9 Promotional Email Examples (And How to Write Your Own)

Are you looking for the best promotional email examples that you can use for your own business?

Whether you need a promotional email template or you just need a bit of inspiration, you’re in the right place.

Because in today’s article, we’re going to teach you what kinds of promotional emails there are, look at 9 examples of emails you can use, and give you some tips on how to write your own.

Since this is such an in-depth post, feel free to use this table of contents to navigate to the section that interests you most:

• Common qualities of successful promotional emails
• 9 promotional email examples
• How to write a promotional email

But first, let’s get clear on what a promotional email is and why it’s such a valuable asset to your marketing strategy.

What Is a Promotional Email?

Promotional emails are promotional messages that are sent out to the recipient’s email inbox. It’s a form of advertising where businesses can send promotional content to their customers or potential clients in an attempt to boost awareness of their products and services.

There are several reasons why you should consider using promotional emails. Here are the top 3:

1. Build Trust & Get Customers Engaged

Promo emails build trust with your customers by providing them real value, whether that be a discount, free information, or otherwise. This makes promotional emails a great tool for converting browsers into customers who will trust you and purchase your product or service.

Promotional emails also build engagement by giving people an incentive to engage with your content.

In fact, promotional emails that contain both content and incentives (like lead magnets) see the highest click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and customer loyalty.

2. Save Money

Promo emails are cost-effective promotional tools because they target audiences that have already shown interest in your products or services through their browsing behaviors.

Plus, most email service providers have reasonable fees that are more affordable than other marketing strategies, such as pay-per-click advertising.

3. Boost Your ROI

Since promotional emails are targeted toward audiences that have already shown interest in your business or products, promotional emails have the highest return on investment (ROI) of all promotional tools.

This is because promotional emails provide real value to the recipient, which in turn provides them with a greater sense of trust and appreciation for your business.

Now that we know what promotional emails are, let’s look at what makes a successful promotional email.

Then, we’ll dive into 9 promotional email examples that you can use for inspiration today!

Common Qualities of Promotional Emails

In this post, we’ll cover 5 main qualities of successful promotional emails. These are emails that:

• Establish positive relationships
• Offer something of value
• Capture the audience’s attention
• Know its audience
• Are easy to read

Let’s take a look at the first objective of a good promotional email.

1. Promotional Emails Establish Positive Relationships

Congratulations! You just got a new email subscriber. Now it’s time to establish a relationship with them.

And what is every great relationship built on? Trust. This should be one of your main goals when crafting your promotional emails.

Here at OptinMonster, we work hard to establish positive relationships with subscribers right from the very beginning:

When you first sign up for OptinMonster’s newsletter, you receive a welcome email from “Syed from OptinMonster,” our co-founder.

The tone of the email further supports a personal feeling by being cordial yet professional, as if it’s coming from a knowledgeable friend who is interested in helping you.

And later in the email, Syed offers to send several resources to help users reach their goals. This is a great way of adding unexpected value to the customer journey and increasing engagement with the promotional email.

This welcome email example does a great job of introducing Syed’s brand and laying down the strong groundwork for a relationship with the reader.

Key Takeaways

Here are a few ways you can write a stellar email similar to OptinMonster’s:

• Using your personal name, if it’s appropriate for your particular company, can add a personal touch to your emails
• Thank your reader for their time
• Set expectations and stick to them
• Make promises and follow up
• Offer value to your customer early and often, showing the benefit they can expect to receive from this new relationship

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Speaking of which, let’s look at the second common quality of promotional emails.

2. Promotional Emails Offer Something of Value

Offering your audience something that will be valuable to them does a few things:

• Catches and holds their attention
• Endears them to your brand
• Encourages them to purchase/interact with your products, services, or website

Since you have a product, service, or content you’ve painstakingly created for them, offering your readers something of value should be easy to achieve. Simply offer discounts on your merchandise or services, or promote some of your great content.

Here’s a promotional email example by Walgreens that does this really well:

Offering your audience a valuable discount has the power to convert unsure readers into faithful customers. In the example above, Walgreens speaks to the bargain hunter in each of us by offering a 20% coupon.

Key Takeaways

Here are a few things you can do to your promotional emails to make them more valuable for your reader:

• Don’t simply try to sell; instead, share free content you’ve produced
• Explain how your content will benefit your reader by solving a need
• Offer your reader valuable coupons or discounts

3. Emails That Capture The Audience’s Attention

You have a limited number of characters to catch your reader’s attention and convince them to open your email, so make them count!

Just because your audience has already shown interest in what you have to say by subscribing to your list, you can’t become complacent. With each new email you send, you need to recapture their attention and entice them to stay engaged with you.

