8 Real Email Marketing Examples With Proven Results
For years, Really Good Emails has been one of our go-to resources for inspiration, a curated collection of standout campaigns from brands and agencies around the world. One of our early favorites was a campaign from Dove that stood out for its captivating creative and solid brand messaging:
Unilever campaign for the brand that celebrated healthcare workers during the pandemic.
This email was part of the larger Unilever campaign for the brand that celebrated healthcare workers during the pandemic, and it stood out for more than a few reasons:
The simple, direct message. The reader connects immediately with what the brand wants them to know.
Powerful imagery. Dove leaned on real people rather than stock photography or posed actors, staying on-brand while landing an emotional impact.
Interactivity. The simple animated GIF added low-bandwidth energy to the message.
A strong video link. Readers respond well to video, and this one delivered on the click-through.
Alignment with a cause. The campaign connected the brand to something bigger than a sale.
Rosenfeld’s Bagels email sharing the news their challah was featured in a spread by Cook's Illustrated.
There are many outstanding campaigns featured on the site, and we're proud that one of our own client emails has since earned a spot on Really Good Emails too. Back in 2023, we built an email for Rosenfeld's Bagels after their challah was featured in a spread by Cook's Illustrated. That email did more than look good, it performed remarkably. With an open rate nearing 60% and a click rate nearing 5%, it truly engaged the audience by linking to America's Test Kitchen's YouTube video and to more detail on the client's own site. Subscribers loved seeing their hometown brand featured nationally, and they were eager to learn more about the content.
For us, it's proof that great email design isn't just about a beautiful photo or layout. Really great email is about the audience, the content, and the ability to connect the subscriber with the brand actually behind it.
When we talk about "the best examples of email marketing" in real world applications, design deserves attention, but it's the strategy underneath it that actually delivers results. Today we're looking at those elements, from segmentation and automation, to connected data and messaging built for the right audience, to ensure that your business or a mission-driven organization creates the best email marketing for your organization.
Here are 8 real examples we've built for clients that show what successful email can actually look like.
CONTENT PERSONALIZATION FOR MISSION-DRIVEN AUDIENCES
Lymphatic Education & Research Network (LE&RN) is an international nonprofit concerned with fighting lymphatic disease. They communicate with a genuinely mixed audience that includes patients, clinicians, and researchers who are all on one list, all needing something different from the same organization. They came to us knowing there was a problem but not sure where to start.
Concerned about engagement and deliverability, we started with a full audit of their campaigns, lists, templates, and automation. Once we saw that a one-size-fits-all approach wasn't working (their clicks were flat and unsubscribes were climbing), we advised integration of their tech stack and updating of their email profiles to create a personalized experience for their subscribers.
Because their CRM and email platform weren't sharing data, it was hard to know who was actually engaged and why. To solve this, we built a CRM-to-Mailchimp integration and trained LE&RN's team to personalize content by demographic and behavioral criteria. This ensures that a clinician gets clinically relevant content, and a patient gets something built for them instead.
This Mother's Day campaign is appropriate for patients, caregivers, and technical audiences, and advocates for better understanding of the disease and support for the organization's work.
This webinar recording email has a more technical audience, and by sending to just those subscribers involved in research and treatment, achieved a high level of engagement from the exact target audience.
After coaching the email and CRM team so that they could create a more refined process, they saw a 12% increase in click rate and a 26% decrease in unsubscribe rate. When a list contains genuinely different audiences, content personalization isn't a nice-to-have, it's truly what makes the email worth opening for your subscriber, and builds a better experience. In the world of mission-driven organizations that depend on donations, it's absolutely essential.
SEASONAL SEGMENTATION
Sending the best email isn't just about WHO is in your audience, but also WHEN you send it. Custom Sportswear has spent over 40 years supplying schools with Spiritwear and Field Day merch, working through school administrations and parent volunteer organizations that turn over every couple of years. But Spiritwear is typically a fall seasonal activity in most school districts, and Field Day is a spring event. Understanding which audience members participate in each event is critical to the "right information at the right time to the right person" formula.
Using a permission-based program that segments outreach by season and by program type, we helped Custom Sportswear target their program outreach meaningfully. That protects against subscriber burnout, especially for lists that can have high attrition rates due to the rapid turnover of recipients.
Field Day subscribers are always looking for ways to make their day more fun for everyone. As experts in working with the people that run these programs, Custom Sportswear provides that insight with their email program.
