Welcome back. In this article, we are going to break down the three different categories of email that we just talked about in the previous article “The 3 Types of Marketing Emails. Most Important One?”. Now, remember, that’s promotional, relational, and transactional.
we’re going to break down each of those emails and identify the primary goal, but we’re also going to talk about some of the secondary benefits that each email type can have in your business. So obviously with transactional emails, the primary goal of a transactional email is customer service is delivering the thing at which the customer requested, whether it’s an order confirmation, an invoice, or a shipping confirmation, if you break down the reason for these emails, to happen to occur, it would be customer service.
Now, relational emails, their a primary goal to increase engagement and nurture your subscriber base and promotional emails. Well, obviously the primary goal of a promotional email is to generate sales upsells or cross-sells, and that’s it, right? It’s that simple.
Well, no, thankfully it’s not. This is one case where complexity is actually a good thing.
The Primary Goals of Transactional Emails
Brand Awareness
Transactional emails also increase brand awareness. if you strictly put the correct social sharing on your transactional emails, it’ll allow people to connect with your brand outside of the channel that they’ve already connected with email.
You may realize that only a very small percentage of your email list is connecting with you via other channels like social media. So, transactional emails are great places to gobble up additional percentages of these channels with your subscriber base so that you’re not just talking to them in one place, but you’re actually communicating and engaging with your subscriber base on the different channels that they’re already engaging with, without you.
Lead Generation
lead generation done correctly; transactional emails could ask for a referral. Now, if you ask for a referral in your, uh, in your transactional email, there’s probably a good chance as long as that transaction was successful and you know, a, a quality transaction for your customer, there’s a very good chance that right then as your customer is the most excited about you and your brand and whatever it is that they just acquired, that they’ll forward that along and share it with their social network or a specific friend and say, Hey! I just did this. You should too. It’s a great way to generate leads and brand awareness.
Loyalty and Retention
loyalty and retention, right? Again, sending these transactional emails, uh, will follow through with loyalty and retention of your active customers, with your business engagement and nurturing, you can link over to your best content.
Sales and Upsells
Sales and upsells, right there are brands out there now like Southwest that do a fantastic job. If you book a flight, their initial confirmation email and their reminder emails are not only there to be informational, to be beneficial, and relational, but to also get you to go from just booking a flight to booking a flight, reserving your rental car, and potentially your hotel all through Southwest, this is not at all a new concept.
What we have done is internet retailers, online sellers or publishers is we’ve gotten away from traditional retail strategies, and you need to look at what the big brands are doing and figure out how you can do that in your business.
And focusing on the transactional emails is a great way to pick up a lot of scraps, uh, from a revenue standpoint that you and your brand are probably leaving on the table.
The Primary Goals of Relational Emails
Brand Awareness
Relational emails, again engagement, and nurturing is the primary goal, but brand awareness is a huge secondary benefit of sending out relational emails, especially if it’s free ungated content.
Free ungated content in relational emails, gets the highest number of social shares. if you’re doing a great job, if you’re not only sending out consistent relational emails to your list, but they’re of real value in something that your subscribers are actually interested in, this is a great way to expand your brand awareness through micro pockets of authority and influence that your subscribers have with their followers, with their friends and family. So, relational emails are great at increasing brand awareness.
Lead Generation
for the same reason. They’re also great at lead generation. They’re fantastic lead generation, the campaigns, because you are sending out free stuff, your free stuff should lead into a campaign to make a sale to make that initial point in the customer journey after someone has become aware to where now they’re subscriber.
So, focusing on how you can add additional sharing and lead capture elements to your relational emails is another way to pick up a lot of crumbs left on the table.
Retention and Loyalty
retention and loyalty. This is pretty self-explanatory. If you are sending content to the people who are your best buyers if you’re adding value to their lives in exchange for nothing, then they’re going to continue to buy from you, right? I don’t think we need to go into that at all.
Sales and Upsells
You can use content to generate sales and upsells and cross-sells. So, you can see these are really starting to stack up while the initial goal for an email is so cut and dry.
The primary goals of Promotional Emails
Lead Generation
Let’s take a look at promotional emails. Promotional emails can absolutely be used for lead generation just by adding some tweaks. Adding the social shares, right? Social sharing icons into your promotional emails, but also leveraging promotional emails to do paid email drops, right? Paid email drops to other people’s lists.
Loyalty and Retention
People purchasing more of your products will take them on that customer journey from a single buyer to multi-buyer, and that gets them moving down the path to becoming, uh, a brand ambassador, to becoming a promoter. And that increases loyalty.
I’ll tell you if you can get someone to promote your brand and whoever they promote it to has a positive experience, that is one of the single most important things you can do, uh, to get that person to be loyal to you forever. It’s very difficult to recommend something, whether it’s a brand or a service, or a product to your friend. Have your friend engage with that, and have a good experience. You also continue to have good experiences, and then you leave. You have now referred someone, right? You’re now somewhat vested in that, and their reputation is somewhat tied to yours. So if you can promote, if you can get people to continue to purchase and engage with your brand, transactionally and promotionally, then you’re moving them down that customer journey much faster.
Engagement and Nurturing
Engagement happens when we’re entering that value loop. I’m sending your email, sending you emails, whether they’re relational or promotional, they’re valuable to you. So you’re opening the emails, you’re clicking the links, you are buying whatever I’m telling you to buy, and it’s giving you equal or higher value than what I’m asking for in return.
Out of all of these, the one that you will see that hits every single box is transactional. So again, hopefully, after the previous article, you paused and took my advice and wrote down, every time your company is sending out a transactional email, every touchpoint that’s happened in transactional and relation relational emails.
Now the next thing that I’ll ask you to do is write down what you’re asking someone to do outside of just being informative. Are you asking them to follow you on social media? Are you asking them to refer a friend to you? What are you doing? And what are the ideas of things that you think you could be doing to maximize these categories of email? I promise you, if you optimize these, you’ll see an instant boost in sales generated from this platform, and you’ll have to do almost nothing differently.
Nothing. It could literally be as easy as writing two to three emails or two to three lines or sentences to increase and have a dramatic effect of the growth of your social properties the number of referrals your business is getting from other clients and leads and the sales that you’re making.
We’ve talked about these three different categories of email marketing in the previous article. We’ve talked about their benefit of them, and we’ll break down great examples in some other articles.
But when should you send each type of email? and who should you send them to? because we’ve talked about a lot of emails.
In the next article, we’ll cover the two different send types and exactly when you should use them in your business. I’ll see you in the next article.
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