Email marketing comes in two flavours: automated sequences that trigger based on customer behaviour, and regular campaigns that you manually create and send to your audience. While automated marketing emails (like welcome sequences and abandoned cart reminders) form the foundation of your email strategy, it’s your regular email campaigns that truly keep the momentum going and drive long-term customer relationships.
While these manual email campaigns might take a bit more time to create than their automated counterparts, they’re absolutely critical to your ongoing growth strategy. Done right, they keep customers engaged, informed, and most importantly, coming back to make more purchases.
The best part? Email remains one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available, which means your return on investment can be exceptionally high. But here’s the thing – for your email campaigns to reach their full potential, you need to take account of several key factors. From timing and subject lines to segmentation and testing, the difference between an email that drives sales and one that gets ignored often comes down to following proven best practices.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll discover:
- Four types of email campaigns that successful businesses use to drive consistent sales
- Ten proven strategies to maximise your email campaign performance
- Real examples from brands like MAC Cosmetics, GoTo, and PandaDoc
- A practical framework for testing and measuring your results
Whether you’re running an ecommerce store or a service-based business, and regardless of where you are in your email marketing journey, these email campaign best practices will help you create emails that get opened, read, and clicked. Let’s dive in.
Understanding Email Marketing Campaign Types (With Real Examples)
In contrast to automated emails that trigger based on customer behaviour, email campaigns are emails you deliberately craft and send to your audience on a regular or semi-regular basis. While they take a bit more time to create than automated emails, they’re a critical part of your ongoing growth strategy. When done right, they keep customers engaged and buying more long after your automated sequences have ended.
Let’s explore the different types of email campaigns you can use to achieve this.
Regular Newsletters: Building Trust Through Content
One of the most common and effective types is the regular newsletter, which you can send daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. The most popular format is what we call a digest: a regular roundup of informative or interesting articles, blogs, or news that provides real value to your readers.
This is where content marketing really comes into play. Content marketing is all about distributing highly valuable, interesting, and entertaining content to build relationships with customers and establish trust over time. That’s exactly what you’re doing with these newsletters. While you can include some promotions, here’s a crucial tip: keep 80% to 90% of your newsletter focused on helpful content.
There are two main approaches to sourcing this content. Look at Goto’s blog newsletter
They lead with a feature article, then follow up with several other pieces they’ve written. It’s all their own content, and it works great for them.
Digital Autopilot takes a different approach:
We combine our self-produced feature content (like a video or written piece) with curated external articles or videos we think our audience will find interesting. This content aggregation approach can be just as effective while requiring less original content creation.
How-to Emails: Education That Sells
Another powerful type of email campaign is what’s sometimes called the how-to email. This format sits perfectly between an informative blog and a promotion. While it’s typically highly designed and product-focused, its primary purpose is educational – teaching your audience how to use your products effectively and solve real problems.
MAC Cosmetics exemplifies this approach. They regularly send out what they call how-to emails that teach their audience step-by-step techniques, like how to cover acne and dark circles. What makes this strategy so effective is that they’re genuinely helping their customers solve real problems while naturally demonstrating their products in action.
GoTo follows a similar strategy, creating content that shows customers how to keep their skin healthy during winter by using their products effectively. These emails work because they lead with value – the educational content – while organically incorporating products into the solution.
Promotional Campaigns: Creating Action Through Urgency
We’ve all experienced promotional emails, and they’re an integral part of any email marketing strategy. These are your holiday promotions, seasonal sales, and time-limited offers. Think summer promotions, winter sales, end-of-year specials, Christmas promotions, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, end of financial year – and the list goes on.
What makes promotional emails effective is that they combine a special offer with time sensitivity, creating that sense of urgency that encourages immediate action.
GoTo demonstrates this perfectly with their Mother’s Day promotion, featuring a special offer on their body bar that’s only available for a limited time.
Product Updates: Building Excitement and Engagement
The final type is what we call the product update or release email. When you’re about to launch a new product or you’ve just updated some features, let your clients know! This is your chance to build some hype around your brand and increase customer engagement.
PandaDoc, a proposal software company, shows how to do this well. Their email alerts customers to the release of their mobile app with a clear call to action to download it. It’s a perfect example of using product news as an opportunity to re-engage your audience.
