Create High‑Performing Email Marketing Campaigns (with Examples)

What is an email campaign?

An email campaign is a series of marketing efforts that are sent via email to multiple people at once using reliable email service providers. The goal of an email campaign is to entice the potential customers to purchase a product or service or to learn more about the business. An email campaign will contain valuable information that is intended specifically for the recipient, making customer engagement a key priority.

Email campaigns can be a great way to grow your business, drive traffic, and increase sales– as long as you write them in the right way and use effective email templates. With good email campaigns, you can build trusting relationships with your subscribers and keep them engaged with personalized content they feel is relevant. Email campaigns also make it easy to collect customer data about your subscribers to see what’s working and what isn’t.

The best email marketing campaigns will contain the following qualities:

• Good subject line: Your subject line will be your first impression, so it needs to be good. The subject line should grab the reader’s attention right off the bat and entice them to keep reading.
• Easy to read: No one wants to read an email that takes longer than a couple of minutes to get through. Your email marketing campaigns should be simple, straight to the point, and easy to read.
• Mobile-friendly: A lot of people open up their emails on their phones, so it’s crucial that your email marketing campaigns are mobile-friendly. Not having a mobile-friendly email campaign can seriously hurt the efficacy of your campaigns.
• Relevant: The content in your email marketing campaign should be relevant to the person you’re sending it to. Once you figure out your brand’s demographic, creating relevant content should be easy. In addition to relevant content, the content should also be personalized, which makes the email more meaningful for the recipient and encourages them to keep reading.
• Value: At the end of the day, your email campaigns are being sent as a way to entice someone to buy a product or service or learn more about your business. So, you need to include in the email what the recipient will get out of buying that product or service. The email needs to provide value to its recipients to encourage them to do what you’re asking.

How emails impact your marketing strategy

Most businesses have multiple marketing strategies. They may already do paid advertising and social media marketing, or they may do referral programs and content marketing supported by newsletter campaigns. But regardless of the marketing strategies that you choose, it’s important to incorporate emails into them alongside other marketing channels as part of a broader set of marketing tools.

Email campaigns are one of the most effective ways to communicate information about your brand and sell your product or service with strong conversion rates. The right email marketing strategies generate more sales and drive traffic to your business’s website through well crafted email automation workflows. Emails are a more direct way to connect with your audience and build a relationship with them that’s based on customer loyalty and credibility. If your customers can get into contact with you directly, they’re more likely to continue to support your business.

You can do endless things with emails. You can tell a story about your brand, you can sell products or services, you can share important news. Emailing is an effective way to improve your marketing strategy and reach your business goals.

Executing an email marketing campaign

So now that you’re more familiar with what email marketing campaigns are and why they’re important, let’s discuss how to actually execute a campaign. You can also use email campaign templates to help you create the best email marketing campaigns for your business.

Identify your audience

To get started with email marketing campaigns, you first need to identify your audience through proper customer segmentation. If you don’t know who your audience is, you won’t know who to send these campaigns to. To do this, you need to thoroughly understand your brand’s demographic so that you can create personalized recommendations in emails that they’re more likely to open.

A subscriber is much more likely to open an email that they feel was created just for them then they are to open an email that looks like it was sent out to hundreds of other people. Take some time to properly identify your target audience before moving on with any of the other steps, leveraging customer data to guide your decisions.

" Not everyone will be interested in the same products/services/topics. By hyper-segmenting audiences, emails become more personalized, more relevant and therefore more engaged with - delivering a higher ROI on email channels. "

                  — Megan Gianvito, CMO, Adapting Social

Understand your goals

Once you’ve figured out who you’re sending your email campaigns to, then you need to figure out why you’re sending them. In order for your email campaigns to actually be successful, you need to clearly define the goal of why you’re sending them. Your goals can be to improve brand awareness, generate sales, increase website traffic, or anything else that you think is important for your business. Once you understand your goals, actually writing the email campaign should be much easier.

Figure out your email campaign type

There are various types of email campaigns, so you need to figure out which one works for your goals and target audience. Some of the different types of email campaigns include:

• New product announcement email
• Event invitation
• Re-engagement emails
• Promotional campaigns
• Welcome emails

These are just some of the many different types of email campaigns there are, so it’s important to choose one that is best for your business and will help you accomplish your goals.

After you’ve decided on an email campaign type, then you need to actually write the content. Make sure your content is relevant and accurate. You want your subscribers to be interested in what you have to say.

Send your emails at the right time

So, your email campaign is written and you’ve gone over it a couple of times to make sure it’s completely error-free. Now comes the exciting part: actually sending the emails. But before you can send out your email campaign, you need to figure out the best time to send it. You don’t want to send out an email too early or late in the day, as that will hurt your chances of it actually being opened. Keep in mind, some studies show that the best times to send emails are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 10 am, 2 pm, or 8 pm.

