There’s a ton of information out there about email marketing best practices. But it can feel overwhelming when you’re building an ecommerce email marketing strategy and you’re not sure where to start.
These seven campaign types were the core set in 2016, and they are still the ones that matter in 2026. Understanding them is the first step toward building an effective strategy. Each email campaign type helps you achieve a specific goal, and you have to plan strategically to get the outcome you want.
Here are seven types of email campaigns ecommerce brands should be implement to increase customer loyalty and engagement and boost sales.
Your first post-purchase interaction with a new customer sets the tone for the entire relationship. A welcome email series is an opportunity to introduce your brand to customers and guide them through your offerings.
By sending new customers a series of three to five emails, you can tailor your messaging and progressively build trust. Even though these customers are new, you can still send further personalized welcome campaigns based on their purchasing behaviors.
Using personalized content to engage your customers early on sets the foundation for long-term retention.
Welcome emails receive higher than average open rates and click-throughs, meaning a high potential to gain more revenue. Even if you don’t implement any other email marketing campaigns, make sure you send a welcome series.
You could spend a ton of time planning a great promotion or sale, but it won’t succeed if your email marketing campaign falls flat. Just like the promotion itself, a well-planned promotional email marketing campaign should be creative, cohesive, and purposeful.
The key is to develop a series of emails, strategically linking them together. Each email should build on the previous one, guiding the customer through a journey. Maybe the first introduces new products, the second highlights seasonal promotions, and the third offers an exclusive discount.
And remember that personalizing and customizing your customers’ journeys will always create more engagement (and it’s even easier now with AI tools). Thoughtful sequencing and consistent messaging create momentum, keeping your customers interested and more likely to click and convert.
Seasonal email campaigns offer a powerful opportunity to connect with your customers, driving both engagement and sales. Gift-giving holidays like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Diwali and seasonal events like Back-to-School, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday create natural opportunities for ecommerce brands to build excitement.
By planning early, you can also build anticipation, offering sneak peeks, exclusive previews, or countdowns to major sales events. This helps generate excitement, keeps your brand top of mind, and encourages customers to keep checking in, maximizing engagement and conversions.
By thoughtfully planning your seasonal email campaigns, you can not only capture your customers’ attention but also turn the holiday period into a revenue driver.
With automated email sequences, you can have a user’s action trigger a series of targeted and relevant emails.
Maybe they clicked a link in one of your promotional emails, or they abandoned their cart after browsing your site. Or perhaps they engaged with your brand in another way by leaving a review or reading certain content on your site. All these actions can be triggers to initiate an email campaign tailored to their behavior and preferences.
Email open rates double with triggered campaigns compared to campaigns that aren’t tied to specific customer actions.
Maropost can help you build personalized automated email journeys with an intuitive drag-and-drop tool. To learn how, click here.
A well-crafted newsletter is one of the best ways to build and maintain customer relationships. For ecommerce brands, newsletters can offer more than just promotions. They are an opportunity to provide value through regular updates, tips, and insights that customers want.
A strong newsletter prioritizes educating, entertaining, or inspiring your audience. Whether it’s offering tips, seasonal advice, or a peek behind the scenes, the goal is to make each email feel relevant and helpful. This builds a relationship over time, rather than just pushing sales.
Consistency is key. By showing up regularly with useful content, your brand will stay top of mind without being intrusive. Newsletters can boost loyalty and turn casual shoppers into repeat customers, and they can even grow your audience as subscribers share content with others. In short, newsletters keep your brand connected to customers by offering value beyond the sale.
Abandoned cart emails are one of the most effective types of automated email campaigns for ecommerce brands. When a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, it doesn’t have to be the end of the road. Regardless of why they left, nudging them with an incentive may be enough to encourage them to complete their order.
Abandoned cart email campaigns tap into a customer’s existing interest and intent, making them more likely to convert. In fact, abandoned cart emails typically see higher open rates and conversion rates compared to other types of campaigns. Setting up abandoned cart emails is within reach for even growing brands, and the benefits are well worth the effort.
Every ecommerce brand loses email subscribers. In fact, it’s common to see about 25-30% of your email list churn each year. Even still, you can re-engage subscribers who have gone silent.
A re-engagement email campaign is designed to reconnect with subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in at least six months or so. You may either bring them back as active subscribers, or you may remove them from your list. By doing this, you can keep your email list healthy and maintain your brand’s reputation.
A re-engagement campaign is about giving your inactive subscribers another chance to reconnect, not cutting them loose. Maybe they’ve lost interest, or maybe they simply haven’t seen your emails lately. Either way, this campaign is your opportunity to remind them of the value you bring.
By running regular re-engagement campaigns, you can keep your email list fresh, protect your deliverability, and ensure your emails are reaching people who truly want to hear from you.
Maropost email and SMS marketing platform allows growing ecommerce brands to easily build highly customized, AI-powered customer journeys so you get more out of your email marketing efforts. To learn more about how Maropost can help you get higher deliverability and conversions from your email marketing campaigns, get a demo.