Finding Your Perfect Mix
You may have noticed that there’s a spectrum here – from pure content like informative blogs on one end, to pure promotion on the other. It’s important to use each of these types of emails in your mix, but you need to get the balance right. While promotions are necessary, be careful not to overdo it. If people feel constantly promoted to, they’ll disengage.
Think of it this way: when you get the mix right, email campaigns become an extremely powerful tool for boosting repeat purchases and increasing customer growth. And since email is essentially free, your return on investment can be exceptionally high.
10 Essential Email Campaign Best Practices for Success
For your email campaigns to reach their full potential, you need to take account of a range of factors. Let’s explore the top 10 email marketing best practices that will make your email campaigns work harder for your business.
1. Timing: When to Send for Maximum Impact
When is the best time to send an email campaign? It’s one of the most common questions in email marketing, and while the answer does depend on your specific audience, we have some solid data to guide us.
Based on 14 different studies, the best days to send emails are typically Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This makes sense when you think about it: Monday is usually the busiest day of the week, with people focusing on their weekly tasks. On Friday, people are trying to wrap up their work week and aren’t keen on leaving things for next week. As for weekends? They’re typically family days, with most people spending their time relaxing rather than reading work-related emails.
Even more specifically, a study that observed response rates of 20 million emails found that Tuesday at 11am is the sweet spot. Why? Mid-morning is usually when people have cleared their initial work tasks and are ready for a tea break – making them more likely to browse emails and check out what you’re offering.
Here’s the thing though: while this data is helpful, you’ll need to test these timing patterns with your specific audience to find your optimal sending time.
2. Subject Lines: Your First Impression
Your subject line is absolutely critical – if it doesn’t entice readers to open the email, even the best content or promotional offer inside won’t matter. You need to get this right.
Our partners at OptinMonster have developed a list of 184 sample subject lines that you can use for inspiration. For a real-world example, look at Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels (a funnel building software). His subject lines tend to be what we’d call “click-baity” – and while this style can be polarizing, it works extremely well for his specific audience. The key is to understand what resonates with your particular market and adjust accordingly.
3. Copy: Bringing Your Brand Voice to Life
The copy in your email needs to consistently reflect your brand personality and voice. We often talk about brand voice in marketing, but email is where the rubber really hits the road. Your email copy needs to embody and express your unique brand personality in a way that connects with readers.
4. Images: Capturing Attention Visually
Your choice of images needs to hit three key marks: they should be optimised for all devices, eye-catching, and relevant to your audience and whatever you’re selling.
Take GoTo’s approach – they use highly designed, engaging images that immediately capture attention. However, depending on your target market, a less designed, more authentic approach might work better. The key is choosing images that will resonate with your specific audience.
5. Call to Action: Making It Clear and Compelling
First and foremost, you need to have one – that’s non-negotiable. But beyond just having a call to action, it needs to lead to a relevant offer and stand out from the rest of your email. Coloured buttons are ideal for this purpose.
Look at Reading Eggs, the kids’ reading platform – they emphasise their call to action with a big blue button that says “hatch now”. It’s clear, compelling, and stands out from the rest of the email content.
6. Mobile Optimisation: A Non-Negotiable Requirement
Here’s a crucial statistic you can’t ignore: 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices. This means your email must be optimised for mobile as well as desktop devices. If your email is hard to read on mobile, people will simply switch off and you’ll lose them. This isn’t just about making your email look good – it’s about ensuring it’s functional and easy to engage with on any device.
7. Segmentation: Breaking Down Your Email List
At its core, segmentation is about breaking up your email list into subcategories that relate to your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences. Here’s the thing to remember: your email subscribers are humans, and you need to relate to them the way you would relate to another person. Sending generic email blasts runs the risk of delivering the wrong content to the wrong people, leading to disengagement.
Each person who signs up for your emails is at a different stage of their customer journey. They may be interested in different products or services. The more you segment your list, the more you can customise your emails. Therefore, the more relevant your emails will be, and the more likely they’ll be to convert into sales.
