Decide what types of emails to send

Decide what types of emails to send

1. Determine what the objective of your email is, depending on what you want to achieve, for example, driving sales of a product or service.

Other common email marketing objectives can be: Engage a contact. Nurture a contact. Inform or update users on new and exciting products, features, or offers. Setup a sales call or follow-up action like an outreach email.

2. Determine if you will include images or any media, depending on the chosen format for your email, like whether it's a sales letter or product email.

If you are creating a sales letter style email, you may wish to use a plain-text email. Emails that you may wish to include images in, sales-focused emails, product emails, emails that promote content, flow emails like browser abandonment, or cart abandonment. If you wish to include images, GIFs, buttons, or any media in your emails, you will need to create an HTML email

3. Decide on how many products, if any, you will include in your email, to determine if you need a single, double, or triple column email layout.

If you wish to promote 2 or more products, it’s often a good idea to have 2 or 3 columns set up in order to display product images next to each other, rather than one on top of the other. If you are not promoting products, you can still utilize multiple columns if you are promoting different pieces of content. However single-column emails tend to render better on mobile and in most inboxes.

4. Decide what type of email will work best for your target segment like whether it is ecommerce or B2B.

For example, if you are trying to book a sales call with a CEO you probably want to keep the email formal, short, and personalized. For B2B emails often shorter and content-driven emails are better than heavily designed HTML emails. So you may decide to use a sales letter style email. For ecommerce emails, the addition of graphics, countdown timers, and GIFs may be more suitable.

5. Sign-up to receive your biggest competitors' emails, to determine what is working for your industry by going onto their website, and finding the join mailing list option.

Ideally, you should pick competitors that have been operating with success in the industry to emulate.