1. Emails About Your New Marketing Offers

This is one you probably already know and love. You know, the one where you announce your next sale, ebook, webinar, coupon, free trial … and the list goes on. This email is used to describe and promote a particular marketing offer — one single offer — with a call-to-action that links to a targeted landing page made for that specific offer. For this email, that targeted landing page is key. After all, emailing someone about a 25% off coupon and sending them to your homepage where they have to hunt down their coupon will only result in huge bounce rates — not to mention significantly reduced conversion rates.

2. Form Submission Kickback (Thank-You) Emails

Whenever a prospect, lead, or customer fills out a form on one of your landing pages, a kickback email should automatically get triggered after their submission. Depending on the form, these kickback emails are often referred to as thank-you emails. These emails are mainly for the sake of fulfilling your promise to the user, and storing the information you promised them safely in their inbox. How frustrating would it be if you downloaded an ebook, and then forgot where you stored the link to the PDF? Kickback emails solve that problem.

3. Product Information Emails

Product emails are tricky. People generally don’t want to receive these often, and they’re often not as fun or engaging to as, say, an offer email. In fact, product emails may be the most important emails in which you should focus on simplifying and not over designing. Many companies choose to send weekly or monthly product digests to keep their customers or fan base up-to-date with the latest features and functionalities. And no matter how much a customer loves your business, it’s still work for them to learn how to use new features or learn why a new product is worth their investment.

4. Digital Magazines or Newsletters

Do you maintain a business blog for your company (hint: you should!)? Are you a magazine or media outlet? No matter which of these categories you fall into, many companies choose to send a roundup of stories or articles published weekly or monthly. And if you truly want people to read these email roundups, it’s critical that you share them in a visually appealing way.

5. Co-marketing Emails

Co-marketing is when two or more complementary companies partner together for some mutually beneficial task, event, or other promotion. The main draw of co-marketing is to leverage the audience of another company to increase your reach. Sometimes the relationship results in a strategic announcement; other times it’s as simple as a joint webinar. Let’s use the latter for an example of how co-marketing emails work, and why they’re so beneficial. Let’s say you and another company decide to do a webinar together on a particular subject. As a result, that webinar will likely (pending your arrangements) be promoted to the email lists of both of your companies. This exposure to a list that is not your own is one of the key benefits of co-marketing partnerships!

6. Internal Updates

Don’t neglect a very important audience for your company: your employees! Many companies, especially if they’re on the larger side, choose to send internal updates or newsletters to their employees to keep them in the know about the latest company information, whether it be new product updates, marketing offers, or events. With these emails, it’s less about the beauty, and more about the clarity. And like all marketing content, make sure you know your audience.

7. Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing emails consist of a tightly connected series of emails containing useful, targeted content. As their name suggests, these emails are used to nurture leads through the marketing funnel into a position of sales readiness. For example, let’s say you sent your list a marketing offer email. You might then set up a lead nurturing workflow that triggers another email about a complementary offer or piece of content to everyone who converted on that initial offer. The logic is simple: By identifying a particular group of your contacts that you already know are interested in a specific topic, you and can follow up with more relevant and targeted content that makes them more likely to continue their relationship with you.

8. Dedicated Sends

Every now and then, you may want to send a dedicated email to a certain group of people. For example, if you’re hosting a conference or event, you might want to send a dedicated email just to event registrants to alert them of any new event updates they should be aware of. Or if your business is community based, it might be a good idea to send a monthly welcome email to all your new members.

9. Email Confirmations

How frustrating is it to book a flight or register for an event and not receive an automatic confirmation email? After all, nobody wants to worry that they’re first payment wasn’t processed, only to click the payment button again and get charged twice. Confirmation emails should be just that — confirmation emails.

10. Event Invitations

Email can be a great promotional vehicle for promoting an upcoming event you’re hosting. But if you want to invite your contacts to an event and motivate them to register, it’s extremely important to clearly showcase why that event is worth their attendance. A great way to do so is through visuals. A lot of events cost money to attend, and most cost a pretty penny. So if you want to attract registrants, cut down on the copy and show potential registrants why the event will be awesome.

11. Social Media Sends

Wait … what does social media have to do with email? Well, if you’re making good use of LinkedIn Groups or Google+ Events, email has everything to do with social media! As the administrator of LinkedIn Group, when you send a LinkedIn Announcement, you’re directly reaching a LinkedIn user’s inbox. And when you create a Google+ event, sending the invite directly sends you into users’ email boxes as well. Without ever creating lists or collecting email addresses, you automatically have access to users’ email, but be sure to tap into these resources with care.