Here’s a number that should change how you think about marketing: the average person receives over 100 emails a day, yet opens fewer than 20% of them. Meanwhile, SMS messages boast open rates above 90%, and push notifications, when done well, can drive click-through rates 3–10x higher than email.
The takeaway isn’t that email is dead, it’s that channel strategy matters. Winning brands know which message belongs on which channel, and when. You don’t need a massive team or budget, just the right ideas and confidence to execute.
Here are 10 campaign ideas, mapped to the right channel, with examples and tips to adapt to your brand.
1. The Welcome Series — Email
First impressions in marketing are everything, and your welcome email is the most important one you’ll ever send. Studies consistently show that welcome emails generate four times the open rate and five times the click-through rate of standard promotional emails. And yet, a staggering 57% of brands send just one welcome email, a single message, and then drop new subscribers straight into their regular send schedule.
A three-part welcome series is the sweet spot.
- Email 1 (immediate): Introduce your brand, set expectations, deliver lead magnet or incentive. Keep it human and avoid hard sells.
- Email 2 (2–3 days later): Showcase top products, content, or customer testimonials. Think of it as your brand’s highlight reel.
- Email 3 (day 5–7): Conversion email — offer exclusive discounts, early access, or free resources. By this point the subscriber knows who you are and what you offer, now you’re giving them a reason to act.
Tip: Trigger emails based on behaviour rather than fixed timing.
2. The Flash Sale — SMS
No channel creates urgency quite like SMS. With 90%+ open rates and an average read time of under three minutes, SMS is purpose-built for time-sensitive campaigns. A flash sale that runs for 4–8 hours on SMS can drive a revenue spike that rivals a full-week email promotion.
The formula is simple: the offer, the expiry, the link. Just three elements and nothing more. Subscribers are reading on a small screen while doing something else, make it effortless to understand and act on.
Timing also matters enormously here. Data from multiple SMS platforms shows that messages sent between 10am–12pm and 6pm–8pm consistently outperform other windows. Avoid early mornings, late nights, and Monday mornings, people are either asleep or buried in work.
Tip: Run flash sales no more than once or twice a month on SMS. Overuse trains your audience to wait for discounts and erodes your full-price sales.
3. The Abandoned Cart Sequence — Push + Email
Approximately 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. That’s not a conversion problem — that’s an opportunity problem. Most of those people weren’t saying no. They got distracted, got interrupted, or weren’t quite ready yet. Abandoned cart emails recover an average of 5–15% of lost revenue. The most effective recovery sequence uses two channels in tandem.
- Push (30–60 min): Quick reminder, one tap to return.
- Email (24 hr): Showcase product, reviews, value proposition.
- Email 2 (48 hr, optional): Offer small incentive for high-value carts.
A push notification within 30–60 minutes of abandonment catches people while the purchase is still top of mind. It should be short and direct: remind them what they left behind and give them one tap to return.
Tip: Personalize push with product names — it outperforms generic messaging.
4. The Re-Engagement Campaign — Email
Every email list has a quiet section: subscribers who signed up enthusiastically and then gradually stopped opening. Industry benchmarks suggest that between 25% and 50% of the average email list is inactive at any given time. That’s a significant chunk of potential revenue sitting dormant. Reactivating a lapsed customer costs five times less than acquiring a new one.
A re-engagement campaign targets subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in 60–90 days. The goal isn’t to win everyone back — it’s to identify who’s still salvageable and cleanly remove those who aren’t. A smaller, more engaged list will always outperform a large, disengaged one in terms of deliverability, open rates, and conversions.
The campaign typically runs in two or three emails.
Sequence:
- Email 1: Gentle “we’ve missed you” + offer. The subject line is everything here, try ‘Are you still there?’ or ‘We haven’t heard from you in a while’ for strong open rates on this segment.
- Email 2: Clear stakes: “last chance.” This creates urgency and often triggers a response from people who were simply on autopilot.
Tip: Suppress these subscribers from other campaigns during the sequence to maintain impact.
5. The New Arrival Drop — Push + SMS
New product launches are one of the most natural and high-performing campaign moments in marketing. Subscribers who have opted into your push notifications or SMS list are already warm, they chose to hear from you, which means they’re far more likely to act than a cold email recipient. The key to making a product drop land is building a small amount of anticipation before the launch.
A teaser push notification the day before ‘Something new is dropping tomorrow’ primes your audience and gives you a head start on engagement. On launch day, SMS delivers the full announcement with a direct link.
If you have a waitlist or a VIP segment, give them access 30 minutes before the general announcement. Exclusivity is a powerful motivator, and even a small head start makes subscribers feel valued — which keeps them subscribed. Push notifications with personalised content see 4x higher open rates than generic broadcasts.
Tip: Use push to tease and SMS to convert. Each channel has a different job in the sequence. Don’t duplicate the message, extend it.
6. The Educational Drip Series — Email
Not every campaign needs a discount or a hard sell. Some of the highest-ROI email campaigns are the ones that simply teach people something useful. An educational drip series builds trust, positions your brand as an authority, and keeps subscribers engaged during the stretches between promotions.
A well-structured drip series typically runs three to five emails, sent weekly, each focused on a single actionable insight. The topic should sit at the intersection of what your audience cares about and what your product or service helps with.
