As we like to say here at Mailee.me, one of email marketing’s major advantages is its versatility. Email is a channel that allows several types of communication between a brand and its audience: from personalized and segmented sendings to promotional campaigns, birthday emails, and several other communications; you can do it all with email.

Obviously each type of email marketing campaign has a different goal: newsletters are mostly frequent sendings that aim to inform and direct contacts to a site or blog; commercial emails highlight products and use more images, and other messages may be a combination of these. Then there are transactional emails, which are emails related to content marketing campaigns, reengagament emails, and several others.

Since you may need to send several types of campaigns at the same time to the same audience, you should try to find a way to differentiate these, through design. This will help you categorize each type of email campaign according to its goal. A good way to do this is by defining and using email marketing templates.

Templates are great resources to make the process of editing and sending messages way easier, because the structure remains the same, allowing you to change only the content. In this post we’ll go through what we believe are the most used email marketing types, and the templates that we believe are suitable for each of these types.

NOTE: Some of the templates shown here are momentarily available only in Mailee.me’s Portuguese version. If you want to use them, you can go to Settings > My Account and change the Account Language to PT. After choosing and saving your templates, you can change it to EN again.

1st Type: Informational Messages

Informational messages are also known as newsletters and known for their news-like characteristics with headlines, news and links to other sites and blogs. In this email type, you should highlight content and let your brand be visible. A very common newsletter structure is the one with a branded header and a series of text blocks, as you can see in the examples below:

Wareline newsletter highlights one piece of news in the beginning and then presents the other in two columns.

Which template should I use to create a newsletter?

You can create a newsletter using one of Mailee.me’s portuguese version templates. In order to do that, you can go to Templates – Criar.
In the example below, we use a model with three images and one highlighted update. Check it out!

2nd Type: Commercial Messages

In these sendings, it is all about the product. These messages are mainly used by retail and ecommerce companies. The message’s structure usually is constructed around the use of images to identify products, links to buy them and Calls to Action, such as Buy Now. Check some examples:

Vandal, a T-shirt ecommerce brand, opts to show only images, without call to actions. Each image has a link to the page where it can be bought.

Oppa, a furniture ecommerce, has invested here in fewer images, with more space and descriptions. Notice that Oppa uses a header close to those used in newsletters, a nice way to mix both email types.

Email marketing comercial produtos — Amazon email is pretty straight-forward. Product’s images, info and links to buy it. Effective.

Which template should I use to create a commercial message?

As we’ve seen in the examples above, you can go in different directions when it comes to commercial emails. If you wish to keep the focus on the products, you can use this Mailee.me template:

3rd Type: Special Messages (Announcements or Sales)

These sendings open the door for email marketers to be creative and use other resources, such as GIFs, images and videos. Since these are irregular sendings, meant to direct the audience’s attention to a specific offer, it is a good idea to invest in different elements. Some emails we’ve received recently in the Black Friday-Ciber Monday period fall quite well in this category, check them out:

Oppa used an animated GIF to make their Black Friday announcement pop! The rest of the message is really simple, with only one button calling people to the website.

CodeSchool sent this message a few days before Black Friday, so the star here is the countdown.

SuperPlayer has used colors really well and made its main offer really clear by using two buttons.

Have you noticed what all these messages have in common? A button! This is a very popular element nowadays, that gives your call-to-action its deserved space.

In these types of sendings, we can also find those emails used in content marketing strategies. As we all know, content marketing is a very important channel nowadays, being used as a way to attract and nurture leads. Messages offering or delivering pieces of content marketing usually have a short description of the material and a link or button to download it, always making your brand very visible.

See some examples:

Smart Insights uses a really good header-footer template, leaving the “middle” part to inform about the material. Note that they use a button, but not in the end of the message, as it is more usual.

Email on Acid is not using any buttons on this email, but the links are clearly visible by using colors. They highlight the material they’re sending by using images.

MarketingProfs uses a header and an image to highlight the download they’re offering. They use a two column strucuture and different color links to get people’s attention.

What template should I use for these messages?

Since there are so many variables to these messages, the ideal template is one that has a header, a footer, and space for you to insert an image or text. We’ve created a template for this use, which you can download here. You can edit all message elements directly on Mailee.

4th Type: Birthday Messages, Greetings, and Cards

Birthday campaigns and greetings messages in general usually rely on graphics and have a simple structure. The idea here is to pass along a good, sincere message to your contacts and make them remember your brand. It is possible to include, in these messages, a discount code or other such benefits. Check out these examples:

Morphy has sent this awesome campaign congratulating their clients. A simple email with a button to take people to a website created specially for the date.

What template should I use?

To create this message, you can use one of Mailee.me’s templates with space for one image. But keep in mind, in order to avoid SPAM filters, you should always include alt text and fill the text block with information about your company and why your contacts are receiving the message.