Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Exceptional email marketing campaigns need to be cleverly written to attract attention in busy inboxes. Marketing emails also need to be personalized, filled with interesting graphics, and designed for desktop and mobile devices.

And above all, emails must contain a meaningful call-to-action.

After all, if brands are taking up subscribers' time -- and inbox space -- with another email, every message must have a point to it.

You probably receive enough emails as it is, and it's tough to know which newsletters are worth subscribing to, so we've curated a list of some of our favorite examples. Read on to discover some great email campaign examples and what makes them great -- or just skip ahead to the brands you already know and love....

This blog post is all about examples of great emails—emails that are so effective, inspiring, and compelling that readers couldn’t resist the urge to engage with them.

Each email is an opportunity to generate leads, further educate your prospects, close customers, and support your evangelists. It’s a chance to move the reader out of their inbox and onto a path to read more, subscribe, sign-up or buy.

Email marketing can be an incredibly valuable communication channel for your business. To drive real results—results measured in dollars and cents—an email marketer has to send emails that add value to the readers and benefit their own business.

The three emails below were all sent by HubSpot customers and achieved OUTSTANDING results. There will be context on why each email was so successful individually, but it’s worth pointing out two things that all of them have in common...

There’s nothing I love more than a universal best practice getting unequivocally bashed in by a niche case study.

“Best practices” are your baseline. They are the Wordpess theme template of your marketing efforts. If you stop at best practices, you haven’t really done any marketing yet.

That’s why today, we’re going to be looking at 8 email marketing case studies that contradicted best practices to get better results. We’ll look at why they worked and how they might apply to your business....

Once you build an audience (of email subscribers), anything is possible.

The truth is that building an engaged and sizable email list is hands-down the most long-term, profit-generating investment you can make.

In fact, a McKinsey study reveals that email is a whopping 40 times more powerful at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. On top of that, the average email-based order’s dollar value is 17% higher than social media channels.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is … getting your visitors to sign up is a struggle – one that many online marketers never overcome.

That’s why I’m going to share 11 proven strategies you can start today to build your email list like crazy....

The three Miami experiments show that as long as people think information is personalised to them they are interested – even if there is no actual personalisation. The “Dear First Name” error is not a problem if the remainder of the email contains information that is of interest to the recipient. Because of this, they think the material is personalised.

Of course, this assumes you know the real interests of your target customers. This is where web technologies let marketers down. Web page advertising, for instance, uses past browser history to target adverts to people. However, it becomes incredibly annoying when you always see advertisements for items you have already purchased. No longer is the advertising about something in which you are interested. As a result, it is like calling David by the name Kevin.

Similarly, many e-commerce sites use visitor purchase history to present a page of options that is “personalised”. However, this frequently fails. If you have been shopping for gifts for a friend at an online retailer you are not that interested in the items yourself. Hence, the so-called “personalised” page is nothing of the sort. It would be better suited to your friend.

For marketers, there is another problem. People do not like their activities being tracked. In one study conducted by Adobe more than two-thirds of people say it is “creepy” when websites track their activities. Increasingly, too, web browsers offer private browsing and Internet security suites are preventing the data from being collected in the first place. The result, inevitably, is going to be that just as marketers start to be able to gather more information to provide greater levels of web personalisation, users are going to stop that from happening....

McKinsey & Company found that email is nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in the acquisition of customers.

One way to convert website visitors is by asking people to sign up to your newsletter. But this isn’t as effective as offering an incentive in exchange for an email address as discovered by Chris Spooner who was able to capture 10X more leads when he gave away an incentive and made a few other changes.

If you’re wondering what you can use as a lead magnet to capture more leads, then you have come to the right place.

Below I have discussed the benefits of various lead magnets and how to get the most out of them. Pick and use the ones that suit your target audience best….

One of the biggest reasons list building is so important is that you’re creating an ever-growing pool of views, comments, shares, and sales that can be tapped into at any time.

If you write an epic post today that goes semi-viral and receives 50,000 views, that’s amazing, but what happens next week when you write your next post? If you have a solid email capture system in place, you now have 5-10% of those views returning to read, share, comment, purchase, etc.

Plus, you have a valuable asset – a lead list you can pitch products and services too. If you know what you’re doing with email marketing, you can make a killing from an email list. And if you don’t, you can still do pretty well. Email subscribers convert like crazy....

Correct positioning of your key messages in your email marketing campaigns can help them get noticed and remembered. But what's the correct position?

Have you ever jotted down your grocery list and driven to the store only to realize you’ve forgotten it? Have you then tried to recall the items on your list? Chances are, you remembered the first items on the list, the last items on the list, or a combination of the two.

What you forgot, on the other hand, were the items in the middle. This is due to the serial position effect.

To summarize, the study found that when you are presented with a piece of content, in this case a list of words, you are more likely to remember the first words (the primary effect) and last words (the recency effect)....