Spiritwear organizers are usually struggling to keep things running smoothly. Custom Sportswear provides experienced advice for them via email.
Alongside a broader sales automation strategy, their email marketing program contributed to over $100,000 in new revenue in a single season, and gave the company a repeatable system heading into future school years.
AUTOMATED B2B NURTURING SEQUENCES
The sales cycle for a B2B organization can be quite long, and that's where a series of emails that nurture prospects along the buyer's journey, or keeps past customers engaged through ongoing education, is critical.
Recasens USA, the North American division of a Spanish technical textile manufacturer, sells into a small, specialized market of buyers of acrylic fabrics across marine, architecture, and casual furniture industries. Over the last several years, we've worked with their team to build automated nurture sequences tailored to each niche audience and product line, so a distribution partner receives different content than a fabricator as they move through the sales funnel.
While all casual furniture industry subscribers are interested in the launch of a new product line.
Only those qualified for direct-from-manufacturer buying are introduced to the Sales Director.
That targeted, automated outreach helped grow their brand reach to more than 17 times its original market.
Relevance is what makes a nurture sequence actually land. When we asked fellow Mailchimp Partners for their favorite examples of great email marketing, Glenn Edley, Director & Email Strategist at Spike, pointed to a campaign with exactly that quality:
Example of clear calls to action.
"I ... like the combination of a smart gif with a simple, clear call to action on a button that stands out, Download my guide. The [senders] then have a backup of more excellent content that works with the guide. I really like the directness of the download links too. 'Save me,' 'Teach me,' and 'Enlighten me' give the reader a clear indication of what action to take and what action will happen if they click the link."
That same clarity should be brought into every creative for an automated sequence to help it work more effectively. Each step earns the next click instead of assuming it.
MORE RELEVANT MESSAGING WITH CONNECTED DATA
But your best automation email only works if the system knows what's actually happening. A trigger can't fire on information it doesn't have.
Not every public health professional works in all areas of public health. Specific newsletters like this offer highly targeted and relevant information just for the professionals in that sector of public health.
NACDD, a CDC-funded nonprofit serving public health professionals nationwide, recognized this and needed their email platform and membership software to talk to each other. This happened to coincide with a sudden shift to remote operations in the middle of an international health crisis. We integrated their systems and trained their remote team to keep member communications stable through the disruption. That connected data is what made it possible to build messaging tailored to specific member segments, rather than sending one generic email to everyone on the list.
Knowing your subscriber is what makes email personalized, and that happens through connected systems. When your CRM knows something real about the person on the list, your email can be very clearly targeted to the person receiving it. Emily Ryan, Co-Founder and Email Strategist at Westfield Creative, told us about one of her favorite emails that leans on this idea:
Postable’s offer is VERY clear and it's always at the top before the graphic.
"I am a huge fan of the emails from Postable.com, an online greeting card service (that I happen to use often). What I love most about their emails is that they make the offer VERY clear and it's always at the top before the graphic...And their animated 'your card was mailed' transactional email is another favorite. Who wouldn't love to get this..."
— Emily Ryan, Co-Founder and Email Strategist, Westfield Creative
A well-timed, automatic message is only possible when the systems behind it are actually connected, which is the same groundwork we built for NACDD.
BEST FIRST EMAILS FOR B2B MARKETING
Some clients don't come to us with a program to fix, they come with nothing at all. The most successful email for a new program is one that provides immediate context for the brand, and creates a memorable impression for the subscribers.
Creating a memorable first impression for the subscriber.
Altrans Postal Solutions had been in business for over a decade but had never run an email program. They came to us with no list, zero automation, and essentially no outreach beyond referrals and word-of-mouth. We built brand identity, a CRM, and lead-nurturing automation from a completely blank slate, moving the company from no email presence at all to a fully functioning program in under 90 days. In the first year, Altrans saw a 36.5% increase in sales, more than doubled social media engagement, and grew website traffic tenfold.
Alessandra Farabegoli, Digital Strategist and Co-Founder of Palabra and Freelancecamp Italia, makes the case for why a company's very first emails matter this much:
Moment uses education to convey expertise to first time subscribers.
"I like...onboarding subscribers by teaching them something [as it] is one of the best ways to initiate a habit of opening, actually reading and clicking your emails, so avoiding irrelevance and being trapped in the Spam folder.