There are a few ways you can do this. In this example from Social Media Examiner, the problem the email promises to remedy can be found in the subject: improving the reader’s Facebook reach.

Whether you’re selling a product, a service, or a blog post, titling your emails to address a specific need of your audience is a great way to grab their attention and convince them what’s inside your email is worth their time.

The subject line gives just enough information to pique the audience’s interest without giving away the whole story. If the reader wants to find out how to say goodbye to their lackluster Facebook reach, they’re going to have to open the email.

If you’re offering your customer something valuable, highlighting the value in your email’s subject is a great way to get people to zero in on your email and pick it out of the dozens of other promotions they receive every day.

Key Takeaways

Some takeaway points that you can use to increase your chances of readers opening your emails:

• Present a problem the email seeks to solve
• Make the subject short and impactful
• Lead with the value you are offering your reader
• Use urgent language
• Concisely state the value of your content in the subject
• Avoid fluff

4. Emails That Know Its Audience

Depending on what you’re promoting, your audience will expect different things from your emails.

It’s important to have a clear goal in mind for what sort of image you want to present so that you can make sure it is clearly coming across in your emails.

It’s important to ask yourself what you want your audience to feel and think when they think of your brand.

Take this example from the restaurant chain Papa Murphey’s Pizza:

The audience is presumably people who like quality pizza that’s not too expensive. The promotional email is perfectly suited for this audience.

It has a large, quality image of one of their signature pizzas. And the second largest element here is the price, “$12.”

Then there’s a very simple (but large) CTA button to place an order.

This is a promotional email example that doesn’t include too many things, focuses on a specific sale, and speaks directly to the target audience.

Key Takeaways

Here are some take-home points that can help you create an email that meshes well with your audience:

• Have a strong concept of the image you want to present for your company
• Know that just because something works for one company doesn’t mean it will work for yours
• Guide your promotional email decisions by what you’ve established are the expectations for your brand
• Be consistent, so you don’t alienate your audience

5. Emails That Are Easy to Read

Many readers skim emails looking for interesting and relevant information.

If your email is difficult to read, disorganized or doesn’t compel them to read further, your email is dead on arrival.

IKEA’s email is easy to skim:

It uses clear images, different colored text, and bold titles to break up sections.

The main messages the company wants to get across are front and center: the purpose of the promotion, the sale they’re advertising, and the prices they believe their customers want to see.

Additional information is in smaller print in case the customer is interested in reading more information.

What is given in the email is enough to pique the reader’s interest while still leaving much to be explored on the company’s website. Call-to-action buttons instruct the reader to click through for more information.

Key Takeaways

Here are a few ways that you can learn from IKEA and make your own emails more compelling:

• Make emails easy to skim
• Make sure the points you most want to drive home are emphasized, so they stand out from the rest of the email
• Break emails up with pictures, specific sections, or paragraph breaks to keep the email looking clean and easy to manage
• Tempt your viewer to click through by keeping some information on your site and not in the email
• Make your call-to-action links and buttons clear and easy to find

Now that we’ve seen some common qualities for promotional emails, let’s turn our attention to 9 promotional email examples you can use for inspiration today!

Promotional Email Examples

The following promotional email examples were taken from some of the biggest names on the web.

Feel free to click on any of the images to see the full version of the promotional email.

Let’s dive into our list:

1. OptinMonster

At OptinMonster, we send different types of email campaigns. But often, we’ll use plain text promotional emails rather than HTML-based emails with images.

Not only can this help boost deliverability, but it lets us connect with our audience through storytelling.

Plus, we’re able to embed CTA links throughout the post to improve our click-through rates.

If you enjoy writing and aren’t great with visual design, then you might consider using plain text emails for your promotional campaigns, too.

2. Bose

Bose has a great promotional email with lots of cool visuals. It features various products with multiple CTA buttons throughout.

This is a great example of a professional and sleek-looking promotional email.

3. Netflix

Netflix has a simple but effective email campaign.

While it doesn’t seem promotional in nature, they’ll sometimes ask for ratings for their most popular show (even if you haven’t watched it yet). When you rate the show, you’re taken to your Netflix account, where you can continue watching or start the series.

This is a great way to expose people to popular shows on the streaming platform.

4. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms has a very informative promotional email.

They provide lots of links to various pages on their site, giving users a lot of ways to interact with the brand. They also use emojis to spice up the email, though it’s mostly text-based.

This is a great promotional email example for SaaS companies with lots of updates and features to showcase.

5. PayPal

PayPal leads their promotional email with a strong incentive: get $30 OFF future purchases if you get a PayPal credit card.