By the end of the series, subscribers have received genuine value five times in a row. That builds the kind of goodwill that converts when you do make an offer — and significantly reduces unsubscribe rates in between. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
Tip: End each email in the series with a soft CTA — not a hard sell, but a ‘next step.’ Something like ‘If you want to see how we handle this inside our platform, here’s a quick look’ works well.
7. The Birthday and Anniversary Campaign — Email + SMS
Personalisation is one of the most cited priorities in marketing, and yet most brands only scratch the surface of what’s possible. Birthday and anniversary campaigns are the simplest form of genuine personalisation and they consistently outperform standard promotional messages by a significant margin.
Birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue per email than standard promotional emails.
A birthday email with a personalised discount code or gift lands differently from a generic promotion. It feels thoughtful rather than transactional. The same applies to a customer anniversary ‘It’s been one year since your first order’ which rewards loyalty and reactivates customers who may have drifted.
If you don’t collect birthdates at sign-up, you have several alternatives. You can ask for them in a follow-up email (‘Tell us your birthday and we’ll send you a little something’).
You can use the date they subscribed as a ‘join anniversary.’ Or you can use the date of their first purchase which is often more meaningful than a birthday for retail and e-commerce customers
Tip: Send the email three to five days before the birthday or anniversary so the customer has time to use the offer. Sending on the day itself often means it gets missed.
8. The Social Proof Campaign — Email
People trust other people far more than they trust brands. It’s been true in word-of-mouth marketing for centuries, and it’s just as true in digital. Reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content are among the most powerful conversion tools available and most brands aren’t using them anywhere near enough in their email marketing.
72% of consumers say positive reviews and testimonials make them trust a business more.
A social proof campaign collects your best customer quotes, pairs them with your most relevant products or use cases, and presents them in a way that lets the customer do the selling for you. This works especially well when sent to subscribers who have browsed your site but not yet converted it gives them the confidence to take the next step.
The most effective formats are a curated review roundup (‘Here’s what our customers are saying’), a single deep-dive customer story with specific results and before-and-after context, or a product-focused testimonial email where every review speaks to a specific objection your audience has.
Tip: Always include the customer’s name, company or location, and ideally a photo if possible.
9. The Back-in-Stock Alert — Push + SMS
A sold-out product is proof of demand. When stock returns, you have a ready-made audience of people who already want what you’re selling, you just need to reach them fast, before they’ve found an alternative.
Push and SMS are the right channels here precisely because speed matters. Back-in-stock items, especially limited-edition categories, can sell out again within hours.
An email that lands six hours after the restock may already be too late. Back-in-stock campaigns have an average conversion rate of 22.45% — far above industry averages. The best practice is to capture demand before the restock.
A simple ‘Notify me when available’ button on the sold-out product page builds a waitlist of high-intent shoppers. When stock returns, that list gets the first alert via push for immediacy, and SMS as a follow-up for those who haven’t acted.
Tip: Offer waitlist members early access or small perks to drive faster conversions.
10. The Seasonal or Moment-Tied Campaign — All Three Channels
You don’t need to wait for Black Friday or Christmas to run a seasonal campaign. The marketing calendar is packed with moments: public holidays, cultural events, sporting seasons, awareness months, and ‘national days’ that give you a legitimate, timely reason to reach your audience.
The best seasonal campaigns don’t just slap a holiday theme on a standard promotion. They connect the moment to something genuinely relevant about your brand or your customers’ lives.
Seasonal campaigns generate an average of 20% more revenue than equivalent non-seasonal promotions. For a full seasonal push, use all three channels with a clear role for each.
Email carries the full campaign — the story, the products, the offer, and the imagery.
SMS handles the deadline reminder: short, urgent, and sent 24–48 hours before the offer expires.
Push drives last-minute traffic on the final day, targeting anyone who opened the email but didn’t convert.
Tip: Plan seasonal campaigns four to six weeks in advance. Last-minute execution almost always means weaker creative, smaller audience segments, and missed opportunities for channel coordination.
The Bigger Picture: Why Multi-Channel Wins
If there’s a single thread running through every campaign on this list, it’s this: the right message on the right channel at the right time will always outperform a single-channel strategy, no matter how well-executed that single channel might be.
Email gives you depth, space to tell a story, showcase products, nurture a relationship over time.
SMS gives you speed and intimacy, a direct line to someone’s pocket, reserved for things that genuinely matter.
Push gives you presence, a tap on the shoulder at exactly the right moment, without requiring the recipient to open an app or check an inbox.
Used together, these three channels create a marketing experience that feels coordinated, personalised, and hard to ignore. The brands that understand this — and build campaigns that deliberately leverage all three — don’t just get better open rates. They get better customers: more loyal, more engaged, and more likely to tell others.
Where to Start
Don’t try to launch all ten campaigns at once. Pick the one that fits your most pressing need right now:
- If you’re losing new subscribers early — start with the welcome series.
- If you have a list that’s gone quiet — start with re-engagement.
- If you’re leaving cart revenue on the table — start with abandoned cart.
- If you have a new product dropping — start with the new arrival sequence.
- If you just want a quick win this week — run a flash sale on SMS.
Launch it. Measure it. Improve it. Then come back for the next one. The best campaign is always the one that actually goes out the door and now you have ten of them to choose from.
If you’re looking to move from scattered campaigns to a more structured, high-performing approach, Go-Mailer is built to help you do exactly that bringing email, SMS, and push into one place so you can execute faster and smarter. Because at the end of the day, the difference between a good campaign and a great one isn’t just the idea. It’s how well you execute it.
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