7+ Best Email Marketing Campaigns to Copy for Your Business

Everybody needs the inspiration to do better in their jobs. And whether you are an email marketing rock star or a fresh newbie – it is always beneficial to learn from the best email marketing campaigns so you can improve your own content.

If you wonder how fantastic eCommerce brands are achieving success with email marketing day after day, then this article is for you.

From world-class copywriting to eye-popping design, I’ve gathered the best email marketing campaign examples I can find to inspire your future email campaigns.

In this article, you can find:

• Top-notch email marketing strategies to make your emails read until the end;
• The smartest email workflows to keep subscribers in loop;
• Brilliants way to sneak into prospects’ inboxes;
• And more.

Let’s start learning to see how you can take their ideas and implement into your email marketing campaigns.

What is an email marketing campaign?

An email marketing campaign is the distribution of planned content via email with specific goals to accomplish for an organization. It’s important that the recipients of an email campaign have opted in to receive the content and that each email offers something valuable.

Here are some different purposes that your email campaign can set out to accomplish:

• Awareness - Not everyone who subscribes to your email is ready for a purchasing decision. Email marketing is your tool to stay top of mind of the audience while providing educational content that is relevant to their needs.

• Revenue generation - Email marketing campaigns can be a powerful tool to promote cross-sell and upsell opportunities to your existing customers. Your campaigns can also capture a sales conversion from those who are close to a purchasing decision. (For example, “abandon cart” email campaigns aim to recover lost sales conversions.)

• Traffic generation - Email marketing campaigns can be an effective promotion channel to drive traffic to high-value content you created on your website.

• Lead nurturing - As you gain awareness from the audience, you may also consider using emails to identify the leads with the highest purchase intent and deliver conversion-focused content that drives them toward a sale (or toward becoming more sales-ready).

The usage for an effective email marketing campaign is endless and limited only to your imagination. In a world where most online users have an email for themselves, there are countless ways to use email marketing for your advantages.

To quickly create an email marketing campaign and automate your email workflows, check out AVADA Email Marketing - a dedicated software that lets you design, run, and analyze your email campaigns to the fullest. The app is free to start using and you only need to pay when your email list exceeds 1000 contacts. Many of the email campaigns in this article can be replicated by AVADA Email Marketing as well.

Read more: How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign that Highly Converts

7+ Best Email Marketing Campaigns

Now, let’s grab some inspiration from these masterful email marketing campaigns below. They not only look good but deliver fantastic results with their content and message, eventually elevating the brand’s experience. That is why you can even copy some of these campaigns for your business if you don’t know where to start. Let’s check them out.

#1 - Function of Beauty

At the start, we have an email marketing campaign from Function of Beauty, which lets you talk to your hair. Sounds weird enough, but it is actually a brilliant campaign.

For the subject line, Function of Beauty begins with “based on your #hairgoals, we recommend..”. With this unique tone, the promotional email from the company can stand out in the subscribers’ inboxes.

The email looks like an apology letter that is written on your behalf to your hair. It addresses a pain point that resonates with many people and the company’s main audience - consumers with fragile hairs.

In this cleverly designed email marketing campaign, readers would feel the promise to take better care of hair. And the solution to do this is already there as well, using Function of Beauty’s products (not that much of a twist, I know).

In the rest of the email, you would see a headline for “Meet Custom Hair Mask,” then the company asserts what your wants and needs are: “You want hydration, you need a hair mask”. Follow up is a call to action button “Order Now” that sends readers to a hair quiz landing page where you can create and purchase your customized hair mask.

With a fun approach to the promotional email campaign, Function of Beauty explains the problem they can solve in a memorable and creative way that any consumer with damaged hair can resonate with.

#2 - Brooklinen

It”s a question all email marketers have wondered:

How can you sell with an email campaign when most customer inboxes are already full of promotional emails? Just take a look at your own inboxes and you would understand why the question is so relevant.

Brooklinen solved the problem with one word: curiosity. The subject line of their email was just simple as: “Hmm… what’s this?”. It’s almost impossible to resist a subject line with that much curiosity-triggering. As a result, you open the email and immediately see this:

Similar to many good email campaign examples, Brooklinen uses GIFs to keep their promotional emails interesting. The ripping effect of the email also adds more curiosity into the email, just like what the subject line did.

