In this blog post, we’ll dive into the diversity of email marketing content. We’ll overview each type and its purposes as well as offer tips to strengthen your email content strategy.
The content of your email is its foundation and what makes your recipients open it. However, according to surveys, 34% of marketers consider email content creation one of the biggest bottlenecks in the entire email newsletter creation cycle. We decided to explore the topic of email content and, together with guest experts, to review its most common types as well as to offer some tips to make your email content more effective and help it avoid spam folder. Let’s dive right in.
What is email marketing content?
Let’s start with the basics. The content of an email is literally what you put in the email. Essentially, it’s the text, images, videos, attachments, links, and other media that you include in your newsletter. It could also include new product and event announcements, promotions, or weekly or monthly newsletters — just to name a few elements.
When I say that I’m an email marketing specialist, I often hear, “So, you send spam?” It’s hard to explain to people — especially outside North America — what this role actually involves. For me, email marketing content should deliver value and feel like a real conversation with customers. Now, “value” can mean a lot of things, but at its core, it’s about giving people something they need. Each email should feel tailored to what the customer cares about and where they are in their journey with the brand. A well-crafted email sparks a reaction; it’s never just an ad sitting in someone’s inbox.
Email content plays a vital role in your marketing strategy, giving direction to all the emails you send to recipients or prospects throughout their journey with your brand. Regardless of whether it’s a quick auto-response or a detailed promotional email, the length and style of your content can be varied to raise the overall engagement level of your newsletter.
Email marketing content is your direct line to the customer’s attention. With socials, where all brands are shouting all at once, you have to be in the algorithm's good graces, and even those that you like may not see your message. But when they give you their email, the customer/lead gives you an opportunity to communicate 1:1. That comes with the added benefit of trust but also the responsibility that you won’t betray that trust. So, make that email marketing content tailored, relevant, and timely. In my current role, that means sending one monthly newsletter where I combine worthwhile information about different aspects of SaaS, a small selection of our own content, and timely product updates.
Email content is the fuel of your marketing strategy, supporting your brand’s vision, strengthening your values, and delivering thoughts to your email recipients.
Email marketing content is one of the top priorities you need to figure out when creating a campaign calendar. It's a constant process, and there are no days off when it comes to ideation. Why is that? Because if your content doesn't resonate, your email won't be effective. Simple as that. So I always suggest finding ways to keep the ideas bucket full — subscribing to competitors' newsletters, following trends and innovations in the industry, reading blogs, and being part of communities.
Why do you need engaging email marketing content?
While it’s good to have interesting email content, what are its actual benefits and purposes? Let’s take a closer look at why you need to invest your creative resources and time into creating top-tier email content.
Convert leads into sales
The primary purpose of content marketing is to raise brand awareness and bring in sales. Good content not only promotes products and services but also converts potential leads into customers of those products and services. Sales emails are meant to effectively promote new products, content, and offers. A combination of professional creative design and insightful marketing strategies can convert leads into customers via email.
Retain existing audience with engaging content
This benefit is closely related to the previous one. High-quality email content helps maintain the right atmosphere while engaging with the recipient. This approach helps retain current customers, which, in turn, helps maintain a constant flow of sales. Engaging subscribers in this manner can reduce customer turnover and increase the potential for cross-selling or additional sales in your business.
Leverage a platform for promoting brand values and ideas
Email content can not only entertain and sell but also communicate your brand’s vision, aspirations, and values. This would allow recipients to understand the values your brand stands for and decide for themselves whether they resonate with them. Below is a great example of such content, where the email showcases one of the brand’s values: solving a customer problem faced by the brand’s founders.
(Source: Email Love)
Types of email content
So, now that we’ve got the benefits sorted out, it’s time to look at what kind of email content can help us realize these benefits. Each type has its own purpose and impact on your email marketing strategy; but before we dive into the specific types, here is a piece of wisdom that can impact your choice of desired email content:
How content impacts a customer depends on the email’s goal and the brand itself. If you’re delivering pure value, you might share educational content that genuinely helps — even if it links to outside sources. If the goal is to drive a sale, you frame your product as something that can improve their life. When you want to entertain or build a personal connection, humor and storytelling work wonders. Or if you’re addressing pain points, you can show the customer that you understand their challenges and have the perfect solution.
Each approach has a different effect. Educational content builds trust, sales-driven content drives action, and relatable content strengthens loyalty. It’s all about knowing what kind of relationship you want to create at that moment and choosing the right content to make it happen. That’s where segmentation comes in first; you decide who you’re emailing, and then you choose what to send.
Olena Severyn,
Now, let’s get to the main course: the types of email content.