Moment sells camera bags and gear, and its welcome series is full of tips to shoot better pictures and movies, create social media posts, and choose and use accessories and apps. By educating subscribers, Moment staff show expertise and willingness to help; the email itself is simple but graphically nice; text is clear, well organized with clever use of subtitles and bullet lists to organize concepts."
— Alessandra Farabegoli, Digital Strategist, Co-Founder, Palabra and Freelancecamp Italia.
That's exactly what Altrans needed built first: a foundation solid enough that everything sent afterward actually performs.
GATED-CONTENT NURTURE EMAILS
Nurture series with gated-content.
HealthLinq by MPX needed to speak to three distinct B2B audiences: health plan administrators, employer benefits managers, and broker partners. Each of these were key decision makers who needed to understand the long-established brand and its newer but reputable presence in the health plan space. One of the strongest pieces of the program we built is a nurture-sequence email offering a downloadable resource: gated content that gives the reader something genuinely useful in exchange for taking the next step, moving them further into the funnel automatically.
Email nurturing helped the healthcare-insurance market website traffic grow from 1.9% of the total visitors to over 20% of their site's visitors. That represented a 958% increase, taking the product line from nearly invisible to a featured service, and putting HealthLinq's sales team in front of far more of the right prospects.
But gated-content email only works if the structure of the email allows for continued engagement with the subscriber. Adam Q. Holden-Bache, Director of Email Marketing at Enventys Partners, selected an example of one of his favorite emails that show this in practice:
Epics email uses CTA up front for generating conversions.
"I love this email from Epic for Kids for several reasons. First, it starts with a benefit. Then it has a short supporting statement, and then a call-to-action. All of this is above the fold, so you'll see it immediately in any inbox. Following that is some fantastic creative with the book covers, presented at an angle and not just in a grid format so it's more visually appealing. The bottom of the email has two additional offers and CTAs, so recipients who scroll down can easily click through at the bottom of the message too. Overall the email is focused on generating conversions, and it does so in a way that is efficient and visually appealing for the recipient."
— Adam Q. Holden-Bache, Director of Email Marketing, Enventys Partners
SEGMENTED B2B AND B2C MESSAGING
Landscapers Depot keeps two very different audiences equally informed.
Landscapers Depot serves both B2B and consumer markets across northeastern New England and Greater Boston. When pandemic lockdowns forced their doors closed, digital communications became vital to keeping touch with customers who were unsure of supplies and business status. We built segmented communications that pitched differently depending on the audience, ensuring the appropriate information and urgency, based on their needs and concerns.
The result was an email program that kept two very different audiences equally informed, at a moment when staying silent wasn't an option for either.
DEEP PERSONALIZATION IN A LUXURY MARKET
Personalized emails builds intimacy with subscribers.
Luxury buyers have their own unique demands, the most important of which is recognizing who they are as a connection to the brand. Tett Safaris launched as a luxury African safari travel brand in 2020, just as international travel shut down entirely. For people managing the fine details of travel, personalization goes deeper than a first name in the subject line, and since Tett Safaris' founder often works directly with clients' travel details, she is able to build a level of trust and familiarity that ordinary retail email rarely reaches.
We built an email program around that intimacy, including messages built from information collected directly from subscribers, like a birthday email that felt individually crafted rather than automated.
Striking photography and storytelling kept the brand top of mind until borders reopened. And when they did, total bookings exceeded projections. Robin Adams, Founder of Chimp Answers, offered the example of a welcome email that talks to its reader by speaking their language:
"One [email] that recently caught my eye was for GFDA. If you're offended by profanity, then it's not for you, but it's big, bold, and brassy and clearly shows what their brand is about [which will further endear them to their audience]. It's got actions to take and clicks to make...and I love their footer... in fact I think I might use it as inspiration!!!" — Robin Adams, Founder, Chimp Answers
Whether it's a welcome series or a birthday email built from real client data, the same idea holds: the more a brand knows and reflects who the recipient actually is, the more personal the email feels.
THE COMMON THREAD
None of these results came from design alone. They came from real world experience from real organizations seeking to create the best email experience for their subscribers. Through audits, segmentation, connected systems, and automation built specifically for each organization's audience and situation, they were able to create the best examples of email for their customers, patrons, and prospects, abandoning the one-size-fits-all approach that leaves more on the table.
If your email program needs sharper personalization, automation built on connected data, or a program built from scratch, you can learn more about our email marketing services or reach out to start making a change.
