2013 is nearly here, so I thought it was appropriate to post some email marketing campaign examples for 2013 to inspire marketers worldwide in case they needed some ideas for what type of campaigns to run in the next year.
The trouble with email marketing is that most companies see their corporate newsletters as ‘enough’ email marketing. They don’t think of anything else they could communicate about through email, which is sad: email is an awesome medium for many, many types of communication. Here are a few email marketing campaign examples you could run in 2013 to cater to your audience’s needs.
Email marketing campaign examples No. 1: Inform
Your basic newsletter tells people what’s going on at your company, of course. But are you providing your audience with tips on how to use your product or service? Imagine being a software company, that normally only provides a newsletter with some basic product updates, training dates and other event and company news. Nice, but not helpful in a dedicated way.
Check with the support department what concerns people the most, what they have trouble with accomplishing with your product or are otherwise spending too much time doing: if it can be solved or prevented with a nice article in an email message: by all means, why aren’t you doing it yet?
Creating a dedicated campaign for this type of messages will help differentiate it from the regular newsletter: also, tracking its success (or failure!) will be a bit easier than when you roll it all into one newsletter.
Still, if that’s too much work or you don’t have enough content to fill a tips email, you can put it in your regular newsletter as a tips/help section: my tv/internet provider does this with their regular newsletter, they put in the most asked question at the support desk and include the answer or link to the answer.
Benefits for you as a company include the following:
– Reducing support load
– Being top of mind in the inbox (communicating more)
– Not selling but helping people
– Having people appreciate your product better because they can use it better
The huge advantage of email over social media for example is its stickiness: after a week, a month or a year that email is still there, somewhere in the inbox or correctly archived in a folder or labeled. If it’s useful people will return to it time and time again.
Email marketing campaign examples No. 2: Inspire
Besides just learning how to use your product to the fullest, people need help on -what- to do with your product: how can they use it to the max, to do their work better and be more creative? This is where you can inspire them: give them examples of what other customers (or you yourself!) did with the product to create something wonderful, do a special event or perform a specialized task.
This is different from the how example at No.1 in that the No. 1 example was about how to use something, and this is more about what to do or create with it: it’s about the end result.
Now if you’re a lawnmower company or a finance software company, it might be a bit more difficult to implement an inspirational campaign than for instance, being a company like Adobe. However, even then it’s possible to have people take pride in their work and focus on the end result.
A lawnmower company could present mowing patterns for grassy lawns, and a finance software company could post examples of beautifully crafted reports or a smart setup of a workspace environment to have customers discover new options. The possibilities are endless!
Benefits for you as a company include the following:
– Have customers be more creative with your product
– Getting in touch with customers on how they use your product to the fullest
– Learn as a company how people use (or want to use) your product or services
– Consequentially to benefit 3, improve upon the product with the experience of customers in mind.
A nice example of inspirational email marketing campaigns is the TechSmith newsletter ‘News you can Use’ – even though it’s not a separate email campaign, it’s still helpful and inspirational. You can view their December issue here.
Email marketing campaign examples No. 3: Integrate
Why not integrate your other channels in your email marketing campaigns? With that, I don’t mind the basis Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social network icons below articles for people to share.
I mean dedicated campaigns to promote other channels, with clear benefits for the audience.
For example, in case you have an awesome YouTube channel: how can people know you do? By sending an email when a new video or video series is uploaded. This can tie in with events, where an event video is posted afterwards: you can send out an email then too.
The advantage of using email for promoting other channels (as long as they add something for the customer!) is the same as with example No. 1: email is sticky, so people will come back to those emails when they wonder what you’re doing on the other channels. Be sure they’re active though!
The worst thing I see from certain companies is them promoting their Twitter channel, and when I visit their Twitter profile the last tweet is from 2010. Wait, what? Why are you promoting a dead channel? It’s doing more bad than good. Get it off, and focus on the channels where you -are- active!
Another example is about Twitter actually: contrary to email, Twitter is not sticky at all. A tweet can be ‘old’ when it’s from an hour ago, or from yesterday. However, this is also part of the power of Twitter: directness. For instance, when you are a hosting or internet provider, or your service relies on web servers being online, down time is killing. However, informing your audience through Twitter can at least alleviate some of the worry and uncertainty there.
Benefits for you as a company include the following:
– Promoting other channels, therefor getting more traffic/attention for the content there
– Being able to track where your audience is active besides email
– Have each channel show its power (for instance, Twitter) for specific purposes.
There you go, three email marketing campaign examples for you to implement in 2013, without selling to your audience. Because email marketing does not just have to be about selling. It’s also about people using your product or service to the max and be very happy with it in the long run.
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