Lifecycle emails can help you to accomplish almost any marketing goal: onboard new users, increase sales, grow users engagement, bring back inactive one or build a long-lasting relationship. It's also known as drip marketing or automated email campaigns. To make it simple: it's a set of emails that will be sent out automatically based on schedule, triggers, or user actions. There are four key components for such email campaigns: the right user, goal-oriented topic, good timing and contextual message.
💻 Let's start with onboarding. The goal of it is to increase the number of users who actually use your product (or free trial) and pay for it later. Onboarding process can be done through in-app messages, live chat messages, product tours, welcome modal windows, well-crafted UX or even phone calls. We will focus on onboarding via emails:
- The Anatomy of a Welcome Email by Customer.io team.
- Trial expiration email best practices by Garrett Dimon.
- Upgrade Emails that Convert by Customer.io team.
- 3 Lessons Learned From Testing Hundreds Of Onboarding Emails by Alex Turnbull.
- 3 copywriting mistakes that could be hurting your lifecycle emails by Alli Blum.
- How to Bring 👻 Inactive Users Back from the Dead with Emails by Ty Magnin from Appcues.
- User Onboarding isn’t a feature, it’s an evolving quality of your entire customer experience via Samuel Hulick. You can work really hard and get a lot of traffic or trial signups. But if your onboarding experience and converting users to customers suck, you will lose the game.
- For getting an inspiration for your onboarding and product emails, you can check examples from big companies: Pinterest Onboarding Emails, Here Are All Of The Emails We Send At Drift, 17 Email Scripts That Have Helped Groove Grow Business and 6 Wearables Tech Email Marketing Examples.
🚀 Subscriber emails are good for announcing new feature releases or sharing blog posts. It's also used for sending educational materials or curated content newsletters. All these emails can be an effective tool for growing your existing user's engagement. With newsletters you can gain many email addresses and turn them into users or partners:
- How To Build And Scale A Curated Newsletter In 5 Easy Steps by Madhav Bhandari.
- Newsletters: General Overview and Brief Guide on Growing Your Permission-Based Email List by Benchmark Email team.
- 14 High Converting Places to Add Email Signup Forms to Build Your List from Optinmonster team.
- 10 Most Common Newsletter Mistakes & Check-List for Fixes by Karolina JasvinaitÄ—. Besides avoiding these mistakes, you should figure out how to provide a consistent value without making your newsletter a "promotion" list.
- 10 Rules to Make Your Email Newsletter Design Beautiful yet Effective by Karolina JasvinaitÄ—.
- Good Guide to Email Design with Checklist via Campaign Monitor.
- Now let's focus on launch emails & release notes: A simple improvement to product announcements by Intercome.
- The 20 Best Product Launch Emails That Reengage Users by Appcues team.
- A little thing about release notes. Why they’re important to us, and how we approach the writing of them at Slack.
- How Our Product Update Emails Get a 68% Response Rate by Groove Team.
📢 Promotional Emails helps you to grow sales:
- 21 Little Known Reasons Why Your Sales Letter Is Not Converting by Danavir Sarria.
You should always A/B test your email campaigns: try different subject lines, texts, message styles, images, CTA buttons. Look at your metrics and measure how well each element works:
- A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: Email Campaigns That Convert from Kissmetrics blog.
- A/B Test Your Email Marketing: How to Get Started, What to Test, and 20+ Apps to Help from Zapier blog. *150+ Email marketing Split tests and ideas from Emailmonday
- Everything You Wanted to Know About Email CTA Buttons by Really Good Emails.
- Best Practices for Buttons: The User Experience of colors by Luca Longo. Good post to help you choose your CTA button.
- 164 Email Subject Lines to Boost Your Email Open Rates by Optinmonster team. Good inspirational examples to try out.
📚 Want to learn even more about Lifecycle Email Marketing? Read these comprehensive long guides, that contain all types of emails we talk above with examples, tips & trips and recommended tools:
- The Ultimate Lifecycle Email Marketing Guide by Jimmy Daly from Vero. The guide has 135 email examples broken down into 5 categories and 41 sub-categories.
- What is Drip Marketing? The Complete Guide to Drip Campaigns, Lifecycle Emails, and More by Joe Stych from Zapier. It's a part of The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Apps, which has 11 more chapters to read. I told you, it's a huge library!
📌 Useful tools:
- Websites with awesome email examples: Email copy from great companies and Really Good Emails.
- Email sequences / Email drip campaigns examples is a nice to place to see how other companies build their campaigns. Most of the examples are from software, marketing or informational products.
- Look this mind-blowing UserOnboard site with many examples of how popular web apps handle their onboarding experiences. The author, Samuel Hulick, made screenshots with explanations of every user's step — from signing to the welcome email.
- 8 Free Newsletter Services.
