3 Ways to plan your email content
Mark
The biggest complaint:
What should I send? I don’t have enough original content on top of blog posts.
This is why you need an email editorial calendar. Just as you would have an editorial calendar for your blog content, you should have one for your email
marketing content. Solopreneurs struggle to come up with email ideas because they see email as a separate entity. Email is just another arm of your content marketing efforts. Your blog and email editorial calendar should feed off one another. The sooner you tie your email list into your marketing plan, the easier it is to come up with content ideas.
1. Plan you email content around offers and promotions in your marketing calendar
Rather than show up on the day of your launch and tell your subscribers to buy your offer, you can create a simple nurture and prime campaign leading
up to your promotion or cart open date. If you have an affiliate promotion on August 25 for instance, you need to prime your audience 2–3 weeks ahead so that they have all the information they need to say YES to your offer.
2. Create monthly themes (for beginners who have no offers)
Having a theme makes it so much easier to organize and come up with ideas. This is how most magazines structure their content. They have editorial
calendars that are broken up into monthly themes and they organize their content based on that. For instance, August is back to school; January is about New Year’s resolutions and goals; February is about relationships. The emails surrounding a theme go on to become an email campaign.
3. Set goals
Is there a topic you’re trying to establish expertise in? Do you want to test a product or service idea by sharing content around it with your audience? Plan your email content around your goals. By stacking your email content together with your other content channels (be it a blog post or a podcast or a
video), you will achieve that goal faster. I suggest having an email editorial calendar for three months. If you send one email a week, that works out to only twelve emails that you need to brainstorm ideas for. Block out a time where you write your emails. This ensures you stay consistent. If you need an editorial calendar that doubles up for email and your blog, check out the CREATE Planner.
Your Sequence is not the only type of email you send !
There are two main email types or vehicles—sequences and broadcasts. The type of content in both is inherently different. Broadcasts are used for
- Time-sensitive content
- Live launches or promotional email
- Sequences are used for
- Evergreen launches or funnels
- Onboarding
- Nurture emails after sign-up to email list
You concurrently can have new subscribers going through your welcome email series (or nurture sequence) and send broadcast emails with time sensitive promotions to subscribers who have completed your nurture sequence.
BEST PRACTICES
- Keep new subscribers who are going through your welcome email series or nurture sequence out of your promotional emails. Imagine being just a day old on someone’s email list and being bombarded with launch content on an offer you know nothing about. Nothing makes a subscriber hit unsubscribe faster than being in a situation like that.
- Always have an identification or tagging system to know which subscribers have completed a sequence and which are actively going through a sequence.
- Ensure that subscribers do not receive the same welcome email and sequence twice. This could happen if they sign up for another free ressource on your site that is linked to the same email sequence.
