Email marketing is one of our favorite ways to drive repeat engagement to your website and business. Emails give you the opportunity to be dynamic, creative, and personalized in your communication to customers. In fact, 78% of marketers describe personalization to be effective for their email marketing campaigns. 

An effective email marketing strategy covers the entirety of your relationship with your customer, and includes a variety of regularly-sent emails that you can save as templates and set up as automations to save yourself some much needed hours in the day. 

In order to save these emails as templates and automations, you’ll need one of several popular email marketing software platforms that are available online like Mailchimp, ConstantContact, Hubspot, ConvertKit, and more. These tools are designed for the everyday user, but certainly can come with a learning curve. We’ve written a guide for Mailchimp, since it’s the most popular, so check that out if you’re interested in learning more about that service. 

Once you’ve made your choice of email marketing software, here is a list below of 10 email templates that might be necessary for your business. In fact, we hesitate to say “might” because no matter if you’re selling cool products in your shop, or your expert services, you’ll likely benefit from these templates. Once you exercise your creative muscles on the template design, we encourage you to automate what you can so you can focus on other parts of your business instead of clicking send on hundreds of emails each day! 

One note about our list of 10 must-have templates is that these don’t include the basic functional emails that should come with your online sales process like your order confirmation email, shipping emails, etc. Set those up first, before moving onto our 10 favorites. 

New Customer Email Templates

Welcome New Subscribers:

Not *if*, but *when* you add an email sign-up widget to your website, the first email new subscribers will ever receive from you will be a Welcome New Subscribers email—so make your first impression a good one!

We’re talking much more personality than “thank you for subscribing.” You want them to feel welcome and that you’re enthusiastic about them being there. Share your excitement that they want to hear from you, and make sure to explain what they can expect from future emails as well. Like, how often you send them, what kinds of information you’ll be sending, and how they can update their preferences if they’d like to do that. Also, take advantage of their captive attention by ending with a call to action. You want them to continue their engagement with you in some way, whether that’s directing them to your social media channels, offering them a free piece of information about your business and products, or even suggesting that they reply to your email to share something. Email communication should feel like it’s two-way, not just that some business is speaking into the void and expecting no response. As a bonus, replying to you signals to their email service provider that you’re a safe sender, so you’ll be less likely to end up in spam folders in the future. 

Email Newsletter:

Hopefully, once you’ve welcomed your new subscribers, one of the emails you’ll be promising them is some sort of email newsletter. A regular email newsletter has a slew of benefits, ranging from brand recognition to loyalty-building, to driving repeat business. 

Depending on the nature of your business, your newsletter could be something you send out weekly, or maybe monthly will be plenty. For example, if your coffee shop has live music and events each week, that might need to be broken down into a weekly newsletter. However, if your fitness class studio only has a few items of new news each month, then a newsletter once a month, looking ahead at what’s coming would work well. 

New Product/Featured Product:

In addition to your regular newsletter emails, you’ll likely have either new products or new services that you want to share on occasion. Don’t miss the opportunity to push those updates out to your subscribers through a specific new product or featured product template. 

If you have a way for customers to purchase these products or services online, make sure to link to a purchase page right from the email. You can even entice them to be the first to purchase by including a special promo code only for subscribers. In addition to letting them purchase (if possible), you should include a way to use your new product/service. If you’re a distillery, for example, that’s sharing a new sherry-cask-aged spirit, you can offer an occasion it would be perfect for, or a recipe to include it in a cocktail. If you’re a bookstore, you can include new releases that are “perfect for spooky season.” And finally, if you have similar products or services, you should briefly link to them at the bottom of the email. This will give your subscriber further opportunities to engage with you past the immediate announcement!

Abandon Cart:

Abandoning a cart simply means exiting out of the screen before completing the sales process. This one is a little more technical, only in that it will require you to use a software or plugin that can manage abandoned carts on your website. And of course you also need online shopping for your website with an online shopping cart (duh!). This will allow your online shopping platform to track people’s email addresses that they insert into the checkout process before they abandon it. There are many of these plugins including big names like WooCommerce, CartFlows, and more. All you need to do is install one of these plugins on your website, follow the setup process, and check the box to allow cart tracking.

OK, now that you have the setup completed, it’s time for an email template that will send to those who abandon those carts. It’s up to you how you want to approach an abandoned cart email, and all companies do it differently. You could use the email template to remind them what they left in their cart, you could be serious, gentle, or funny. You could also send them a special offer to get them to complete the sale, like free shipping, a promo code, or whatever makes sense to your business! Regardless of what avenue you choose, we encourage you to set these up, so you can recover lost sales for your business.

