If you run a digital business, you will likely not talk to all of your customers and prospects in person. That’s why 81% of businesses rely on emails to get new customers, and 80% use emails to retain customers. But if you’re a growing business with thousands of clients to interact with, sending emails can be a pretty daunting task if you do it manually.
This is where email automation comes into play.
When you set your marketing emails to be auto-sent via pre-defined rules or sequences, the marketing automation platform takes care of the work for you.
Simply put, email marketers use automation to send out targeted marketing campaigns to different segments of their audience.
This blog will talk about 18 different types of automated emails (with examples).
Implement at least a couple of these examples in your campaigns, and you will improve your customer experience and email engagement metrics.
Let’s get on with it!
We’ve compiled 18 automated email examples you can use in your business in 2022. So let’s get straight to it.
Quick note: Don’t take these emails as the ONLY email marketing emails that you can send. In fact, you can check more examples and templates of automated emails here.
Contents
1. Welcome emails
Welcome emails are the messages you send to every new person in your email audience. They’re meant to serve as a warm greeting — like how you serve tea or coffee to people who come over and visit your house.
Welcome emails are your first “real” engagement with prospects turned subscribers ― they carry your tone, too! So when introducing your brand, you have to make a great first impression. Make it educational yet fun (if this reflects your brand).
How important are welcome emails?
Here is an important stat: the average open rate of a welcome email is 4 times higher than regular emails, making them 86% more effective. So make your automated welcome emails extra — put your most important message in there. Make your new subscribers feel excited about being on your list.
Here’s an excellent welcome email from VeryGoodCopy that nailed it.
This email sets their expectations. Plus, it elicits a response from every subscriber. This makes that first interaction even more personal.
So, what info should you include in the welcome email?
- Invitation to your social communities (like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, etc.)
- The benefit they will get from using your product/service (keep them thrilled!)
- Incentives/offers as a token of appreciation
- Quick instructions to making sure that your future emails land in their Inbox
Quick tip: Send it as soon as users sign up, and don’t forget to add a clear CTA button that stands out.
2. Onboarding emails
Do you consider welcoming your new buyers already enough, thinking to yourself, “My job’s done here”?
Nope, you shouldn’t do that.
After your welcome email, onboarding emails are critical since they keep the attention of people who signed up for your app, coaching program, or course.
You already have their interest. Your next move is to further sway them into the sales funnel.
In these automated email campaigns, you get into more detail about what they should do next, how to do it, and what else they are learning or gaining from you.
For example, you can show them what they need to do after signing as an affiliate in your affiliate program.
Or share videos to help them understand how to get the most of your product or service…
Send these emails as part of the drip campaigns triggered at the beginning of the customer journey.
How important are onboarding emails?
According to Wyzowl, 63% of customers consider the company’s onboarding program when making a purchasing decision. Onboarding emails play a massive part in converting new prospects to paying subscribers.
Show the best parts of your service, product, program, or app in these emails.
3. Lead nurturing emails
Lead nurturing emails move users through the customer journey — usually as a part of the awareness or consideration stage.
Based on their behaviors, you can target the right demographic. Send them content that will sway them to sign up to your app, attend a webinar, download a case study — whatever the next required actions for them are.
Lead nurturing emails are pretty similar to onboarding emails. The difference is that lead nurturing is targeted at people who are on top of your funnel. Onboarding emails are sent to people who have already opted into something you have offered (like a free trial, for instance.)
How important are lead nurturing emails?
Leads may never turn into customers if you fail to nurture them. If you’ve spent a lot of ads budget in acquiring those leads, now that would be a terrible loss of money.
51% of email marketers say lead segmentation is the most effective way to personalize lead nurturing. Plus, marketing data shows that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
4. Event emails
Event emails and seasonal newsletters are special campaign emails usually centered around popular holidays. They’re typically one-off email campaigns or sequences that are designed to rake in more sales.
Are we only talking about Christmas?
Of course, but that’s not the only time you can send event emails.
Seasonal emails could be occasion emails celebrating days like Black Friday, World Mental Health Day, or even Bitcoin Pizza Day.
You can even organize made-up events that only your company celebrates (could be your anniversary or a special milestone). Send this email and make your customers feel part of the celebration.
