Over the past 18 months, I’ve managed close to a million email sends specific to the screen printing industry. Despite some popular new age belief, email is still the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers (VentureBeat). According to a study by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing yields an average 4,300% Return On Investment for businesses in the United States.
“Sounds great!” you say, “I’m signing up for MailChimp now and will start blasting all my customers right away!” …slow your roll there, Sparky. First and foremost is understanding what types of emails you should be sending, and outlining a specific strategy behind each one. So let’s cover the 3 types of emails your company should be utilizing, in the order of importance for each.
1. TRANSACTIONAL
Transactional emails are the emails you usually expect to get after a purchase with your receipt, a shipping confirmation, creating an account, password resetting, support tickets. These are all emails you typically expect whatever system you’re using to handle automatically, and most do – but are you customizing them to maximize their potential? The average revenue per transactional email is 2-5x higher than a standard bulk email (Experian Benchmark Report). Although the primary message in transactional emails should be strictly information exchange, it doesn’t hurt to sneak a secondary marketing message in there to re-engage your customers with additional “exclusive” types of offers.
2. RELATIONAL
These emails generally follow through on a promise that you have made to your subscriber such as an eBook delivery, weekly newsletter, subscriber confirmations, exclusive promotions, discount codes, etc. This is an email that keeps you front of mind with your customers and helps them progress through their Customer Journey to become engaged and excited about your brand with the ultimate goal of making them a repeat customer and potentially an advocate for your brand. The rule of thumb I try to follow with relational emails is GIVE FREE VALUE. Whether it’s a tutorial video showing how to overcome a common problem or a blog post outlining email marketing 
3. PROMOTIONAL
This is often the type of email most people think about when they hear the term “Email Marketing.” This can be a broad range of content from special sale announcements to new product releases, case studies, and special gated content. These are the emails that really T up a sale (no pun intended), but will generally have lower open and click-through rates due to the “salesy” feeling they typically give off (eg: That company that has a sale for 40% off every other week).
Remember, email is not the end all be all marketing communication channel, but it’s a huge player in the game as 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a direct result of an email marketing message (Direct Marketing Association). Companies using email to nurture their leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost (Hubspot).