3 Excellent Examples of Email Marketing for Food and Beverages

The food and beverage industry is highly competitive. That’s just a fact! Anyone entering the space knows the inherent risks, and everyone with a foothold understands the herculean effort required to gain traction. There are countless food and beverage brands with multi-centennial lineages, and those giants block competition.

Summarily, it’s hard to grow an audience for any food and beverage brand.

Locating new customers is not enough. You must also build relationships and promote widespread brand recognition. You need a way to nurture brand loyalty and gather customer testimonials. Oh! And don’t forget about gathering valuable insights from your customer journey. Otherwise, your marketing strategies are little more than vaguely educated guesses.

It’s a lot of work. Fortunately, email marketing fills most of those gaps. Modern email marketing campaigns reach new customers, promote positive customer relationships, and establish footholds along every step of the customer journey. Moreover, thanks to marketing automation, brands can quickly establish evergreen email campaigns to engage customers and boost brand loyalty.

So, to highlight the positive benefits of effective email marketing efforts, I’ve pulled some of the best examples my team has crafted for food and beverage brands. These email campaigns are the best of the best, and they’re perfect starting points for burgeoning email marketing professionals.

1. The Delicious Delights of Drip Campaigns

It’s hard to imagine a time before Melinda’s® was a well-known food and beverage brand, but I can! My team of hand-picked experts has helped this massive hot sauce producer gain a foothold in an ever-growing segment of the food and beverage industry.

So, to begin today’s examples, I’ve snagged a sample of a mouth-watering drip campaign. This email campaign revolved around National Barbecue Day, which is celebrated yearly on May 16.

What Is an Email Drip Campaign?

Email drip campaigns are specially formulated types of email marketing. Their name comes from their persistence, frequently likened to the “drip, drip, drip” of a leaky faucet.

In many ways, drip campaigns are the bread and butter of modern email marketing strategies. They promote customer loyalty and indiscriminately nurture every stage of the customer journey. Their versatility opens doors for future email campaigns and personalized content. They may not be the most immediately gratifying campaign type, but they satisfy your email list and promote higher engagement.

The goal of this Melinda’s® email campaign was threefold. The team wanted to:

• Entertain and engage customers with light-hearted promotional content.
• Increase total revenue by promoting higher conversion rates.
• Raise brand awareness by associating Melinda’s® with a pleasant desired action. In this case, the team paired the brand’s signature spices with barbecuing.

Promoting Conversion Rates and Satisfying Subscribers

One of the first things you’ll notice about this email content is its hierarchy. Everything is arranged deliberately, following the eye’s natural “skimming” path. Subscribers read everything from top to bottom, then left to right. Thus, the clever designers at The Email Marketers front-loaded the email.

Next, you’ll notice the clear call to action. No cutesy language or coy tomfoolery is happening here; save that for the body content!

The call-to-action link is your customer’s path to checkout. Don’t obscure its meaning behind insincerity. Now, that’s not to say you should always say “Shop Here”; you can be clever; “BBQ with Melinda’s” isn’t a generic statement. You don’t necessarily need literalism. Instead, focus on ensuring your call-to-action text meets three basic criteria:

• Clarity: Your email recipients should know what the link will do. Shop links should allude to monetary transactions, while interactive content should promote active participation.
• Excitement: Use active language to garner more engagement. As a food and beverage brand, you should tantalize your subscribers’ taste buds at every possible moment!
• Functionality: Big, bold links are a powerful tool. On the surface, they promote higher click-through rates with greater visibility. However, their increased screen real estate also ensures accessibility and ease of access, especially in smaller mobile devices.

Use Those Images

I must also call attention to the visual appeal of the email.

Yes, there’s obvious branding. The content aligns with Melinda’s® spicy red and pepper green color scheme, accenting both highlights with a warm gray. The campaign’s vertical layout is ideal for mobile viewing and builds upon a tried-and-true email template. However, I’m more concerned about the imagery.

As a hot sauce producer, Melinda’s® falls into the “process” category of the food and beverage industry. It produces ingredients, and its customer experience revolves around the possibilities of its many spices. So, the team emphasized that. The email campaigns focus on just a couple of ways to use Melinda’s® sauces in barbecue recipes.