Here are the most common world holidays that you can plan around:
- Christmas and New Year’s Eve
- Easter
- Halloween
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- Movember
- World Mental Health Day
- Valentine’s Day
- Father’s day
- Mother’s day
- Country specific holidays like Independence Day and Thanksgiving in the US
- And even non-traditional holidays inspired by popular culture and media like Star Wars day (May 4th).
How important are holiday emails?
Special holidays are a whole lot of fun. And you probably already know that a good mood means more reasons for spending.
If we talk about Christmas and New Year’s Eve, you want to prepare your campaigns at least a couple of months in advance.
The same tip applies to other holidays as well. If you aim at launching a Black Friday campaign, do not leave it for the last week of November — schedule your email campaign at the beginning of the month and start building up the anticipation.
5. Birthday or anniversary emails
How much do you know your existing customers?
It’s a great practice to collect their birthdays when you onboard them. This way, you can give them exclusive promos on their birthday. It’s a good excuse for some self-love splurge!
Keep a record of when they signed up or first made a purchase. So year after year, you have a good reason to offer them an exclusive discount.
How important are birthday and annual emails?
These occasions are but another good reason to spend some money with your brand. After all, it’s a special occasion to treat oneself.
You’ll not only get more purchases but build stronger relationships with your customers by showing that you care about them. After all, you paid extra attention to remembering such an important day!
Sending birthday emails and recurring annual emails in Encharge is extremely easy using the Birthday/Annual trigger. As long as you collect their birthday date, you can use that date field to trigger an email on that exact date.
6. Request for feedback emails
Feedback emails are often underrated because they don’t yield direct conversions.
But they are a gold mine of customer information that reveals what your clients value about your brand, as well as critical information on what needs improving.
Also, feedback emails can be a great source of *shiny* testimonials to display on your website.
How important are feedback request emails?
You want to make the overall customer experience with your brand unforgettable. How to achieve this? Just ask. You’ll get honest thoughts from loyal customers.
7. Re-engagement emails
Have you noticed that email opens decrease further along in your email campaigns? That’s normal.
You know how you’re all excited when you buy a new phone, but after a while, you don’t care that much as you scratch the phone here and there.
The same is true for people on your email list. They are most engaged initially, but soon things get in the way, and they forget to open your emails.
You’ll always have subscribers who won’t engage anymore. And that’s the goal of re-engagement emails: to win people back.
In this example, the company is trying to engage their inactive subscribers by asking questions and inviting them to a demo.
How important are re-engagement emails?
Aside from squeezing more juice from your list and scoring more sales, re-engagement emails help you keep your list healthy.
Email deliverability decreases when you continuously send emails to inactive subscribers. When your emails have low engagement, email service providers pick it up, affecting your email performance. A re-engagement email can help you convert passive subscribers.
8. Cart abandonment emails
Marketers in eCommerce know that there’s a big opportunity to earn back lost sales using the cart abandonment email.
You send this email to customers who added products to the cart but did not complete the checkout.
Mini-Farm makes the customer feel at ease and hyping them up to buy at the same time. Look:
How important are cart abandonment emails?
If we’re talking about revenue, cart abandonment emails can reduce the loss in sales. But aside from its ROI benefit, this type of email is another chance to express your brand and tone in your marketing efforts and demonstrate personalized email communication.
9. Reward emails
Who doesn’t want a pat on the back from time to time? Marketers understand this human need, and that’s why they use reward emails.
Reward emails are virtual kudos you send whenever your users achieve their goals, no matter how tiny they are. They are targeted campaigns that recognize your active customers.
Fabulous, a self-improvement app, does a great job at this. They send their congrats and gamify the progress with badges.
How important are reward emails?
Rewarding people is all about getting them to become repeat customers. Emails like this fire up Dopamine, the body’s “happy hormone.”
Reward emails entice people to achieve the next milestone in their customer journey, which triggers the whole feedback loop as they get more and more from your product. Now you have someone closer to becoming a loyal, paying client.
But take note, and only use reward emails that move a user into activation — you don’t want to send reward emails for every single thing that happens in your app.
10. Nudge/reminder emails
Opposite of the reward emails, reminder emails are the emails that “nudge” users to take action when they haven’t met critical goals.
Nudge emails poke inactive users to continue to signup, use a feature, or upgrade.
How important are reminder emails?
These emails, when done right, allow you to be politely persistent with getting users to convert. They enable you to send follow-up messages to reiterate your USPs, present your product in a different perspective, and keep your users engaged in general.
