19 Email Examples to Boost Your Marketing Strategy: Inspiring Ideas for Every Stage of the Customer Journey

Email marketing is a powerful tool that allows businesses to engage with their audience, nurture leads, and drive conversions. However, crafting effective and compelling emails can be a challenge. That's why we've compiled a comprehensive list of 19 email examples for various stages of the customer journey, from abandoned cart emails to customer appreciation emails and everything else in between.

In this blog post, we will explore a variety of email examples that can inspire your marketing strategy. Whether you're looking to recover abandoned carts, encourage customer engagement, strengthen customer loyalty, or gather feedback, there's an email idea here for you.

By showcasing examples of well-executed emails, we aim to provide you with inspiration and innovative ideas to elevate your email marketing game. These email examples demonstrate best practices and creative approaches that have proven to be effective in engaging customers and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Throughout this blog post, we will delve into the specific features and strategies that make each email example effective. We will discuss the key elements to include, such as catchy subject lines, compelling visuals, personalized content, and impactful calls to action.

Whether you're a seasoned email marketer or just starting out, this collection of email examples will serve as a valuable resource to enhance your email campaigns. Get ready to discover new tactics, learn from successful email marketing strategies, and find inspiration that will take your email marketing efforts to new heights.

Let's dive in and explore these 19 email examples that will help you engage, delight, and convert your audience at every step of their journey.

1) Abandoned Cart

Abandoned cart emails, also known as cart abandonment series or shopping cart abandonments, are automated reminders sent to individuals who have not finished an online transaction. Typically, the company sends the first abandoned cart email about an hour after the customer abandons the purchase, followed up by other emails until the customer makes a purchase or stops engaging altogether.  In this example from Chatters, they emphasise scarcity, putting the customer at a fork in the road, buy the product now or put it off for later with the possibility of missing out completely.  This email is not only a reminder of an abandoned cart, but playing on the customer's psyche to make a decision before it's too late. 

 

2) Behavioral

Behavioural emails relate to when you want to elicit a specific behaviour or action from a customer.  In this product on-boarding example from Only Domains, it isn't just a boring thank you for signing up to our product email, but rather gives detailed and simple instructions on what the customer needs to do in order to get the best experience out of the product.  In addition to the step-by-step instructions there are call-to-action buttons for tutorials related to a specific tool or feature the customer might be interested in. 

3) Comment Notification

Comment notification emails, also known as automated comment triggers, are specific for sites and apps that allow commenting. Their purpose is to bring individuals back to the platform where comments and conversations are happening so that the recipient can reply and, ultimately, become more engaged and loyal. In this example from Trust Pilot, what stands out in the email is the user's comment analytics giving them a sense of pride and fulfilment in how how many people viewed their comment and how many found it useful therefore motivating the user to go back to the platform and leave more comments i.e. spurring a gamification feeling. 

4) Curated 

A subsection of newsletters, curated emails (as a category) include a variety of best-in-class content (links, images, articles) which are gathered for a specific time frame, a specific topic, or both. These emails stand out for their ability to create a theme and an authoritative perspective which serves its audience.  In this example from Freelance Things, what they get right is the combination of media resources presented.  In one email they provide multiple useful resources in a combination of formats: a Tweet, video, article, book, etc ... capitalising on the fact that at least one of these media formats would be the user's preferred method of digesting information. 

5) Customer Appreciation

While a larger volume are sent at the end of the year, appreciation emails can be sent any time and for any reason. It is important to recognize readers with gratitude to foster goodwill, loyalty, and a relationship past a transaction. After all, you wouldn't have a reason to send out an email without them. In this example from Google 1, what better way to show appreciation to your customers and put a smile on their face than to offer something valuable for free?

6) Customer Service

A staple of any online service are customer service emails; your customer performed an action and you need to acknowledge it so that they are sure their action was recorded in your database.  A great example is a summary email from CitizenM Hotels for a booking confirmation.  The check-in and check-out dates are extra large imprinting them in the customer's memory so that they don't have to reopen the email 20 times, hyperlinks for extra services are available because they are usually overlooked during the booking process, informational links for parking and finding the hotel are also present preventing the user from having to switch to another application like Google Maps for these services, and finally a link to download their mobile app so that the customer can manage their booking on the go without having to be locked into doing it strictly from their computer.  

7) Discovery

It is almost impossible to showcase everything your platform has to offer in one email as that would be informational overload, which is where discovery emails come in.  A discovery email nudges your customers to discover aspects of your platform which aren't necessarily evident from an initial visit. A great example of this is from Pinterest, where they curate a list of images that the user might like based on other similar images that user viewed on the platform in the past. And should Pinterest's recommendation engine made a mistake, the user can easily rate the accuracy of the recommendations in one click at the bottom of the email to get better recommendations in the future.

