Nutshell’s email marketing experts are here to help. Watch the videos below to get a crash-course on the terminology and strategies you’ll need to get your email marketing efforts off the ground. Thanks for watching, and please email growth@nutshell.com to send your email marketing-related questions directly to our team.
A newsletter is a themed series of marketing emails that go out to your subscribers on a regular basis. The key objectives of a newsletter are to nurture subscribers by offering value and to maintain positive associations with your brand.
Each newsletter in a series is called an edition, and being consistent about the design and cadence of your editions gets your readers in the habit of opening them.
A broadcast is a one-off email to your marketing list or a segment of that list. You’d send a broadcast when you have something special to offer your subscribers or something important to tell them.
Broadcasts don’t have editions. They are single-serve, one-and-done marketing communications. For that reason, marketers have more freedom when it comes to how they look and when they go out.
For further reading:
How to build a newsletter that turns readers into buyers
8 newsletter design tips to help you boost clicks
A personal email sequence is a templated series of one-to-one sales emails that automatically send until the recipient replies to the sequence, or until all messages within the sequence have been sent. When the emails reach your recipients’ inboxes, they look like any other personal email your recipient might receive.
Personal email sequences are great to use when you want to create a connection with your recipients and are looking to kick off a 1:1 sales conversation. Once a recipient replies to your email, their sequence ends and the real conversations can begin.
Marketing drip sequences are similar to personal email sequences, in that they are also a templated series of emails with scheduled follow-up messages. But the goal of a marketing drip sequence is to inform the recipient or get them to interact with your emails.
Marketing drip sequences are mostly curated for a target audience that you’re either working with (like customers in a specific sales territory) or marketing to (like subscribers to your newsletter).
Messages within marketing drip sequences typically contain images and stylized text. They seem as if they’re from the company or brand, rather than being personally sent by an individual. Regardless of how your recipient engages with your marketing drip sequence—whether they reply to it, click on one of its links, or ignore it—they will continue to receive the sequence.
According to the CAN-SPAM act, recipients need to opt in to receiving your marketing drip sequences as they are considered marketing emails.
For further reading:
The simple guide to drip email campaigns
How to write a killer follow-up email sequence that draws replies
Bulk emails and marketing broadcasts are both tools that help you get your message into a lot of inboxes at once, but each one has its own specific purpose.
Bulk emails are personal emails that are delivered to multiple people at once. Sales reps use templated bulk emails to re-establish contact with buyers they haven’t engaged with in a while, or even just to start a personal conversation. When they show up in recipients’ inboxes, they look just like any other personal email.
Many CRM platforms offer the ability to create email templates with merge fields and placeholder text to make your message feel more personal. The reason bulk emails offer this level of personalization is because a bulk email—just like a regular sales email—is supposed to look and sound like a one-to-one email, and its goal is to start a conversation with the recipient.
A marketing broadcast’s main purpose is to get the recipient to click on a CTA. This can take them to a registration page, a signup page, or any other targeted landing page.
Marketing broadcasts look like they’re coming from the brand itself, rather than an individual at the company, and will often include images, text styling, multi-column layouts, and buttons.
Since marketing emails are not one-to-one conversational emails, they fall under certain CAN-SPAM rules, and require permission to be sent to an audience. This is why companies require you to sign up for their email communications—they need consent.
For further reading:
The complete guide to writing much better marketing emails
The email marketing launch checklist: 8 things to check before hitting send
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