14 Examples to Inspire Your Next Great Email Marketing Campaign

A holiday sales funnel will maximize the power of scarcity as you present special offers to your list. It’s one you can mix up and turn into a promotion that is based any of the hundreds of holidays that exist. In the simplest form, when things are scarce, we want them. People will be incredibly motivated to act by the thought that they might lose out on something.

Many try to take advantage of tax holiday season, most often leveraging scarcity to create a sense of urgency, but this email from ConversionXL does it better than the most. In it, they let their readers (“entrepreneurs and tax-savvy employees”) know their courses are eligible as a tax write-off.

The email is lengthy, but with a numbered list highlighting the top benefits for the reader it becomes easy to scan. You can build secondary reading paths with highlights and formatting, that way your busiest readers get the main idea of the email without having to deep dive. This is even more important for longer form emails.

Personalized email campaigns make your subscribers feel that your email was typed out and sent exclusively to them. Plus, there is plenty of evidence that says personalizing your email content results in a much higher engagement rate (one study from Campaign Monitor found by as much as 56%!).

Specific content will resonate for certain segments of your email subscribers subscribers so the easiest way to make this successful is to segment your email lists based on their different interests, pain points, or their current stage in your funnel.

What makes this email from Email Copy Boss so great, is it feels like your getting the motivational, end of year pep talk you need. But what makes it feel extra special?

They’ve personalized the email in an unique way that effectively establishes a personal connection with each and every email subscribers.

Additionally, this email shows that not every email you send needs to be about selling. Every email you send needs to focus on connecting and building some sort of relationship with your subscribers.

This is a very engaging email that takes a two cliche ideas (working in PJs & Starving writer) and uses them to connect with the reader’s actual goals of creating a steady income from freelance writing.

This use of cliches creates a theme. Themed emails are a lot easier to read because they are way more entertaining than official, dry emails.

This email is also a great example on how to write like you are talking with a friend. Which is a great way to be persuasive. Note the use of slang like “kidlings” and “dollahs”.

Creating a unique voice for your brand is crucial and Copy Hackers has developed and maintained an effective casual tone.

The PAS formula is an underutilized email copywriting trick that almost instantly increases your email click-through rate.  What is the PAS formula? Consider it the framework for structuring copy that when applied correctly will make it painless to write the words that compels emails subscribers to take action.

The PAS Formula:

1. ​Identify your customer’s problem and state it
2. ​Help the reader understand how the problem relates to something they care about
3. ​Provide the solution to their problem

This email from Unbounce uses the PAS formula exceptionally well. Highlighting your customers’ pain points is a great way to increase your email click rate. Just make sure you have the solution to help solve those pain points!

Consumers these days are always looking for a reason to say no, especially when some level of risk is involved. When understanding your audience, make note to include counters to the most common objections they might have.

FAQ emails can be a great way to squash any objections while keeping your leads engaged. These email marketing campaigns are an important tool in any sales funnel your business builds.

This email example from Peter Sandeen perfectly demonstrates how to address readers’ most common objections in an email.

Cleaning your email list is critical if you want to improve your email marketing campaigns. Removing bad emails and disengaged subscribers will keep you sending content to people who want your emails. But before you toss out the disengaged email subscribers, run a re-engagement campaign to get the most out of your hard-earned leads.

Here at Performance Marketer, we maximize the value of our unengaged leads by running them through our Holiday Funnel and presenting them with special offers.

This email example from Meet Edgar attempts to engage their leads by inviting them to check out the latest product updates.

​Retargeting marketing is a powerful strategy that taps into the biggest pool of potential customers: cart abandoners. With an average abandoned cart rate of 69.23% the potential to reach users with retargeted content is too big to ignore.

Shopify recommends sending an abandonment email to send within 24 hours of the customer visiting your site. Then follow-up with a second email within two days, and a final email within one week.

UrbanStems has crafted a beautiful email to send those who abandoned their cart. With imagery and a message, “It’s not too late to make someone’s day,” they’re reminding visitors why they were originally interested in their product.

Way back in 1898, American advertising executive E. St. Elmo Lewis was the first to explain, in detail the stages of every successful sales funnel. He found that salespeople tended to walk prospects through four distinct emotional stages until they converted into customers. Those four stages are awareness, interest, desire, action.

This email from Customer IO shows that you can craft a powerful message in few words using the AIDA format.  It focuses on the desire of winning back customers by using the analogy of the classic ‘pulling a rabbit from a hat’ trick creating an email that is useful and entertaining.

Social proof is an important part of selling, especially early in your customer’s journey. With the right social proof you can easily build an incredible amount of trust with your future customers.

Every time you make a benefit claim in your emails, you build up a bit of doubt in the reader’s mind. It’s best to follow up the largest claim with a powerful piece of social proof.

This email crafted by Drip from Leadpages is a classic social proof email. Even their email subject line is flaunting social proof with a snippet of a powerful customer testimonial.

Smartly so, since email subject lines ​35% of subscribers open emails based on the subject line alone. To further the strength of their glowing reviews, Drip could add pictures of their customers or screenshots of the feedback.

From short and sweet, to long stories, the length of your emails will depend heavily on your business and preference of your subscribers. If your open rates are good, but no one is clicking, it probably means you need to change the layout and style of your emails.

Noah Kagan has some of the shortest emails we’ve ever seen. It’s an art how he keeps his messages easy to digest, concise, and valuable. And it’s what works for him.

On the other hand, longer emails are perfect to entertain and share personal stories with your email subscribers. When stories are used to convey information, retention jumps to 65% to 70%. Which is how personal stories can build the trust and connections you need to convert your leads into loyal customers.

3 Stories to Share with Your Subscribers: 

The key is to using the right story at the right moment to bring out the right feeling that will drive your audience to convert. Take Ramit Sethi, for example. He’s an ace when it comes to storytelling, and this email below is a prime example of writing that demands your click, while still being very entertaining.

More and more is it becoming commonplace to include GIFs and animation into email campaigns. Not only are they a great touch of humor to email content, but they essentially incorporating that same movement we’re seeing everywhere else on the internet.

While video is on the rise, delivering them in emails can be tricky, especially considering different inboxes render emails (and videos) differently. GIFs and animation however, are easy and make an excellent substitute for marketing emails.

​You can be as creative as you’d like to make unique animations like LOFT does in their promotional emails. GIFs are very versatile in emails. 

​Most often, you'll use them to make boring, transactional emails special, stress your call-to-action, show a product collection, or even just to add a seasonal touch to your emails.

Starting with social proof is a good way to grab attention and this email from Leadpages does it beautifully. After engaging their readers with a question they follow up with an impressive stat that outlines an opportunity the reader maybe missing. 

They then take that opportunity and break down the benefits of utilizing it in their business. This is a great way to add value to your readers by pointing out opportunities they may be missing.

Newsletters are extremely popular form of broadcast emails due to their versatility, but there is one downside to them.  Newsletters constantly require new content on a regular basis, which can be tough for some businesses.

Food blog, Sugar and Charm sends out a weekly newsletter, that’s always seasonally themed, featuring a great mix of content.

Not only that, but their email newsletters always show a nice balance between images and text, nearly feeling like you’re browsing their website. Still the spacing is done well, so even though it’s long it’s easy to read and mobile friendly.