All marketing emails are not created equal! Different types of businesses will need different styles of email to engage their customers. Today we're going to talk about the different kinds of marketing emails and try and help you identify what version might be best for your business.

Postcard Emails:

The idea behind a postcard email is to get your point across quickly. You'll want the entire email to be visible without scrolling, and these will typically include more graphics than other email marketing types.  The idea is for the email is to make one or maybe two offers to the recipient and make sure they can see and understand those offers as quickly as possible.  It is important that the text you place into your postcard email is snappy and to the point.  It's also important that the offer(s) you are making will be enticing to your list. Otherwise you may end up with postcard emails that leave your recipients scratching their heads, like Montana's did.

Recipients often prefer postcard emails over other forms of marketing email because they are short and don't take a lot of time to read.  From your perspective they are also easier to produce and send,  but you're only able to promote one or two products or services in a postcard email, so depending on your goals it may not be the best bet.  One of the best uses of this type of email is for retail / consumer driven businesses who can offer promotions to get customers in the door.

Email Catalogs:

The name of this type of email is pretty indicative of what it is: essentially it's a product or service catalog sent via email.  These are almost always longer than the postcard type of email.  Email catalogs are usually used by businesses who have an online store.  If you have ecommerce, you can link the products in your email catalog right to your website where the user can make a purchase if they are interested.

You need to be careful about how much is included via your catalog emails -- if there is too much to download you may run into users giving up on the email before it downloads completely. For an ecommerce application, you'll want to highlight a handful of products that are either very popular or on sale. If the products  are popular AND on sale you'll do even better as you are giving recipients more reasons to buy.  If your goal is to have recipients click through to your website and purchase a product, then it's obviously very important that each product is linked to the product page.

An alternate use for email catalogs is for businesses who have a large product catalog that they send out via print quarterly or twice a year. If you have customers who will agree to receive this catalog via email, you can send an email catalog when your print catalog updates and link the recipient to a PDF download of your full catalog. This will save significant amounts of print costs.

Hopefully you enjoyed part one of this email marketing type overview. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post where we'll go over email newsletters and personal relationship emails.