11. Product recommendations
You can use well-timed, relevant product recommendations to influence potential customers. This is effective since you’re making tailored-fit suggestions to your customers.
Here’s a good example from a local bank. They put out other relevant services that the client is qualified to get based on the credit score.
How important are product recommendation emails?
Recommendations in emails are known to increase click-through-rate by 330%. That should be enough to consider implementing them in your marketing automation strategy.
12. Customer survey emails
Like feedback emails, surveys aim to gather the opinion of your customer base. They are more effective if short and straight to the point, like this email.
No hassle for the users, as they can respond to this email with a single number.
Another approach is to use links and ask users to click on the answer.
How important are customer survey emails?
It’s essential to your business growth to listen to your user’s honest opinions and concerns. It’s vital to your business growth to listen to your user’s honest opinions and concerns. The best part is that marketing automation tools like Encharge can segment those answers and create audiences that target specific respondents.
13. NPS score email
Net Promoter Score (NPS) emails are more like a simple answer to “How likely are you to recommend us to others?”. They can measure your user’s loyalty if they are satisfied with their experience with your brand.
Please note that NPS differs by industry. If you want to compare your score to other companies, only correlate with those in your field.
How important are NPS emails?
NPS emails can serve as guides for marketing, sales, and product development. You can apply the insights you’ll gain to create campaigns that emphasize relevant value propositions to customers.
14. Upsell/down-sell emails
First, let’s define the difference between the two terms:
Upselling is a marketing technique that aims to make a customer purchase higher-priced items or services.
A down-sell is the inverse of an up-sell. The customer may not want the product you wish to sell, so you suggest a cheaper alternative.
How important are upsell and down-sell emails?
Upselling brings up the sales. But down selling is also a profitable technique for customers who cannot afford premium products. Instead, you can pitch your lower-priced packages, and it still gets you a new customer.
15. User activity emails
Say you already have lots of data about your users’ activity. What now?
You can use that data to create better automated campaigns. Here’s an effective weekly user activity email from Ubersuggest.
Activity emails keep your users in the loop and allow them to see the ROI with your product by gaining deeper insight into their progress.
Marketing automation platforms like Encharge allow you to connect your app activity using an API or native Segment integration.
How important are user activity emails?
It’s a universal fact that people are most interested in themselves, so personalized reports are quite compelling to open. You can expect a higher open rate with this type of emails.
16. Scheduled newsletters
You can send automated newsletter emails that round up the highlights of the week or month in your business.
Like this one.
Your newsletters can include information about:
- Events
- Announcements
- Blog posts
- Guides
How important are newsletters?
Newsletters are your regular emails that drive traffic to different parts of your websites. They are an essential part of your email marketing strategy as they keep your leads and customers up to date and nurture them with consistent communication.
17. Promotional emails
Promotional emails with marketing offers are meant to drive purchases and conversions pronto.
Apart from discounts, you can spice them up with one-time special coupons and gifts.
How important are promotional emails?
Promotional emails are an excellent way to advertise your products and services to everyone in your audience who didn’t buy from you or was on the fence about making a purchase.
18. Transactional emails
Transactional emails are emails sent when a user takes a specific action like signing up for your product, purchasing an item, or even changing your password.
Here are some popular examples:
Invoice-receipt Emails
Here’s a delivery receipt from Lalamove, a courier service company, as soon as the recipient has received the goods.
Support ticket emails
This one’s from Intercom after you reach out to them via their chatbots. The reply will also be delivered to your inbox.
Registration confirmation emails
Eventbrite sends this event confirmation email on behalf of the hosting company, CodeOp. This email is sent to attendees as soon as they register for a free online class.
Password change emails
How important are transactional emails?
Since these emails contain information about money, private details, or personal changes, these emails are not just important but crucial for the overall operations of many digital businesses. When selecting a marketing automation tool, make sure that it supports transactional emails.
Bonus: 8 quick tips to implement these automated email examples
To make sure you don’t miss anything when you start automating your email campaigns, here are some of the best practices to follow.
- Make a plan for your automated workflows.
- Personalize the user experience as much as possible.
- Segment your email audience.
- Learn how to craft effective email copy.
- Practice A/B testing of subject lines.
- Send emails at optimal times.
- Make sure you’re measuring your campaign performance.
- Implement a marketing automation platform.
If you need marketing automation that can propel your email marketing strategy, try out Encharge for free.
