10 Inspiring Email Marketing Campaign Examples

Email marketing allows you to reach your audience directly by landing squarely in their personal inboxes. 

You don’t need to rely on them visiting your website or social media channels – instead, once they’ve signed up it’s up to you to keep the communication active.

Just like other marketing methods, email campaigns can have either a B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) focus depending on your aims. 

Email campaigns can have different goals including:

• Increasing traffic – Email marketing can be a great way of directing traffic to your website, particularly to important pages or cornerstone content.

• Lead generation – Email campaigns are a great way of generating leads and income by promoting your products and services. They’re also ideal for capturing leads that may be about to close such as abandoned cart users.

• Lead nurturing – Regular emails can help to nurture the relationship between you and your customers, particularly those who have a high purchase intent. Your email may be just the push they need to convert.

• Raising awareness – Your email campaigns don’t just need to be about making sales. You can also use them to help raise awareness of your brand in order to keep hold of those who have signed up but are not yet ready to make a purchase. 

Whether you’re a small business just starting out on your digital marketing journey or a large, household name, there are various automated tools you can make use of too in order to ensure your email campaigns are seamless. 

Glossybox

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Lead Nurturing 

Beauty subscription service Glossybox uses its email campaign to drive more sign-ups to its service. An engaging subject line and unique discount code encourage users to subscribe for a discounted price. 

Glossybox

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The email also includes signposts to learn more about how the platform’s additional services, such as Glossy Credits, work and encourage users to download the Glossybox app. 

Why was it effective?

By featuring the special discount in the subject line, Glossybox offers users a reason to open their email and helps to avoid being moved straight to trash. 

The discount code within the email gives a sense of exclusivity, suggesting to the receiver that they would be getting a bargain not available to others. A clever tactic to help convince people to subscribe. 

Spotify

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Driving Traffic 

Music giant Spotify regularly sends subscribers email updates about new releases and music they might like based on their activity within the app. 

Spotify

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One of its latest campaigns cleverly combined an everyday activity, cooking dinner, with using the app by showcasing playlists specially curated for dining in. 

Why was it effective?

If you want to drive traffic to your website or app then you need to give people a reason to visit. Spotify knew this and by creating a useful resource for users that related to their everyday activities, it was able to convince users that they had a desire for a dinner playlist. 

Calendly

Audience: B2B

Primary Goal: Lead Generation

Calendly uses its email campaigns to encourage users and businesses to upgrade their subscription plans through the use of engaging and informative content. 

Calendly

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Rather than sending obvious sales emails, the calendar platform instead shares informative and engaging content from experts about how to get the most out of their service. 

Calendly then encourages users to think that, in order to put these tips into action, they’ll need to upgrade their plan – clever right?

Why was it effective?

Calendly utilizes the power of offering users valuable content in order to convince them to sign-up or upgrade their subscription plans. 

By linking users to the content it also helps to drive traffic to its website. After consuming and engaging with the content, often in video form, users will be more likely to upgrade than they would from a cold sales pitch. 

Personalizing the email also helps to build a connection and relationship between the brand and the user. 

Wizarding World/Harry Potter Fan Club

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Lead Generation 

The official fan club website for the Harry Potter franchise cleverly uses its email marketing strategy to help boost sales from its online shop. 

Wizarding World/Harry Potter Fan Club

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This specific email encouraged “wizards” – aka the user – that they needed to buy their own wand. After all, you’re not a wizard without a wand! 

The simple email let the product do the talking and encouraged users to visit the website to make a purchase. 

Why was it effective?

This email is so clever and effective because whilst it is clearly a sales tactic, the receiver doesn’t feel forced into making a purchase they don’t want. 

Instead, small features such as a call to action that reads “discover your wand” and references to the popular franchise help to convince the user that a purchase is the obvious next step. 

Personalizing the email to the specific user is also a nice touch that helps to nurture the relationship between the audience and brand. 

Cambly

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Lead Generation 

Cambly expertly made use of the season with its Valentines Day themed email campaign. 

The You + Cambly = Perfect Match email encouraged users to sign up to the platform with a special offer exclusive to email subscribers.

Cambly

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With many thinking about the season of love and what they could treat their loved ones to, the language-learning platform also offered subscribers the chance to gift a free month to a friend. Perfect timing for last-minute present ideas…

Why was it effective?

Lead generation emails can be tricky. You don’t want users to feel like you’re constantly trying to convince them to spend their hard-earned money. 

By tying their email campaign into the season with a clever subject line and offering users the chance to gift a free month to loved ones with an exclusive code, Cambly successfully promoted its services whilst seemingly giving something back to its audience. 

Hootsuite

Audience: B2B

Primary Goal: Raising Awareness 

Social media scheduling platform Hootsuite regularly updates its email subscribers with news or data that can help them get the most out of their service. 

Hootsuite

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This email campaign was used to raise awareness of Hootsuite’s new Social Trends report.

The email kept text simple and included key findings from the report with a link for users to follow and download the report in full. 

Why was it effective?

The Social Trends report was a major piece of added value content for Hootsuite’s audience and as such the platform needed to ensure that as many subscribers as possible saw it. 

