4 Unique Email Marketing Examples for Your Next Campaign

Email marketing remains one of the most important components of a complete and successful marketing campaign. It’s estimated that by 2025 there will be 4.6 billion email users worldwide! How can you forsake or diminish the power of emails when the number of users has kept growing since its inception?

Besides, email marketing offers you unprecedented control over the whole sales journey, as it creates a more intimate and personalized relationship with your customers.

So yeah, you better start thinking about crafting that email campaign of yours.

To make it easier, I’ve gathered four examples to inspire you for your next email marketing campaign.

Let’s take a look at what the world of email marketing has to offer!

*TLDR: Investing in email marketing is essential. Here, you can find campaign examples to help you craft the best campaign for your business. You can find examples of how to create the right mood — like FlixBus does — in an email and transport your customers immediately where you want them to be. Next is an example from BookDepository; Learn how to use your creativity for niche products and how to hit a specific type of audience by crafting a fun and simple email. In the third example, I remind you why it’s good to capitalize on limited-time offers and show you an example from the well-known publisher NYRB. Ultimately, it’s all about motivation — see how the fitness app FitOn does its best by including its exercises in emails. *

1. Get Your Clients In the Right Mood

A good marketing campaign should be able to transport you to whatever or wherever they’re offering instantly. That’s exactly what happens in this FlixBus campaign.

FlixBus is a very successful transportation company that offers low-budget long-distance and short-distance bus and train services.

So how do they do it?

Well, first, take a look at the subject line below. FlixBus doesn’t ask you whether you’re ready for your next trip or not. It immediately (but politely) invites you to choose the best seat possible for you.

Once you open the email, you will see this: Traveling can be stressful. To help alleviate this, FlixBus gives you four simple reasons why you should reserve your seat. Each is worded carefully to help you to make decisions and not create more stress. They do this by including many questions to get you to think about how you want to spend your travel time and why booking can help you get the most from your trip.

It also includes a CTA (call to action) button that immediately takes you to the page where you can book your trip.

At the end of the email copy, they include a list of attractive destinations nearest to your location, and the photos double as links to book a trip to each one. Those are some pretty eye-catching CTA buttons.

And that’s it. Pretty simple but very effective for getting you in the mood for traveling!

2. Be Extra Creative for Your Niche Products

If you think this subject line is creepy, think again. Context is everything. At a second glance, this sounds so much like a riddle, right? Well, that’s because it is.

This is a subject line for an email from BookDepository, an online bookseller’s site. The email copy contains book offers for a specific book niche: jokes and riddles books.

The email copy is not very long, just like the subject matter it advertises, but it has everything it needs to have. First, there’s a colorful, fun picture with a very eye-catching dominant purple color and laughing books.

The copy below helps tie everything together with a few well-placed word puns like “bound to make you smile” and “Treat your-shelf”. This keeps up the fun atmosphere and reinforces that they are qualified to pick out great jokes & riddles books for you to buy.

Just below the text, there is the CTA button that brings you right to the book category on BookDepository’s website.

Simple copy that does a great job of marketing a niche subject. Sometimes less is more, and all you need are a couple of good sentences and a cute picture to complement them.

3. Capitalize on Limited Time Offers

Limited-time offers are marketing tactics to make your customers feel a real sense of FOMO. If they don’t act fast, the offer will disappear, and they will regret missing out.

NYRB’s Visual Delight

NYRB (New York Review of Books) has a great weekend limited-time offer that also puts an accent on the visual.

The subject line is just as it should be — precise and simple. It tells you when the limited-time offer ends and the discount you get. The email copy is also pretty concise and says just what the buyers need to hear. But, first, you get to see all the pretty book covers, which are minimalistic but all in different colors. You can also click on them, and you’ll be immediately taken to NYRB’s website.

After the crisp visuals, you have information about the type of discount NYRB offers. It says when it ends and that free shipping is available on orders above 50$. Also, the discount tiers depend on whether you buy two, three, or four books; you can get 20%, 30%, and 40% off, respectively.

I doubt any book lovers will stay indifferent after reading that. However, what’s also interesting, is that just below that, you’re also able to see the titles and the poets that are part of the offer, so you don’t immediately have to go to the website — you have them in the email copy itself. One great detail is that you’re immediately redirected to the book on NYRB’s website by pressing any of the names.

