7 Types of Emails You Should Be Sending

Hey Party Animals!

We recently talked a lot about email marketing in the Party Business Think Tank group and I wanted to expand a bit more on this for all of you today.

In previous posts, I highlighted the MANY benefits of email marketing. Like how 99% of consumers surveyed check their personal email every single day, and over 50% of them admit to checking their personal email more than 10 times a day!

When you email someone, unlike on the Facebook timeline, you have a chance to take over 100% of that person’s screen and attention… if you do it right!

So, before I jump in and talk about the 7 different types of emails we should all be sending to our clients. I first wanted to emphasize one simple thing you can do to make sure you’re doing this emailing thing “right”.

And that is… Make your emails look like an email that an actual person would send to another actual person.

I don’t know about you, but when I get an email that is highly stylized and formatted with colors and pictures and so on, I assume they are trying to sell me something and move on.

To be honest, I know for a fact it’s not just me that feels this way. In my own experience the results I got from emails I was sending out skyrocketed after I switched to simple text-only emails.

And if that’s not enough for you, according to a study done by Hubspot, while 64% of people SAY they prefer emails with mostly images, rather than mostly text… the results told a very different story. Every single time they tested mostly text emails vs mostly image emails, the ones that were mostly text won with statistical significance. (See Hubspot’s report)

The great news is that not only are plain-text emails more effective, they’re also way easier and quicker to put together!

So, as I said, today I wanted to take a few minutes to review with you the 7 different types of emails every one of us should be sending to our clients and leads.

Here they are:

1. Transactional Emails

These are emails you send to clients and leads as part of your business procedures and processes.

Emails like:

Confirmation that you received their request
Connecting about available dates/times
Sending Confirmation forms and reminders
Sending Pre-event reminders
Sending Post-event thank you emails
And so on

The big thing about Transactional emails is to be really intentional about what these are and what they should be for you. A mistake I made for you years was not planning these out carefully. So, every time a request came in, I was re-writing my responses to that client. Eventually I realized that if I just saved a simple script my life would be easier AND I’d be sending better responses too!

I recently partnered with Adam at Party Pro Manager on a project where we created a utility you can all go to browse a collection of different Transactional Emails you may want or need and can copy and paste these for your own use.

While we’re on the topic of Party Pro Manager, I should mention that one thing this system does EXTREMELY well is make it incredibly easy for you to save and send your Transactional Emails. For example, when it’s time to send out your pre-event reminders to clients with parties coming up this weekend… you can filter your event list to see only those parties, then select everyone from that list that you’d like to send a pre-event reminder email to and fire off that email to everyone with the click of a button. Best of all, it’ll be using a saved template that will personalize every email with the name of your contact, throw in their party date and time and can even personalize it with the birthday child’s name in there too! It’s pretty awesome!

But even without Party Pro Manager, you can and should be creating a library of Transactional Emails you send out to make your life easier and your responses better.

2. Offer Emails

These are emails where you focus on a single special offer to your email list. Make sure to focus on one message with one simple action for your clients to take. If you clutter the email with too many offers, people won’t take any action at all.

3. Survey Emails

Stop guessing what your clients want and start asking. Ask about services you should offer, ways to improve, and so on. Plus, when people are involved in the process they become more loyal to you and your company.

4. “Newsletter” Emails

But to be honest, “newsletter” is just a dirty word to most people now… So, let’s call these Routine Value Emails instead.

These are the emails that go out on a routine schedule, usually monthly. Of all the emails you send, these are the ones where giving it a nice format and using images may not be the worst thing. Most people use these emails to just make a bunch of boring announcements about themselves. I encourage you to find ways to flip these around and provide value first and then add a few announcements below. For example, if you are a facepainter, you may offer a fun crafting / painting project idea at the beginning and then follow it up with events you’ll be at this month. Something like that.

5. Free Gift Emails

This is an email you send out from time to time with something free and of value. Could be some kind of free downloadable PDF. Or maybe a free video greeting offer to anyone that wants one. No sales pitch, just something nice and free.

6. Announcement Emails

These don’t have to go out on a schedule, just when you have something big to announce. Do you have a new service launching soon that you want to share or maybe you’re hiring and want to announce that?

7. Celebration Emails

These aren’t your celebrations though… those would be an Announcement Email, like when your company celebrates its 5 year anniversary, that’s an announcement. These are for celebrations or milestones your clients or leads are having. It could be the 1-year anniversary since you first worked with them. Or their 5th time attending one of your events. Or an upcoming birthday in their family. Celebrate with them and offer them something special for the unique milestone.

Ok, so that’s seven!

What types of emails are you sending now? Which of the seven do you plan to add to your strategy this week?

Party on!!