Email marketing platforms make this easier by allowing you to segment your list by contact data and behaviour. You can break up your list by:
- Geographical location
- Life cycle stage
- Stage of the customer journey
- Industry
- Previous engagement with your brand
- Job title
- Products purchased
Really, there’s no limit to how you can segment your list. Just make sure you’re as exclusive as possible when sending emails to each segment to maximise engagement.
8. Personalisation: Making Emails Feel Personal
Now that you know who you’re emailing and what’s important to them, you can start to really personalise your emails. If you need convincing about the power of personalisation, here’s some data: personalised emails have a 26% higher open rate and an improved click-through rate of 14% compared to personalised emails.
Think about it: you’ve gathered all this unique data, and your email marketing software allows for personalisation. Why not use it to make your target audience feel special? Here are several ways to do it:
- Add a first name field in your subject line or greeting
- Include region-specific information
- Send content relevant to your lead’s life cycle stage
- Write about relevant events like region-specific holidays
- End your emails with a personal signature from a human, not a company
9. Spam Filter Prevention: Getting Past the Gatekeepers
The arch enemy of your heroic email campaigns is the dreaded spam filter. Not only does the spam filter block emails from getting through, but ending up in spam can actually hurt your email deliverability rates across the board.
Here’s how to avoid the spam folder:
- Get whitelisted – encourage new subscribers to add your email address to their address book (include instructions in your welcome email)
- Use careful copy – avoid all caps, multiple exclamation points, and spam trigger words like “opt in,” “click below,” and “order”
- Use a reliable email service provider – their reputation affects your deliverability
- Implement double opt-in – send a confirmation email to verify subscribers want your emails
- Remove inactive subscribers and hard bounces to maintain list hygiene
10. GDPR Compliance: Protecting Your Business and Subscribers
While GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) currently only applies to businesses operating in the European Union and those marketing to EU citizens, it’s being adopted globally. It’s worth creating a GDPR strategy for your business now.
Here are the key compliance tips:
- Use explicit and clear language when requesting consent
- Only collect necessary and relevant contact data
- Store contact data securely and use it only for agreed purposes
- Retain data only for justifiable purposes
- Delete contact data upon request
- Make it easy to unsubscribe or update preferences
- Respond promptly to data access requests
- Keep records to prove compliance
These regulations are being taken seriously worldwide, so it’s worth getting ahead of the curve on this one.
Testing and Optimisation: Making Data-Driven Improvements
By themselves, these best practices aren’t enough – because you can never know for certain what precise combination of strategies will work with your specific target market unless you test and optimise over time. Testing gives you the data you need to make decisions that will ultimately improve your performance.
A/B Testing: The Scientific Approach to Email Marketing
In the digital marketing world, scientifically testing the effectiveness of your email marketing is called A/B testing or split testing, and it’s absolutely critical. The concept is actually quite simple: you create two versions of an email to determine which one statistically performs better. Once you identify the winning version, you optimise your email strategy based on what you learned. This way, you’re learning exactly what engages your audience most, which helps boost conversions and revenue.
Want to see just how powerful testing can be?
Even Barack Obama’s team A/B tested their email subject lines during his 2012 presidential campaign. By sending different subject line variations to small samples of subscribers, they could calculate the expected donation amounts for each version. The worst-performing subject line (“One thing the polls got right”) would have generated around $400,000 in donations. The best performer? “I will be outspent” brought in a total of $2.67 million – that’s an additional $2.2 million raised just by changing the subject line.
Just like Obama’s team, your task is to test each element of your email. But here’s a crucial tip: only test one element at a time. If you test multiple elements simultaneously, you won’t know which change caused the improvement in results.
Measuring Your Results
Effective testing requires a way to measure your results – otherwise, you won’t know which tests performed well. Here are the key email marketing metrics you need to monitor to gauge your email campaign’s effectiveness:
1. Deliverability
This measures the rate at which your emails actually reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes. This is where following those spam prevention best practices becomes crucial.
Measuring email deliverability is important because it tells you the rate at which your emails are actually reaching your intended subscribers’ inboxes. This is a fundamental metric because if emails aren’t being delivered, none of your other email marketing efforts matter – your subscribers won’t see your content or promotions regardless of how good they are.