Newsletter content
Despite its name, which is often used as a general term to refer to any email campaign, this type of content has a specific purpose. These emails contain news and updates that keep the brand and its customers on the same page. Do you have a new product line? Has your marketing department released a niche study? Has your brand collaborated with another business? All these pieces of news make up the main content of newsletter emails.
(Source: Template from Stripo)
Working for an email automation tool, I am surrounded by brainy people who handle all the neat automation that has to do with onboarding, engagement, renewals, etc. I also get to talk to the customers by bringing a monthly dose of product and SaaS updates, and it’s been a great way to build rapports with the people on our mailing list. Email automation tools have notoriously long sales cycles, but that gives us a good opportunity to build a brand relationship even before they join us as customers. And our audience tends to respond well to the monthly newsletters. Our newsletters help make the team seem more human, highlight what we have recently accomplished, and always include valuable, actionable links for people in SaaS — be it our own content or content curated from across the web.
Katarina Andrejević,
Marketing content
This type of content is one of the pillars of marketing that brings in leads and sales. At its core, it is content that promotes anything that a business can promote: products, events, collaborations, customer benefits, and so on.
(Source: Stripo template)
Dynamic content
Here, we will delve into the interesting territory of personalized email marketing, which involves dynamic content changes based on the recipient’s data, behavior, and other information. For example, if your brand sells fashion clothing, dynamic content can allow men to see only men’s clothing in emails and women to see only women’s clothing (both options are included in the design and are switched between depending on whose inbox the mail is going to end up in).
Dynamic content that adjusts based on the recipient’s data is one of the best ways to make emails feel relevant. Product-specific cross-sells are a perfect example: If someone bought leggings, a follow-up with recommendations for matching bras feels like a natural extension of their shopping experience. These emails perform exceptionally well because they combine recency (targeting within the first month of purchase) with extreme relevance. Click rates and purchase rates are usually high for these types of emails because they’re designed to match the customer’s immediate interests.
Olena Severyn,
We’ve provided a full-fledged overview of dynamic content and its benefits in our special article about email personalization practices.
Interactive content
This type of content is a powerful tool for increasing email newsletter engagement and is one of the trends in the email marketing industry. At its core, email interactivity refers to actions taken directly within the message, which eliminate the need for recipients to leave their inboxes. Interactive content includes various NPS questionnaires, quizzes, carousels, wheels of fortune, and much more.
(Source: Stripo template)
Creating such content requires technical knowledge or a team of programmers who can implement interactive elements in email newsletters. However, there are simpler ways, such as using the interactive module generator.
This tool allows marketers to generate and implement various interactive elements in their emails regardless of how technology savvy they are. By selecting the desired type of interactive module, you can quickly generate it using a convenient interface and get a full-fledged module with code that you just need to paste into the email. Voilà! Your email now contains interactive content.
Automated content
Email marketers are often swarmed with routine tasks, but there are always tools to automate and optimize them. Automatic emails represent one such tool that carries out the routine tasks involved in email marketing, such as re-engagement mailings, welcome mailings, post-purchase flows, and so on. These are the types of emails that should be sent automatically and without the email marketer’s participation (or with minimal participation).
(Source: Stripo template)
When it comes to automated email sequences, post-purchase flows are seriously underrated. They play a huge role in creating a positive customer experience by guiding customers on using their new product, getting them excited about their purchase, and preventing buyer’s remorse. Plus, they drive conversions. Customers are more likely to buy again if they’ve just bought from you, especially if you continue to engage them thoughtfully.
Pro tip: Exclude customers in the post-purchase flow from your regular email marketing campaigns to avoid overwhelming them and keep the post-purchase experience unique and special.
Olena Severyn,
While marketers generate ideas and work on the other types of content we’ve talked about in this article, automated emails function continuously, saving them precious time that can be used for more important marketing tasks.
Automated emails should be your number one tool for activation, retention, and re-engagement. It’s not unusual for companies to spend a lot of resources in acquiring users but put very little effort into their retention. The very famous metaphor for this is filling up a leaky bucket. The thing is, automated lifecycle campaigns like that take more effort upfront to set up. But then they continuously guide more and more users through different scenarios, stumbling blocks, and upgrades, and they end up proving their worth over and over again. Thankfully, now there are many frameworks that can help even 1-person teams to tackle and establish lifecycle campaigns in a very efficient manner.
Katarina Andrejević,
eCommerce content
This is another type of content that brings in sales and email marketing revenue. It includes emails containing product cards, special offers, and other content that takes you straight from purchase to checkout.
(Source: Stripo template)
Best practices for creating your email content correctly
Each of the above types of content requires its own approach; but we have also put together some tips to help you correctly create effective and relevant content for your newsletters.
