Email marketing has come a long way since Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, fired off the first mass email in 1978, which led to his being dubbed the Father of Spam.

Since then, creative marketers have come up with an assortment of email marketing campaigns in an effort to earn their way into the elusive inbox.

In order to accomplish that, of course, the right approach has to be taken. To aid you, I will highlight three important types of email marketing that you can use to earn the attention of your customers and prospects.

1. Email Newsletters
The email newsletter is a one-off communication that can be used to send promotional messages, important account information, product updates, and more. Done well, an email newsletter will help build brand recognition and awareness.

In creating an email newsletter, it’s important to consider a variety of factors, including:

* Content length
* Type of information
* Placement of images and text
* Design
* Call to Action

Every audience is unique, so it’s important to experiment with different formats.

2. Transactional Emails
Email receipts, invoices, billing statements, order confirmations are examples of transactional emails. They are triggered by user behavior.

Transactional emails present a fantastic opportunity to turn a routine email into a path back to your website. Email receipts, for example, generate high open and click rates.

> Customers engage with transactional emails such as order, shipping and return/exchange notifications at a much higher rate than they do with promotional and branding-focused campaigns. It is clear from the total open rates that customers open transactional emails repeatedly. The exceptionally high open and click rates underscore the opportunity for companies to cross-sell products and services to highly engaged customers through transactional emails. – Experian

Customers want these emails. It’s up to you to implement calls to action, branding, and readability.

Learn more about Transactional emails.

3. Behavioral Emails
Behavioral emails are targeted messages based on a user’s behavior.

Simply put, what behavioral email boils down to is this: personalization. By getting to know your customers and creating buyer personas, you can tailor your emails to be relevant to where customers are in the buying cycle.

> We have to think about behaviors and the customer’s desire to buy. It’s not about their company or demographic, it’s about where they are in the buying cycle. – John Watton, Silverpop

Here’s a list of 10 types of behavioral emails you can automate:

1. Welcome/Onboarding
2. Browse abandonment
3. Recommendations
4. Product review requests
5. Replenishment/re-orders
6. Password renewal/reminders
7. Free Trial expiry
8. Cross-selling
9. Purchase anniversary renewals
10. Re-engagement

Email marketing software, like Vero, enables emails to be triggered when a customers clicks a button, scroll down a page, read an article or watch a video. And that’s just the beginning. As you collect more data about a user, the emails can get more and more personalized, greatly increasing the chances that customers will engage with your website and buy products or services. For SaaS businesses, behavioral email marketing opens never-before-seen opportunities for upselling and converting clients and prospects.