With an excellent copy of “Something big is coming” and a GIF image unwrapping itself before the reader, Brooklinen further draws the audience in by teasing their upcoming sale.

Note that the email doesn’t let you see the entire discount amount, but they make sure you are interested enough to check back again in the next email. Brooklinen even goes beyond that by asking you to remember the sale off day: they invite you to set a reminder.

When you set a reminder by using the two suggested options of Google Calendar or Outlook, Brooklinen’s mystery sale date is added to your calendar. With this fantastic email, Brooklinen sets expectations and creates excitement about their upcoming sale.Also, they keep their brand top of consumers’ minds with Black Friday just nearby their sale off event.

#3 - Wool and the Gang

We naturally like people who have similar traits to us. More than that, when we get to know and like someone, we are more likely to say “yes” to their requests. For brands, this is a key lesson to be more appealing to the target customers.

Brands that speak their target buyer’s language evoke a sense of positive feeling which helps them persuade customers more easily.

Wool and the Gang is one brand who knows this well. That is why their email marketing campaign starts with a subject line that resembles a friendly conversation-starter: “Plan tonight?”

What looks like a chat message from your best buddies turns out to be a subtle promotional email. When opening the email from Wool and the Gang, you are greeted with a GIF to imitate a conversation between two friends.

If you’re the target audience of Wool and the Gang, this iMessage design is likely familiar to you. Millennials or gen Z use the chat box to connect with all of their friends, so they would immediately pick up the visual cue.

And in case if you’re interested in knitting, the company reminds you of JOMO (the joy of missing out ), simply by forgetting about plans, being at home, and spending the night on your hobbies.

By speaking the buyer’s language and associating their brand with positive emotions, Wool and the Gang creates more demand for their products. The conversation is really smart too since the company introduces knitting as a fun and joyful activity that people can happily do while forgetting about other activities. As an introvert, I can heavily relate.

Next, the email introduces a how-to video to help you recreate the wool jumper from the conversation above. After creating excitement around the brand, Wool and the Gang recommends wool products that you may enjoy.

With a conversational tone, Wool and the Gang resonates with their audience in a unique way and triggers their JOMO by using their products as a solution. Not many brands can make knitting exciting, but Wool and the Gang surely handled it well with their email marketing campaign.

#4 - Sweetgreen

This salad company Sweetgreen has a fresh and absolutely stunning email design that I think any marketers would want to try copying for their email marketing campaign.

“Green looks good on you!” is nothing short but true for this brand, and the email encourages readers to make an order with just a few steps! With mouth-watering images of the dishes in their email, readers are likely to get attracted and click on the CTA button of “Taste the summer.”

Beside that, when you unlock The Green Status as a Sweetgreen member, you get an email which alerts that you just unlocked some perks. One of the special perks is a free salad on the store for your birthday! So, if any reader wants a big quinoa bowl, the email lets them know it is time to treat themself!

This email design is easy to replicate with our app AVADA Email Marketing, so you can hop into the app and check out the premade templates to apply for your brand.

#5 - Boxycharm

It’s no secret that eye-catching subject lines are what get your emails opened. But how can you people read your email all the way to the end?

With billions of emails sent and received every day, users simply don’t have time to read every email in their busy inboxes. In other words, despite spending hours creating your emails, they can still go unnoticed even with a fantastic subject line.

This is even truer if your campaign consists of long emails that introduce several products at once. By using visual cues, your emails can guide readers to the most critical part of your content and nudge them to read throughout your emails, even if they are long.

Evoking curiosity with the email’s content is the best way to achieve that. For an example, let’s look at Boxycharm’s email campaign.

Coupled with the scarcity-infused subject line of “LAST CHANCE: This box will be gone forever”, the company promotes the new products in September with their email. An interesting touch is that Boxycharm uses several animated arrows to direct the readers’ attention throughout the email.

Knowing that we all love surprises, Boxycharm holds the reader’s attention with the promise of a wonderful surprise at the bottom of the email. And when you scroll down, Boxycharm delivers the reward matching its word.

They give a limited-time freebie that readers can claim when they buy Boxycharm’s products with each cart’s value over $185.

