5 Examples of Excellent Email Marketing Campaigns

Today, I bring you a guest post from
 Jaime Brugueras.

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Online marketers, business people and SEO experts like to kick around ideas just to get a rise out of people sometimes. A popular claim that get readers stirred up is that “email marketing is dead.”

This really riles other marketers’ feathers and attracts a lot of negative attention, largely because it just isn’t true! Email marketing is still a growing, valuable resource when you know how to use it.

Here are some examples from around the internet of email marketing simply done right. As you develop your email marketing strategies, borrow ideas from these stellar campaigns to ensure that your content is valuable, enticing, and worth reading.

ModCloth Takes Advantage of User Data to Individualize Email Messages

ModCloth, a popular clothing and accessory shop that specializes in unique items, uses all sorts of customer information to highly customize their email marketing campaigns. Since they are a direct online retailer, wishlist and shopping cart-based email campaigns are a major part of their strategies.

When a registered visitor starts to build a wishlist of items they would like to purchase, ModCloth sends individual emails notifying the visitor that one of their wishlist items is going on sale.

One of their greatest uses for user data is the way they implement user-generated content into email campaigns. Not only do they take user data from their own comments and feedback sections on-site, they pull tweets and Facebook status updates about the site and their products into their promotional content.

Social proof is an important marketing asset online retailers need to capitalize on, and ModCloth has perfected the art of finding user-generated content that compliments their brand and putting it to work for their sales.

Remind Your Email Recipients: Who Are You Again?

One hard fact about email marketing is forgotten or ignored all too often: a lot of times, your subscribers won’t remember where they signed up for your messages, or why. If you remind them how you got into their inbox, you’ll be sure to retain more subscribers, because they will appreciate your attention to detail.

Zizinya Web Solutions does exactly that in this email campaign. When they contact you again after you’ve visited them, the action you initially took to get on their mailing list is mentioned before everything else.

There are a handful of great ideas in this single message. First, “first name” would be your own first name. If you give them this information, they’ll customize their emails with a direct address to you.

Second, the reminder text. They explicitly state that they are contacting you because of an action you performed on their website, and even have an additional call to action to re-engage with the company to discuss the effectiveness of your downloaded ebook.

Third, the next offer is not the call to action to contact the business, but an offer for another free ebook.

In this single email, they have provided individual customization, context for their email message to you, and a related offer for another free product that is immediately relevant to your previous interaction with their business.

LinkedIn Provides Valuable Content With Each Email Blast

LinkedIn offers special account plans where users can pay monthly or yearly for advanced features they wouldn’t get as a free member. Here’s an example of their email remarketing message for one of these paid account plans.

The recipient has already purchased this account bonus before, so they know exactly why they’re getting this mail. The sale proposal is quick, and then transitions into valuable information about the benefits of redeeming the offer. The redemption button is the most prominent feature of the message.

LinkedIn also sends customized email newsletters that are deceivingly simple. User information pulled from their account is applied to a news aggregator, and it compiles a list of news stories written on LinkedIn and around the web.

The headline article is always something produced by a LinkedIn, however: the topmost link sends readers directly back into LinkedIn’s website, and the “trending” labels at the bottom establish authority.

Clearly there are plenty of ways you can use the information your website makes available to you as part of an intricate, highly individualized targeted email campaign. Take ideas from these email marketing strategies and find new ways to turn your email marketing blasts into conversion machines.

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Jaime Brugueras is a 10-year veteran in marketing analytics and the co-founder of Mineful, an automated email marketing software for online retailers. You can find Jaime on Google+ and Twitter.

Image credit:
 smilla4