Dec 10, 2015 By Matthew Hutchinson

Put Yourself to the Test—Have You Mastered the Five Basic Types of Email?

in Marketing, Marketing Cloud

Throughout the lifecycle, there are countless opportunities to engage prospects and customers with email. But before tackling all of the possibilities, there are five fundamental types of email every marketer must master. They are: Welcome Emails, Promotional Emails, Event Registration Emails, Transactional Emails, and Cart Abandonment Emails.

In our recently published "5 Blueprints for Building Smarter Emails," we identified the key elements that marketers must consider for each email type--and provided practical tips for improving performance. Now, we’re going beyond the basics with "The Email Workbook," an interactive, step-by-step guide to help you evaluate your existing email programs and identify actions you can take to deliver higher impact email campaigns.

Let’s start by taking a look at some of the core concepts you’ll find in the workbook.

Evaluate Best Practices

The assessment starts by enabling you to compare your existing processes with best practices. This helps to identify simple steps you can take to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your email program. For example, take a look at your existing data and see when subscribers are opening your email, and test sending email at that time to see if that increases response rates. Another quick win is automating welcome series and onboarding email campaigns. Basically, any routine email series can be automated, allowing you more time to test and optimize your sends.

Analyze Your Data

Next, the workbook enables you to analyze the personal data you possess about your subscribers. This helps to identify data that can be leveraged to create more engaging emails (beyond addressing your subscribers in the subject line!). Consider your individual account information. What is their loyalty status, what did they last purchase, or what is their account balance? By understanding the breadth of your data, you will undoubtedly identify opportunities to create more personalized email content.

Target Key Audiences

Now you can take a look at all of the different segments or categories of your audience. First, consider your subscribers’ demographic buckets. For example, male versus female, married versus single, and age data. Also, what is the geographic make up of your audience, both by location and by environment? In addition, take a look at the preferences that customers have identified about themselves.

Once you have segmented different groups, you can begin to target each audience with content specifically relevant to them, which will drive engagement. And with dynamic content, you can send the same email that includes customized content for each specific audience based on the rules you as the email marketer establish. With segmentation and dynamic content, you can easily create several dozen versions of the same email, delivering relevant content to your entire list.

Leverage Behavioral Data

Lastly, take a look at what data users provide about themselves. With each online and offline action, prospects and customers are telling you about their interests. You have a lot of behavioral data that you can leverage, and with machine learning, Predictive Intelligence can provide the ultimate in personal communication. Each email message becomes a 1-to-1 communication, built just for that subscriber. But fortunately, you only have to create one email and the data and technology do the rest.