5 Examples of Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

1. TravelOnline: From Inbox Overload to a 66% Open Rate Lift Through Smart Segmentation

Australian travel agency TravelOnline had a subscriber list of more than 300,000 and was sending up to 6 million emails per month — blasting every deal to every contact, up to six times per week. While this approach once drove bookings, large portions of their list had stopped opening emails entirely, and engaged subscribers were tuning out. Marketing Manager Sheri Adamson partnered with Mailchimp's Australia Customer Success team and pivoted to a segmentation-first strategy: warming up domain deliverability one provider at a time (starting with Gmail, which accounted for over 40% of contacts), using tags and engagement analytics to identify active vs. dormant subscribers, and shifting to a more deliberate send cadence. Within just two months, the results were dramatic — open rates rose by 66%, unsubscribes dropped by 38%, and overall email ROI improved by 13%.

2. Willful: 18x Conversion Rate Lift with Personalized Automation Flows

Canadian online estate-planning company Willful faced a challenge familiar to many service businesses: customers would start a meaningful process — in this case, writing their will — and then pause mid-way, often to consult family or reflect on decisions. Without automation, re-engaging these customers consistently was impossible. Willful solved this by building segmented, stage-based automation flows in Mailchimp, using API integration to pull real-time behavioral data from their website and trigger personalized follow-up emails tailored to exactly where each customer had stalled. The results were transformative: automated campaigns now account for 40% of all Mailchimp-driven revenue, open rates for automated emails are 1.7x higher than bulk sends, and the conversion rate for automated campaigns is 18x that of mass communications.

3. Ideal Image: SMS + Email Omnichannel Strategy Delivers 2x ROI and 30% More Bookings

Ideal Image, a leading North American aesthetic treatment company with over 140 locations and 1.3 million subscribers, found that time-sensitive offers like same-day appointment slots or 24-hour flash sales were getting buried in crowded email inboxes. Their solution was to layer SMS marketing on top of their existing email strategy, using Mailchimp to coordinate both channels without needing a developer to build or segment campaigns. They set up automated SMS triggers based on customer actions — such as sending a Botox replenishment reminder after a customer's email was opened — while using email for deeper nurturing and educational sequences. The combined approach doubled their marketing ROI, lifted bookings by 30%, and boosted total direct-marketing engagement by 50%, with SMS open rates exceeding 90% and a Tuesday MMS campaign shown to lift Friday bookings by 30%.

4. Vårdväskan: 30x Revenue ROI with Segmentation and Welcome Series Personalization

Swedish healthcare uniform retailer Vårdväskan — which sells colorful scrubs, shoes, and accessories to medical workers across Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark — switched to Mailchimp in May 2024 with a team of just one dedicated email marketer. To scale across four Nordic markets without growing headcount, they connected Mailchimp to their e-commerce platform Norce, a personalization engine called Clerk.io, and Google Analytics via API, enabling highly precise audience tagging and segmentation. They built automated welcome flows and abandoned cart reminders, and developed separate B2B and B2C campaigns targeting customers by occupation and purchasing behavior. Within less than a year, the results were exceptional: their welcome series achieved a 58.7% open rate and a click-through rate of 5.4% — a remarkable 315% above the e-commerce industry benchmark of 1.73% — while the overall email program generated a 30x revenue ROI.

5. Sportsmart: ~70% Audience Conversion Rate Increase with Omnichannel Automation

Melbourne-based sports retailer Sportsmart, competing against national giants with a lean marketing team of just four to five people, faced siloed data, manual campaign workflows, and a stagnant legacy database of over 133,000 contacts. After transitioning to Shopify and integrating Mailchimp in 2024, they built an omnichannel ecosystem that connected e-commerce data, Google Analytics 4, and Facebook Custom Audiences to enable suburb-level and sport-category segmentation. They launched automated welcome series and abandoned cart recovery flows — both including discount incentives — and exported Mailchimp audience data to create lookalike audiences across Meta and Google Ads for a consistent cross-channel message. The results included a ~70% year-on-year increase in audience conversion rate, email now driving approximately 10% of total digital marketing attributed revenue, and roughly four hours saved per week for their Channel Marketing Specialist thanks to automation.

Getting started with Mailchimp

If you need help with creating the best email marketing campaigns for your business, look no further than Mailchimp. With Mailchimp, you can get help writing, designing, and sending your email campaigns so that you can be sure you always deliver the best results possible. You can also access a variety of useful tools on Mailchimp that can help you with your email marketing strategy, like an email marketing guide and email and newsletter templates.

Creating email marketing campaigns might seem overwhelming, especially if you don’t know where to start– but that’s exactly where Mailchimp comes into play. Mailchimp will help you create the best email marketing campaigns so your business can succeed like never before.

You can have a lot of different marketing strategies for your business, but email marketing is without a doubt one of the best. Email marketing is a great way to build relationships with your customers, increase sales, and drive traffic. So if you haven’t already gotten started with email marketing, now’s the time. And you can use Mailchimp to help you out. Mailchimp is an industry leader in email marketing platforms and helps with everything from managing mailing lists to creating email marketing campaigns. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that can help you reach your business goals. So what are you waiting for? Sign up on Mailchimp today and improve your email marketing campaigns forever.

Key Takeaways

• A good subject line is crucial for grabbing readers' attention and enticing them to read the email.
• Email campaigns should be easy to read, mobile-friendly, relevant, and provide value to the recipients.
• Identifying your audience and understanding your goals are essential steps in creating effective email campaigns.
• Mailchimp offers tools and support for writing, designing, and sending high-performing email marketing campaigns.