8) Engagement 

Unlike emails about wedding proposals, the engagement category focuses on emails that are sent for the purpose of boosting an intended action. Think of them as a jumpstart for readers who have shown a lack of engagement over a certain amount of time or fuel to make a reader even more active or loyal. A great example is from LinkTree, in addition to showing the user their analytics on their activity or lack of, they display badges for certain achievements that user has or hasn't achieved motivating them to jump back onto the platform and earn the yet to be received badges. 

9) Follow Up

Another staple of online platforms is the follow up email to let users know that you haven't forgotten about them.  In this example from Busuu, they congratulate the user on what they have achieved so far and encourage them to keep going as the key to success in anything is routine and repetition, never give up!

10) Loyalty / Rewards 

Loyalty emails create a sense of urgency and show customer appreciation with milestones. “Once you spend X amount of money, you’ll earn this freebie.” You can create triggered emails based on customers signing up for a new loyalty account, showing them how they can earn rewards and save money on future purchases, and send an alert when reward points are expiring to keep customers engaged. Chamberlain Coffee had a unique approach, they decided to mix gambling and rewards together. Buying with a discount code is great, but what's even better than your purchase potentially being completely free?

11) Post Purchase / Recent Purchase

Another staple of online platforms is the purchase confirmation or receipt email. What is great about this email from Audible, is that it not only provides the standard purchase summary but also shows similar products based on the user's purchase enticing them to potentially make another purchase again directly from the email. 

12) Recommendations 

Recommendation emails pull in content, products, or services that pair well with a previous action taken by the reader. Typically, these recommendations are built off of browser behavior, profile data, or purchase history and sent one to three days after. The more personalized the recommendation, the better the email. In this recommendation email from OpenTable, by showing the user restaurants similar to ones that they have already visited, they take the user's guess work out when having to think about their next meal. 

13) Referrals 

Referral emails are a way for companies and organizations to spread the word about their "goods" through their most loyal customers. And because nobody does anything for free anymore, the referrers are often compensated for bringing a newbie into the fold as well as the referral receiving something. Win-Win-Win. In this email from airbnb, they made the referral process as straightforward as possible. The referral fee is very generous ($600) and the process to receive it is clearly laid out in 3 simple steps that are easily understood by anyone.

14) Retention / Re-engagement

Before you lose a reader to inactivity or unsubscribing, you can pique their interest again with retention and reactivation emails. The best emails that re-engage subscribers are triggered by subscriber data, such as last purchase date, user activity, and segmentation. These emails remind the recipient of why they signed up, they spark curiosity, or introduce new ways to engage with your platform. Captions pull their users back in by showcasing what updates and new features their product has, potentially peaking their user's curiosity and motivating them to give the new updates a try.

15) Review / Testimonial

Many online services usually hesitate or completely forget to display users' testimonials and feedback on their products or services however similar to reviews, this is one of the biggest drivers in increasing sales as it increases a brand's trust levels. Peerspace's testimonials email is very straightforward. It curated a list of the highest rated spaces showing both their star rating and total number of votes, a complete summary of each space's details, and a call-to-action button to view each space on the platform immediately and potentially rent it out.

16) Summary

A summary email usually summarises a user's activity on a platform over a given period of time.  One of our favourites is from Loom, a screen recording / video recording software. In their email, they capitalize on the one thing that everyone wants to buy but cannot; time.  This is especially useful as an end-of-year email where the user can look back on all of the time that they saved by using this service therefore not only being a great informational email but also increases the user's satisfaction in using the service and have a greater sense of loyalty towards it.

17) Survey / Feedback

Survey emails and feedback emails are a great way to hear directly from your customers. What are they loving about your product? What could be improved? Getting this feedback could be an opportunity for you to follow up with customers to improve your process or update your product in the future. What Descript did correct in their email is that they made the investment from the user to give their feedback as minimal as possible, just click on one option and done! Similar to referrals, no one is going to take 5 minutes out of their day to answer a feedback survey unless there is something in it for them.  Can't give away something for free? Then make it as simple as one click.

18) Thank You

Every business has to be grateful for every customer that it acquires and what better way to show your appreciation than to offer something for free simply because your user signed up to your platform? Well that's exactly what Huel did. As soon as a customer subscribed to their newsletter, they were greeted with a referral code to get a free product as a token of appreciation. 

 

19) Unsubscribe

The email that we hate to send out most, but it has to be done. Whether a customer unsubscribed from your newsletter or service, they have to be notified that you recorded that action and will no longer bother or charge them. What's great about this email from Bonsai is that not only do they alert the user that their subscription has been cancelled but also give them an opportunity to retrieve it for free through their referral program.