The 4 Email Campaigns Every Marketer Must Run

5 min readApr 21, 2023

Email marketing is changing. If you are simply sending an email to everyone on your list, you are missing out on sales.

In fact, even the term email marketing is “old skool.”

Clever marketers are focusing on Marketing Automation.

Forget lists, tags and conditional content are what the smart marketers are using.

Here are four email campaigns that you should be running all the time. If your Email Service Provider (ESP) can’t do these, shop around because they are losing you money.

Most email service providers will provide you with some level of email automation, my preferred tool is ActiveCampaign as I’ve found it to be easy to use and flexible.

Contents

1 1. The Engagement Campaign
2 2. The Click Recency Campaign
3 3. The Re-Engagement Campaign
4 4. The VIP Campaign
5 Share this Image On Your Site
6 Related Post

1. The Engagement Campaign

This is the simplest and most important campaign. Everyone who opens an email should be tagged with an “engaged” tag.

Then ensure that you send 1 or 2 pieces of great content to them each week.

This content shouldn’t be overtly promotional (although I never send an email without a link to one of my products or blog posts).

You should aim to give your subscribers your best free content. By doing this you are simply turning their casual engagement (they opened one or more emails) into a long term relationship.

I always send this as a broadcast, and it’s always topical and focuses on actionable ideas.

2. The Click Recency Campaign

Every time your subscriber clicks a link you should be tagging them with Click Recency (CR) tags. Typical tags are (CR=1-Week) (CR=1-Month) and (CR=3-Months).

Then you set up a rule to remove:

The one-week tag after one week
The one month tag after one month
The three-month tag after three months

Then you’ll know exactly who your most engaged subscribers are (the ones with a one week tag!). These tags are reapplied whenever a link is clicked.

Send your emails to them first and your deliverability will increase for all subsequent segments you mail because email services can see the high open rate your initial emails get.

3. The Re-Engagement Campaign

Anyone who doesn’t have an Engaged tag or a Recency Click tag needs to be re-engaged and brought back into the fold.

Every 3 or 4 days you should set an automated email go out to your unengaged subscribers. As soon as they open any email, the Unengaged tag should be replaced with the Engaged tag and they should start receiving your engagement emails.

I’ve reduced my list of unengaged subscribers from over 800 to under 400 by doing this on a weekly basis.

4. The VIP Campaign

You need to reward your best subscribers. I do this through a VIP list.

Using this list, I reward my buyers’ loyalty by giving 15 minutes of free Skype coaching, access or discounts to products or answering individual questions, etc.

First you need to decide: what are your criteria for getting on the VIP list? It can be opens, clicks or purchases. I use links clicked and products purchased. A click on a link earns 1 point and a purchase earns more depending on the cost.

When a subscriber reaches X number of points, they are moved onto the VIP list. To make this even more powerful, you could add different levels of rewards. For example, silver, gold and platinum levels.

Finally, if you have a person on a VIP list that doesn’t own some of your premium products (tag everyone who buys a product with a unique tag!) give them a free trial or a discount coupon.

These VIPs can and should be your main priority. These are the subscribers that will determine if your business succeeds or fails.

Please share this post with anyone you think could benefit.

For those of you who do best with visuals, here’s an easy-to-read breakdown of the 4 Email Campaigns Every Marketer Must Run.

A note about ESPs: I use Active Campaign and ConvertKit for my marketing automation. With Active Campaign, you get Infusionsoft/Keap levels of marketing at Aweber prices. With Convertkit you get ease of use.

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