Sending a targeted email campaign based purely on the report highlighted how important and useful the information in the report was, and ensured it didn’t get lost amongst other content in the email.

Cleverly picking out key bullet points from the report gave users a taste of the content and helped persuade them to download and read the whole thing.

Starling

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Driving Traffic

Online bank Starling uses its email campaigns to keep customers up to date with the latest news and features available. 

Their AppDate Newsletter issues a new “volume” every month and is full of relevant information. 

Starling

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These emails will often link through to longer pieces of content available to read on the Starling website, making the newsletters great for both keeping customers informed and driving traffic.

Why was it effective?

This kind of informative email campaign works well to help nurture the relationship with existing customers and subscribers as well as promoting content available on the brand’s website. 

With inboxes getting regularly filled up with junk mail and sales emails, informational content that users find useful makes a welcome change. 

Fiit

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Raising Awareness

Global fitness app Fiit cleverly used its email strategy to help raise awareness for its new crowdfunding campaign. 

Fiit

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Raising money to help take the platform to the “next level” and improve the service for its community, Fiit cleverly targeted exactly the people who would benefit from the results of the crowdfunding – its users. 

Why was it effective?

Crowdfunding is hard and with so many projects clamoring for donations, it’s a competitive environment. 

Fiit knew this and used its email subscriber list to its advantage. The people most likely to donate to the cause were those it would benefit, which is why targeting Fiit’s community directly in their inboxes was a great way to get the campaign in front of the most relevant eyes. 

Zoom

Audience: B2B

Primary Goal: Raising Awareness 

Thanks considerably to the COVID-19 pandemic, webinars have grown tenfold in recent years. Video call platform Zoom uses its email marketing strategy to help promote its next online events. 

Zoom

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The email campaigns begin in the build-up to the next webinar, highlighting the topics and speakers as well as key information such as time and date, and continue right up until the day of the webinar, encouraging subscribers to set aside time to attend.

Why was it effective?

We are busier than ever and with so many online and in-person events and responsibilities taking up our time, it’s inevitable that something will get forgotten about. 

By sending regular emails straight to users’ inboxes, Zoom ensures that its webinar is at the forefront of their minds and encourages them to easily register their attendance. 

Regular reminders in the run-up to the event also ensure that attendees don’t accidentally schedule something else in the same time slot, helping to reduce the number of no-shows and boost the platform’s viewing figures. 

Ryanair

Audience: B2C

Primary Goal: Lead Nurturing 

If you’ve ever flown with budget airline Ryanair then you’ve probably received one of its emails.

The airline is a pro at using its email campaigns to target users in their sweet spot and send out regular content to subscribers.

Ryanair

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This particular campaign focused on encouraging users to start thinking about booking a spring vacation. 

Whilst these emails were directly referring users to the booking page of Ryanair’s website, they also included clever destination profiles to help nurture those who were debating a holiday but not yet ready to make a booking.

Why was it effective?

Sending this particular email campaign out in the middle of January was a smart move from Ryanair.

With the weather miserable and the post-Christmas blues well and truly kicking in, many of us were starting to think about summer holidays and plans for the year ahead.

Ryanair successfully targeted these thoughts and emotions by piquing interest in vacations, while destination features help to plant the seed for bookings further down the line. 

These email campaigns were all great examples of brands utilizing email marketing to help communicate with their audience and reach specific marketing goals. 

Below we’ve listed 10 key tips that you can take from the above examples and use within your own email campaigns:

1. Offer unique discount codes only available to email subscribers. 
2. Use an engaging subject line that will stand out and prevent your email from being moved to the trash folder. 
3. Include relevant and relatable content that your users will find interesting or useful. This will encourage them to open further emails from you in the future.
4. Use “soft” calls-to-action such as “discover more” or “find out here” rather than obvious sales prompts like “buy now”.
5. Link your email content to seasonal events such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.
6. Preview longer-form content within your emails and link users to your website for the full article.
7. Create a regular series of emails on a certain topic or theme that users can expect to land in their inbox on certain days.
8. Use your emails to promote both online and offline events to help grow your community.
9. If you have an important topic to share, make this the only feature of the email to ensure it doesn’t get lost within masses of content.
10. Tap into emotions and online behavior to make your emails as relevant as possible.

Email campaigns can revolutionize your marketing strategy, so it’s no surprise that so many brands are utilizing them to help drive traffic to their website and boost sales. 

The examples in this article all have their own aims and objectives that they’ve successfully achieved thanks to clever content and simple email marketing hacks. 

Some key things for you to take forward as you begin your own email marketing journey include:

• Don’t forget the subject line – this helps you stand out in an overflowing inbox.
• Offer users something bespoke, such as a discount code, that non-subscribers don’t have access to.
• Use your emails to preview content that can be found on your website.
• Think about the behavior and pain points of your users and what you can do to help solve their problems – this should form the main foundations of your email marketing strategy. 

If you combine the tips from this article with your own knowledge and audience research, along with a spot of creative flair, you’ll soon have a winning email marketing strategy on your hands.

Why not give these articles on email marketing and email marketing services for small businesses a read too – and don’t forget to let us know in the comments once you’ve sent your first email campaign. Good luck!