Review Request/How Are We Doing?:

Hopefully your subscriber purchased a new product or a new service from you through that last New Product/Featured Product Email Template, so now you can follow up and ask them how your new-found relationship is going. You can ask them specifically about that purchase, using a tool through your website like Shopify or WooCommerce, where they get an email triggered by their specific purchase. Or you can simply follow up a few days later through a simpler automation and send out a Review Request email. In this email you should include links to specific sites where you’d like them to leave you a review. Sound like a human and don’t forget to ask nicely!

Also, we put this email template under the “New Customers” section, but it applies to the next section about Customer Retention too. Don’t ever stop asking your customers how you’re doing, whether they’re brand new, or have been a customer for five years already!

Customer Retention Email Templates

Customer Birthday/Anniversary: 

One of the simplest email automations to set up that will delight your customers the most is a happy birthday or a happy anniversary email. When a customer purchases from you, or joins your email list, you can ask them for their specific birth date, or even simpler a birthday month. Then, you can set up an automated email to all who have that birthday month with a happy birthday message and even a coupon to use only during that month. Similarly, you can celebrate someone’s “customer anniversary” with you, by setting up an automated email template for exactly one year from when they first made a purchase, to offer them a thank you promotion and encourage them to continue being a customer. 

Similar Products:

Are you able to collect data based on what products or services customers have purchased and tie that data to their email addresses? If so, you’ll want to set up an automated “similar products” email to check in with an existing customer and create an opportunity for repeat business. You’ll notice that among this entire list, we don’t shy away from sales emails, but they’re not the only email templates we recommend either. That’s because a comprehensive email program combines relationship-building emails like the birthday/anniversary templates, the newsletters, the welcome, and so on, with sales emails like this similar products template. There’s no reason why you can’t sell to your current customers—in fact—we encourage you to! Because studies say that there is a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer vs a less than 20% chance of selling to a new person on average. But only receiving sales emails is a total turn-off and could send your emails straight to the dreaded spam folder, or the unsubscribe button.

Re-engage Customer:

A major benefit of using an email marketing software like Mailchimp, Hubspot, ConstantContact and others is that you can see both in aggregate and individually which email addresses open your emails and which do not. This is something you’ll want to monitor about 2x per year, so that you can send an email template for “Re-Engage Customer” to the segment of your list that hasn’t opened any recent emails. This email template should specifically address that “Hey! We see you haven’t been interested in any of our email communication lately. Is there a topic that you’d love to hear more about that we’re not discussing? And if not, would you like to stop hearing from us altogether?” 

This is not only polite and gives your customers the chance to either respond to you with what they’d like to see and hear, but it also serves a very practical purpose: did you know that how many people open your emails affects what’s called your “sender reputation?” And that senders with low reputation scores through low open rates, being sent to spam, etc. can actually be automatically blocked or put in Spam or Promotions by the major email providers like Gmail and Yahoo? So it’s important to keep your list “cleaned” as is the industry term of non-engaged subscribers. 

**In fact, we might add a Pt. 2 to this Re-Engage Customer email template, with a Final Goodbye email template too. If your re-engagement email doesn’t elicit any response, you can follow up with a final goodbye and an opportunity to re-subscribe if wanted, before archiving that email address from your list. 

Event Email:

This one is a little self-explanatory and of course only applies to your business if you ever host events at your location. If you don’t host events and it’s not a logistical problem, we do highly recommend looking into hosting an event, either at your location or in partnership with another local business, and then creating one of these email templates. What content needs to go into the template? Your basic event information, of course (date, time, address, pertinent information), and some sort of link that will allow your subscriber to purchase tickets to the event or RSVP. Pretty simple!

Exclusive Offer/Promotion:

Finally, a very versatile email that can be duplicated for different holidays and occasions, is some sort of exclusive offer or promotion email template. Design-wise, you’ll want your offer, or your promo code to be the star of this email, and you can even take it the extra mile by linking straight to your website so they can begin shopping right away. 

Switch this email up with different colors and backgrounds, and fun text that matches whatever holiday or occasion you’re celebrating with your offer. We called this “exclusive offer or promotion” because this email template is under the customer retention section. We recommend offering your loyal customers an offer that rewards their loyalty, and a different offer to strangers off the street. Rewarding loyalty promotes more loyalty, and more than 50% of customers surveyed stated that discounts and loyalty points make them stay with a brand longer. 

Final Thoughts:

If you’re just setting up your own email marketing program, don’t worry, you don’t have to design all these email templates at once. We recommend you start with your basic transactional emails so people know when their purchases are successful. Then, set up your infrastructure for an email newsletter, which includes a welcome email and your newsletters themselves. Now that you have those in place, you’ve got a great foundation for your email marketing program and can add a new template to your repertoire monthly until you have everything you need. That’s about 12 months worth of tasks to a complete, robust email program for your business. 

Don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions about this information, we’re here to help! Happy emailing!