It’s a straightforward email that’s well designed, easy to read, and gives a solid (and tempting) CTA.

6. Amazon

Amazon gives us another promotional email example that leads with an incentive: you can save $5 by selecting your pickup location (rather than having your packages delivered).

While there are prettier email templates out there, Amazon has done an incredible job consistently branding these emails.

You can usually tell the message is from Amazon just by the look of the campaign before ever reading the company name.

7. Medium Daily Digest

Medium Daily Digest is a promotional newsletter for the blogging site Medium. It provides subscribers with lots of new content to check out, depending on their interests.

This is a great promotional email example because the content is personalized to the user’s interests. That means it will have higher open and click-through rates.

That, in turn, should boost Medium’s deliverability rates and increase overall engagement.

8. Best Buy

Best Buy has a stylish and professional promotional email campaign that’s perfect for summer.

It shows different products that go well with the season (like the stand-up paddleboard) and features other top-selling items.

Their CTA buttons also stand out with a bright yellow color, making them incredibly easy to find/click for Best Buy customers.

9. Constant Contact

Constant Contact has a great promotional email with big, bold letters to grab your attention.

As you scroll down, there are various links and CTAs that the target audience would find valuable. Then there’s a section specifically designed to provide users with a link to call for support.

This is an excellent strategy for connecting with your audience and getting more people to engage with your support and sales team.

At this point, we’ve learned quite a bit about promotional emails. And we’ve seen 9 promotional email examples that you can use to start creating your own.

But before we wrap up this post, let’s take a look at how you can write the most effective promotional emails possible to see more sales.

How to Write Your Own Promotional Emails

There are four important factors that make great promotional email content: relevance, value, trust, and engagement.

Let’s quickly look at each one in a bit more detail.

• Relevance: Great promotional email content should be relevant to the recipient. This means providing them with promotional messages that are concretely related to your business or product AND their interests.
• Value: Promotional emails should also provide value to the recipient. This means providing promotional messages that offer an incentive to engage with it.
• Trust: Promotional emails should build trust in you and your business.
• Engagement: Great promotional emails should also engage the recipient. This means providing promotional messages with promotional content that your audience is interested in and giving them the incentive to engage with your promotional message.

There are at least 4 steps you should follow when creating a promotional email for your next campaign:

1) Create a Promo Email Landing Page

To create promotional content that gives recipients incentive, you need promotional landing pages (called “landing pages,” for short) where your promotional emails link to.

A promotional landing page should be designed to convert promotional email traffic by capturing promotional inquires from promotional emails.

Need help building your landing pages? We highly recommend checking out SeedProd:

SeedProd is the best landing page builder for WordPress. It allows anyone to quickly and easily create landing pages in a matter of minutes.

That’s because this tool has a codeless drag and drop visual, so you can add new features to your page in just a few clicks.

Plus, it has over 100 templates that you can use to get your pages up FAST. These templates look great across devices and are designed to save you time, energy, and headaches in the page creation process.

You can even integrate your email service provider (ESP) with your landing pages. This allows you to reach more of your marketing goals by growing your list with potential leads who aren’t quite ready to buy.

At the end of the day, if you need high-converting landing pages set up quickly, SeedProd is definitely the way to go.

Get started with SeedProd today!

2) Include a Promo Offer

In promotional emails, you should also include offers that provide incentives to your audience.

The best promotional offer typically is relevant to your message, provides real value to the recipient, and builds trust in your brand.

3) Include a Call-to-Action (CTA) Button or Link

In promotional emails, you should also include a call-to-action (CTA) link that prompts your audience to click through your promotional email for more information.

The best call-to-action link prompts email recipients to click through promotional emails for more information on the specific offer your email is highlighting.

4) Create a Look that Reflects Your Brand

To create promotional emails, you’ll want something the reflects the uniqueness of your brand. This is why starting with promotional email templates can be a double-edged sword.

While templated emails are great at saving time, they have the drawback of looking like generic templates.

That’s why it’s important to make modifications that are custom to your company’s voice and style to stand out from the competition.

That way, your promotional emails won’t look the same as other companies in your niche, even if you were working from the same templates!

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Once you’ve developed the look, stick with it. Then, over time, people will start recognizing your brand simply by the colors and images in your promotional content.

And that’s all we have for you today! This has been a comprehensive post on promotional emails, including examples you can draw inspiration from and how to write your own.

We hope you found this post helpful. If you did, you definitely want to check out the following resources:

• 17 Tips for Writing Email Marketing Copy That Converts
• Email Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• How to Create an Effective Autoresponder Series

Those resources will have even more helpful information on how you can improve your email marketing strategy to boost conversions and sales.