Notice, too, that every photo is also accompanied by appropriate alternative text (or “alt text”) to promote accessibility. The plain-text variations also boost email deliverability and enhance the customer experience, as the alt text is shown whenever images fail to load.

2. Expand Your Reach With Loyalty Programs

Sometimes, you have an information-packed campaign. You can try different subject lines and test your final results, but your ultimate goal is clarity.

Many loyalty-focused email campaigns require a multifaceted approach. Depending on the target audience, a loyalty campaign may even link to multiple channels, including social media. You’ll also be tapping into your audience of satisfied customers to encourage conversions from potential customers. However, those additional layers of marketing require ample tracking and management. You must ensure your Google Analytics configurations can parse the resulting data and website traffic.

You must also encourage engagement and intrigue. Take, for example, this Beatbox® beverage brand email. It’s not about increasing sales; it’s about winning hearts and customer loyalty.

Knowing Your Place in the Food and Beverage Industry

When the team writes for Beatbox®, they must get “in the zone.”

Beatbox® is a trendy alcoholic punch beverage brand. It’s not a stuffy, old-fashioned behemoth of today’s ever-expanding alcoholic beverage industry, nor is it a children’s fruit juice company. It’s a light-hearted, colorful, and energetic company, and its marketing efforts should match the vibe.

This campaign certainly checks those boxes. It’s bright, cheerful, and punchy. (Pardon the pun!) It knows its target audience and speaks directly to them without pandering. It understands what email subscribers want and uses those desires to forge a deeper connection.

Take a closer look at the language used in this email campaign.

Subscribers are invited to join the “Fam Member Program.” That certainly doesn’t sound like your run-of-the-mill loyalty and ambassador program! Similarly, the email content opens by asking if subscribers want to “rep” Beatbox®. These simple, casual inclusions set Beatbox® apart from other brands.

Add User-Generated Content to Your Email Marketing Campaigns

The user-generated content only adds to the campaign’s allure.

Beatbox® prides itself in its friendly outlook and trendy placement among modern food and beverage brands. So, it’s only reasonable for its ambassadorship program invitation to include fun and engaging photos of normal people enjoying Beatbox® beverages.

It may not seem important, but user-generated content can make a huge difference. It encourages customers to engage with content and invites an inherent sense of trust. In this email, the team focused on imagery. However, user-generated content also covers text-based positive reviews and enthusiastic testimonials.

3. The Importance of an Introduction

Finally, I must emphasize the importance of your pitch.

Whenever a customer opens an email, you have mere seconds to catch their attention. This applies to your entire email list. So, send emails that matter.

Your email content must be the highlight, and your pitch comes first. As a food and beverage brand, you must also entice consumers with remarkable visuals and scrumptious “menu” items.

Fortunately, I have a perfect example for this last point.

Set Yourself Apart From Other Food Brands

This campaign was made for Rishi Tea and Botanicals®.

What’s the first thing you notice?

The elegant branding? The tasteful imagery? The massive, mouth-watering cup of tea?

Remember: Your email campaigns are multifaceted. It’s not enough to have gorgeous visuals and subpar body text. Likewise, flowering prose won’t prop up ugly product photography. Your email marketing campaigns must balance optimization and content.

Yes, email marketing is still a massive business booster. It increases total revenue and encourages customers to investigate other channels. However, it doesn’t take less effort than its competing outlets.

Let the Pros Handle Your Email Strategy

Ultimately, your place in the food and beverage industry is never guaranteed. You must drive sales, maintain customer interest, and manage financial matters at the same time. Or — perhaps — you can find some help.

I founded The Email Marketers as a one-stop shop for email marketing. My hand-picked team of professionals monitors your performance and manages your email marketing campaigns, freeing you to deal with more important matters.

Here, the experts understand that consumers check emails religiously. They know the nuances of email deliverability and the importance of your needs as a food and beverage brand. They’re always ready to tackle a challenge, and they’re an on-demand resource.

Schedule a free consultation to see how you can access these amazing pros. I’ll show you a customized email strategy to amplify your business growth and delight your email subscribers.