Clever Email Marketing Campaigns: 7 Ways Companies Converted Us from Browsers to Buyers

Email Marketing Campaigns: 7 Ways Companies Converted Us from Browsers to Buyers

When it comes to eCommerce, email marketing is a vital tool for increasing website traffic and online revenue, as well as recovering abandoned carts. All it takes is a catchy subject line, some well-placed pop culture references or fun images, and you can drive a customer back to your website to a make a first-time or repeat purchase. Further, marketing automation makes targeting website visitors and sending them relevant content simple, especially when online retailers often require providing email addresses in order to access promotions and make purchases.

As fellow modern-day consumers, we spend a lot of time online shopping, so it’s no wonder that we have entire folders in our inboxes devoted to receiving promotional emails from the companies where we do our most browsing. We’ve put together some of our favorite – and most convincing –emails below. Take a look and see what inspires your next email marketing campaign!

1. Starbucks

If you’re not familiar with Starbucks’ mobile app and the incentives it provides, you definitely know at least one person who is. With this in mind, Starbucks sent one of our coworkers (a regular app user) this email, incentivizing them to have one of their friends download the app. The friend gets a free drink, and the referring customer get stars (to be used towards a free drink). Everyone wins.

2. Pizza Hut

This email’s receiver didn’t even remember giving Pizza Hut their birthday – but can you blame them? We’ve all hastily filled out registration forms when we’re trying to order something online, just trying to get to the payment screen so we can go on our merry, convenient-commerce ways.

3. J.Crew

How many times have you looked at a piece of clothing and talked yourself out of it because you weren’t sure what to wear it with? J.Crew tapped into this pre-purchase anxiety, and took an opportunity to cross-sell while they were at it.

4. Loft

This email was the first we received after signing up for Loft's Insider Rewards program. Not only did they draw our interest with a timely email likely to help increase website traffic, they also used a spin on a popular song. The song is now stuck in our heads, and so is the 20% off we need to use the next time we need a new pair of shoes.

5. The UPS Store

The dreaded post-holiday returns. While online shopping inconvenient and the most common way consumers do their purchasing, products can sometimes miss the mark and not be quite what we expected when they’re delivered. While companies like Amazon and Zappos may offer free returns, not all eCommerce companies do. This is where The UPS Store finds an opportunity to expand the holiday profits and offer their expertise in a highly relevant way.

6. J.Crew Factory

Another winner from the J.Crew family, and this one addresses a common online shopping occurrence – abandoned carts. In this scenario, the email recipient got distracted and navigated away from the J.Crew site before completing their purchase. Using marketing automation, the company was able to recapture the potential buyer’s attention, recover what could have been lost online revenue and make a cross-selling attempt, in one, simple image.

7. Birchbox

A beauty box subscription service, is one of our persona favorites when it comes to simple, effective email marketing campaigns (and we’re not alone). This birthday offer was sent early in the month, tapping into those feel-good emotions before many other companies even get the chance. As we all know, buying is an emotional decision.