Know your target audience
As our expert mentioned earlier, segmentation is a vital part of choosing the email content on which your campaign will be based. Email list segmentation refers to the process of separating your email list into several groups based on recipients’ shared characteristics or behaviors. This allows you to send targeted and personalized emails to each segment rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
Various aspects can be used a basis to segment your email list, including
- basic information about gender, age, and place of residence;
- life cycle (just registered, loyal customer, or inactive for long periods of time);
- behavior on the website and email newsletters (opens, clicks, and more).
So, the big question is — how do you know what content your list wants to see? It's not like you can randomly come up with topics and angles for your emails and expect them to perform. Here's where review mining comes into play. AI has given us a great opportunity to analyze large amounts of data, and this is where you can utilize it. You can find different tools and apps online, or create your own process. All you need is to make it streamlined and aligned with your ideation process.
Here's an example of how it can look like step-by-step:
- Gather your customer reviews with the most characters (those are especially valuable and will give you the most bang for your buck because they can cover many aspects. Don't limit yourself there. You can also have short reviews — AI will do the heavy lifting anyway.
- Compile them into a spreadsheet.
- Create a prompt, so the AI can analyze it for you and show the main recurring points such as (but not only) pain points, solutions, strengths, weaknesses, emotional triggers, things they love and hate, etc.
- Once you have the results, rank them, analyze the top hits, and use those to come up with topics and angles to cover in your email content (this works for email automation as well, and it's highly recommended so you can nail the FUDs (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) your high-intent prospects have when considering your product).
You're just starting out and don't have any customer feedback to do this for? Use the same process as what's available for your competitors.
Stefan Stefanov,
Make it accessible
No matter how interesting and engaging your content is, it will be ineffective for an audience with visual impairments if it is not adapted for them. Excluding a large chunk of your audience is not the best idea because, according to statistics, about 295 million people in the world live with moderate-to-severe visual impairment.
Adapt your emails and content according to this fact. Use the necessary color palettes for colorblind people, choose the most readable fonts and text composition for greater readability for dyslexic individuals, and so on.
We have created an entire email accessibility eBook that examines accessibility as a new trend in email marketing in detail. Together with industry experts, we provide guidance on how to make your email newsletters accessible.
Implement the FOMO strategy
Fear of missing out, or simply FOMO, is a common email marketing strategy used to make your content more engaging.
(Source: Userlist)
The FOMO approach has its perks. But only if we don’t overuse it, make it timely, and communicate the value. If you overuse the whole “last minute” shtick, the leads will grow numb to the next offer, and it won’t really feel like they’re missing out on anything.
Katarina Andrejević,
Statistics suggest that 60% of people make purchases out of FOMO. What is an example of FOMO? If, when looking at a product card, you see that 15 other people are interested in buying the product at that moment, and there are only 5 pieces in stock, you will most likely not postpone the purchase. This happens because of FOMO, and many industry giants and brands use this approach (Amazon, Levi’s, Starbucks, and others).
A thing that's heavily relied on is FOMO. While an effective strategy, it could lead to losing your customers' trust when not executed properly. The most important aspect here is credibility. If you say a certain sale expires or an offer is exclusive, and you don't follow through, you can expect some backlash. That's why I'm not a fan of the item countdown things they add on product pages. Those look fake. It's all about sprinkling the right amount of FOMO and keeping that for the right moment. Also, creativity is a big one here. There are multiple ways you can engineer that. You just need some creativity.
Stefan Stefanov,
By adding various temporary offers, timers, implementing FOMO in the email subject line, and adding other modifiers that make your content temporary, you can actively increase the engagement of your email content.
FOMO can be powerful, but it’s a double-edged sword. The worst thing a brand can do is treat customers like they’re naive, lying about urgency, scarcity, or sale endings and assuming people won’t catch on. Customers are smart and can spot inauthenticity. If the scarcity isn’t real, it’ll hurt the brand in the long run.
For FOMO to work, it has to be genuine. If you say a sale ends tomorrow, make sure it actually ends tomorrow. When FOMO is overused or feels manipulative, customers lose trust and start expecting discounts constantly. This can kill a brand by attracting people who only care about the price — not the brand itself. There’s a place for urgency, but it needs balance — creating real excitement without sacrificing trust.
Olena Severyn,
Test your email content rendering
There’s nothing worse than spending a lot of time designing an email, only to send it out and then discover that it performed poorly because it didn’t render correctly in a particular email client. Any type of email content you create should be thoroughly tested to ensure that it renders consistently across all devices and email clients. This rule is especially critical for interactive content.
Wrapping up
Deciding the email content you want to use to support your campaign is a tricky process, as there are many content types — each with its own functions. Also, your choice depends on the brand goals you are looking to pursue. We hope that this article and the insights of our guest experts will help simplify your decision-making process, so you can pick the perfect content for your next successful email marketing campaign.
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