There are email marketing tools that help you to understand your deliverability. My favourite tool is Mail-Tester (mail-tester.com) as it’s easy to use and shows you exactly where your email is running into problems. Just send an email to the unique test address they provide, and they’ll give you a detailed report showing:
- The rate at which emails reach inboxes vs. getting blocked
- Whether emails are landing in spam folders
- Hard bounces (emails that permanently cannot be delivered)
- Your spam score and specific issues affecting deliverability
- Specific recommendations to improve your deliverability
This kind of monitoring helps you quickly identify if you’re having deliverability problems that need to be addressed, as deliverability issues can cascade and hurt your overall email marketing performance across all campaigns.
2. Open Rate
This tells you how many emails were opened out of the total number delivered. Your open rate depends on several factors:
- Whether you include the sender’s name
- How you personalise the email
- Your subject line
- The pre-header text
- The day and time you sent it
- Your from name
If you have bad open rates (but good deliverability), you might need to work on your headlines, or you might have an old and unresponsive list. Send your campaign to your own email and look out for possible reasons why you’re getting low open rates and then a/b test possible improvements. It’s also good practice to regularly clean your email lists – eg. if someone hasn’t opened an email in over a year, and has never purchased anything from you, remove them.
3. Click-through Rate
This measures how many people clicked on your call-to-action buttons or links. A high click-through rate suggests your content is relevant and valuable for your audience and you have a list of engaged subscribers. Focus on:
- Ensuring your content offers value to your segmented list
- Testing different calls-to-action to find what works best
4. Conversions
This measures whether readers take action after clicking – like making purchases or signing up for lead magnets. At the end of the day, this is what it’s all about – turning email engagement into actual business results. If your email marketing campaigns aren’t delivering any business results, it might be time to rethink your strategy. Maybe you need to run more promotions, or more enticing promotions. Or maybe you need to be directing subscribers to a dedicated landing page specific to the email campaign you are running vs sending them to the homepage or a generic category page.
5. Unsubscribes
These are the people choosing to leave your mailing list. If this number gets too high, you need to reconsider your approach:
- Is your email aligned with your brand?
- Are you delivering enough value?
- Are you focusing too much on selling?
- Am you sending too many emails?
A high unsubscribe rate is a sign that the emails you are sending are not relevant to your subscribers. If you have a store that sells a lot of different products, then you need to segment your email list by product or service type and then send specific emails to those segments. Eg. Someone interested in a gardening product, should only be sent emails related to gardening.
6. Spam Complaints
If your emails are being marked as spam, it suggests they’re either unwanted or unexpected. It’s an even stronger sign that your emails are not relevant to your audience and/or you’re being too aggressive with your email strategy. You’ll need to address this quickly to avoid damaging your email sender reputation. Make sure you have an easy to find unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email as nothing will make people want to mark your emails as spam faster than making it hard to unsubscribe.
It’s worth reviewing these metrics on a regular basis to help evaluate the success of your tests and optimise for future campaigns. What I’ve found with many of our clients, as well as our own business, is that when you take this sort of testing, measurement and optimisation seriously, you’ll see your engagement and ultimately your sales increase in the process.
Next Steps for Implementation
Now that you understand both the best practices and how to test them, here’s what you need to do next:
- Use our email campaign planner to create your schedule of emails, including topics, subject lines, and sending times
- Note down which elements you’ll be A/B testing in each campaign
- Track your email results (open rates, click-through rates, conversions, etc.) so you have the data needed to continually optimise your campaigns and boost your sales
Remember, the key to success is consistent testing and optimisation. Start with these metrics as your baseline, and keep refining your approach based on what the data tells you about your specific audience.
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Need help getting started?
Running effective email campaigns that actually drive results can be difficult to get right. You know the potential impact on your business, but nailing all the different elements – from email design and crafting the perfect promotion, to timing, segmentation, and tracking – takes time and expertise.
That’s where Digital Autopilot comes in. Our team of email marketing experts has helped hundreds of businesses just like yours implement successful retention strategies that drive real results.
Start With a Free Strategy Session
Book a free 30-minute strategy session with one of our strategy experts. We’ll:
- Review your current retention metrics
- Identify key opportunities for improvement
- Provide actionable recommendations for your business
- Explain how we can help implement these strategies for you
Don’t leave money on the table by neglecting your email list.
