people prefer to receive promotional content via email. The key is to be consistent. Customers want to see regular emails with quality information— like new products, big sales or special promotions. Use your email marketing to strategically plan out consistent promotional emails. You can transform this into a monthly newsletter or a regular series of promotions and deals.

4. Birthday & Holiday Promotions

Nothing makes a customer feel more valued than getting a birthday message. Many businesses send out special birthday or anniversary emails to help their customers celebrate. This can be easily automated as long as you collect customers’ birthdates with their email addresses when they subscribe to your email list. The same thing goes for National holidays— you don’t always have to offer a sale or promotion. Sometimes customers will appreciate holiday-themed products, gift guides or just a happy holiday message.

5. Order Confirmations

Order updates, confirmations, and shipping notifications don’t have to be fancy, but they are necessary. They boast open-rates and click-through rates because they contain important information that the customer needs to know. Keep these emails simple and straightforward, but feel free to get a little creative or clever and stay true to your brand identity.

6. Review Requests

Once a customer makes a purchase and received their order, it’s a great idea to send them a review request. What did they think of your brand? Was the product what they hoped it would be? Did shipping go smoothly? Was it an overall positive experience? Knowing this information can help you improve your products and improve your customer experience— a win, win for you both!

7. Cart Abandonment Emails

This is a big one, so we wrote an entire blog about it! An abandoned cart happens when a customer is shopping on your site, adds an item (or items) to their cart, but then does not follow through with the purchase. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but sending an email reminder is the best way to re-engage your customers and finalize the sale. Check out the full blog— Get Inspired! 15 Abandoned Cart Email Designs You’ll LOVE!

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