The Power of Email Marketing

Planning, Step 1: What Do Your Readers Want to Know About?

To learn more about multichannel campaigns, check out the MineThatData blog. http://minethatdata.blogspot.com/

This might seem like a pointless exercise — after all, isn't it obvious what they want to know about? Just look at your business, your site and your signup form; what do they offer?

I think this is worth doing because you might find that what you actually send to your readers doesn't necessarily match what they want to know about.

A couple common causes of this:

You've adapted your campaigns after getting feedback from readers.

You're now talking to them about different topics than you did originally, or with a different focus, but you never updated your site or signup form to reflect the changes.

Now new subscribers, who didn't see those changes as they took place, aren't getting exactly what they bargained for when signing up.

You've changed your signup page/s or form/s, testing new headlines and incentives to get people to subscribe.

Like the last example, there's now a difference between what subscribers expect to get, and what they actually get. In your haste to "get something out" to your list, you've sent emails that didn't deliver exactly what your readers came to you to get.

Go back and scan a few months' worth of email campaigns — if you find you've rushed content out like this a lot, you may find that what you think you're writing about, and what your readers are actually getting, are quite different.

To plan your email marketing campaigns, and put together a calendar, you first have to decide what exactly you're going to write about — and what type of content, stuff you may have sent in the past just because "it was time to send," you're not going to send anymore.

Look at your site and signup forms. What are your subscribers are signing up to your campaigns to get?

Now, based on that, write down what you're going to email them to meet those expectations — what topics are you going to focus on? What not quite on-topic content are you going to stop sending them?
Once you've decided what to send (and what not to), you're ready to start brainstorming content, and spreading it over the upcoming weeks and months.

Planning, Step 2: How Often Do You Plan to Email Them?

If you immediately said "daily" or "weekly" or "monthly," hold on a second.
It's good that you're that confident and decisive about your campaigns. That instinct (hopefully) comes from the experience you've gained in past email marketing efforts. You know approximately what your audience feels is the right frequency to hear from you.

But remember, we just spent time deciding what we are and are not going to send out. And the #1 thing that can blow all that planning we just did sky-high is our choice of email frequency.
After all, if you decide to send weekly, but you don't have enough of the right content one week, what do you do? Many publishers fall back into the habit of sending content that's not in line with readers' objectives and expectations.

A few things to consider when determining your email frequency:
How long will it take you to write an email of the quality your subscribers expect?

How many email messages do you intend to send in a week/month/year? Multiply this by how long you estimate it takes you to have a campaign ready to send to find out how much time you need to budget per week/month/year for composing emails.

To be continued…