In this email, Boxycharm’s strategy is to first highlight the scarcity of their products then focus on the value the audience can get upon purchasing them. Finally, they offer a time-bound, free gift to convert subscribers.

The best part is, the visual cues help you read through all of the email, expecting for a beneficial message.

You don’t really need to draw an arrow to get your email read until the end. But you can tease your surprise gift or set expectations about the reward of reading your emails with the introduction copy, and you will successfully evoke subscribers’ curiosity.

#6 - Rifle Paper Co.

Not all subscribers are ready to buy from your company even when they often open your emails. That’s a fact.

Some will need more persuasion, which means follow-up emails and maybe a bit of discount. One challenge facing many email marketers, however, is to write follow up emails on a sales campaign but not being pushy.

Luckily, Rifle Paper Co. shows us a solution to that problem with their email marketing campaign:

With the subject line of “New items added to our sale page”, the company informs readers that they now have new products on sale. Note that they don’t use pushy words like “last chance.’ or “hurry up.”

The email is a valid excuse to follow up on the Christmas sale campaign, especially for consumers during the busy holiday season. Scrolling down the email, you would find more recommended product categories that you might want to browse for some holiday gifts.

Rifle Paper Co. knows that it requires more than one email to convert subscribers into customers. And with this subtle approach in using follow-up emails, they have another chance to impress consumers even if they couldn’t grab their attention the first time.

#7 - Tuft & Needle

If you’re an eCommerce email marketer, reducing cart abandonment is probably one of your primary goals. So combining timely popups with email campaigns to combat cart abandonment is likely one of your strategies.

But, if so, you also know that it’s hard to convince consumers to complete their purchases and sound not too salesy at the same time.

Tuft & Needle’ email marketing campaign has the solution for you: A fantastic abandoned cart email flow.

When you leave your cart on the Tuft & Needle website, you first get an email with the subject line of “The spookiest bedtime story ever…” Who can say this is a promotional email?

In the first part of the cart abandonment email flow, Tuft & Needle joins the conversation with the consumers by acknowledging that mattress shopping can suck. (This is coming from a mattress brand, keep that in mind).

After positioning themselves as the leader of the mattress eCommerce market, they ask the question that many readers have in their heads: How can I make the right choice? Next, they compare their reader to the one million customers to show a social proof that they can serve well.

In the middle of the email, readers see a warning line with a hyperlink on it: Don’t buy a mattress not reading this first. When clicking on the link, readers are sent to a landing page where the company further discusses the 12 reasons you may put off buying a new mattress, until seeing Tuft & Needle.

A few days later, Tuft & Needle sent the second email of their cart abandonment flow. In this email, the company highlights the fair pricing and its transparency. They invite readers to another landing page with a sentence that shows they made this page to prove they have nothing to hide. On this landing page, Tuft & Needle compares its perks to their competitors, such as Lessa and Casper, in a transparent way.

In the final part of their cart abandonment email sequence, the company sends you an email with the headline: “You should sleep on big decisions.” With a hard-to-disagree statement, Tuft & Needle grabs the reader’s attention and makes them open the email.

As a final attempt to convince consumers to revisit their abandoned carts and purchase, Tuft & Needle focuses on a promise of satisfaction guarantee. If readers still wonder if they should buy or not, the company reassures them by showing how easy it is to return the mattress.

Overall, this is a brilliant abandoned cart email workflow to convert consumers. You can easily replicate Tuft & Needle persuasive email strategy by following these three steps:

• Address possible objections in consumers’ minds;

• Show how different your service or products are from your competitors’;

• Ease consumers’ minds with your satisfaction guarantee.

Our app AVADA Email Marketing also has premade abandoned cart email workflows that you can try for your campaign, so check it out. Better yet, you can include the power of SMS marketing into your workflow to increase the reach and performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Final words

Many elements go into creating a fantastic email marketing campaign. But don’t let that fact hold you down. Focus on providing friction-free experiences and relevant messages for your recipients with tailored ideas, experiments, and optimizations..

If you’re new to email marketing, consider focusing on one single element such as testing, design, or copy and improve a focus area with each email campaign.

And if you’re already sending email marketing campaigns, look for ways to improve and try to get more in depth with additional testing tactics or enhance the branding and design.

When in doubt, take another look at the best email marketing campaigns above for new ideas and try for a better result. Thanks for reading!