Codeacademy’s Classic Limited-Time Offer

Sometimes less is more. That is the case with Codeacademy’s limited-time discount on annual membership. The subject line is pretty simple and straightforward - it tells you there’s not much time to make up your mind about a 50% discount. Now, 50% is quite a lot, and paired with the “last chance” phrase, naturally, you’d probably want to open it. As you can see, when it comes to a limited-time offer like this, there’s no need for too much content. All you need is:

• Striking visuals - and here that is achieved with the vibrant blue color, which is nicely complimented with the relaxed workspace image;
• Information on when the offer starts and ends - or just when it ends;
• Information on what the offer is about and, again, how big the discount is;
• If there is a promo code, then info about the promo code that subscribers can use;
• And, of course, in the end, there must be a CTA button - in this case, it’s Join Pro, and there’s another one, smaller and less visually accentuated (because it’s secondary to the email’s main purpose) that says Join Pro Student.

And that’s it, folks, all you need for a limited-time offer are just several elements in order to make it work like a charm.

4. Motivate Your Customers

Motivation is the driving force behind everything that we do. When you’re in the sports business, that’s even more true. But motivation wanes from time to time, which is all the more reason to remind your customers why they’ve started in the first place.

FitOn’s Call to Excercise

Here’s an excellent example from FitOn, a digital fitness platform offering countless free exercises on its app and site.

Their latest subject line reads: Simple, motivating, personal. It’s a nice idea to capitalize on the end of the summer holiday season in order to motivate people to get back to the healthy habits they may have abandoned.

And their email copy, phew! It’s a mini catalog of exercises to get back in shape. Because, hey, just telling you about it won’t cut it. People won’t just say to themselves, “oh yeah, I do need to exercise again and feel better about myself,” and then go do that. They’re more likely to see the email, nod their heads, and go on with their day.

Simply put, FitOn doesn’t just remind you.

They give you exercise links inside the email with clever descriptions to ease you back into healthy habits. These are followed by the strong CTA, START NOW.

And that’s it! I mean, who can resist these beautiful, happy, smiling, exercising people?

Adidas Runtastic’s Meal Planners

While we’re still at the sports stuff, another great example when it comes to motivation is Adidas’ Runtastic program, specifically made for people who run. This is their subject line, focusing on one of the most important parts of being fit - diet and meal planning, which, truth be told, can often be a bore. The subject line is simple, easy to understand, and most importantly, makes you read further because who doesn’t want meal plans made easy?! Inside the email content, you can find information on how to find out more about this subject. The tone is helpful, kind, and pleasant, while the text points you to the CTA button LEARN MORE HERE. But, this is not where the email ends. Just below, you can find two other CTA buttons leading you to a list of healthy food, so they can show you just a glimpse of what you can find on their website.

The email ends with a SHOP ADIDAS CTA button which leads you to Adidas’ store. A brilliant move when you realize you need new sporting equipment in combination with that healthy meal-planning lifestyle!

5. Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience means sending them curated content that they’ll actually find useful. This is done through email personalization and can be applied to all kinds of businesses. Take a look at these two examples from streaming services.

Netflix

Netflix, a giant among streaming services, certainly knows its audience. One of their email marketing strategies is that they send curated emails to their subscribers informing them about a new show or film that might be of interest to them. This is usually how the subject line goes: Inside the email, you can find short info about the show, alongside still images. But what is especially smart about it is that just below, you can find the CTA button Play, as well as My list, so you can either play the show right away or add it to your personalized list and check it out afterward. What’s more, if you want to find out more about it, you can watch the trailer provided in the same email.

This is a very good move if you’re in the video and streaming services. When sending movie or show recommendations to clients, make sure to send a video of it inside the email, preferably a trailer, so that interested customers can engage right away with your content should they want to find out more. And, of course, in the end, there are other Recently Added show recommendations and another CTA button which will bring you to Netflix’s main browsing page. If your subscribers end up not being interested in your suggestion, then they might want to find something else on your site, right?

MUBI

Another, a more pared-down and minimalistic example of sending curated content is MUBI’s email movie recommendations. MUBI is an arthouse-film-oriented streaming site, and production and distribution company.

They usually promote a Film of the Day and send their subscribers emails about it. Their email subject line contains the director’s name alongside the title. The email content is visually pleasing and minimalistic. It contains a short description of the film, and, similarly to Netflix’s CTA buttons, has Watch Now and Watchlist options. You can also just press on the video that’s embedded within the email and it’ll lead you straight to the film.

As you can see, this is a more minimalistic version of Netflix’s email marketing, but it still works wonders, especially because of its Film of the Day tactic. With a few words, they manage to paint a picture of the atmosphere of the film and spark your interest. And if it’s done well, sometimes that’s all you need in email marketing.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are so many ways you can craft your email marketing campaign. These four examples are just a fraction of what’s out there, so if you are struggling to craft your next campaign, some more inspiration is just a short search away.

In any case, I hope these were useful to you and that you can turn to them during your next efforts to build the best email marketing campaign for your business.

Cheers to that!