The Power of Email Marketing

Consider: If You Send 2 Emails per Week, That's 104 Emails per Year (or About 9 per Month)
To learn more about multichannel campaigns, check out the MineThatData blog. http://minethatdata.blogspot.com/

And that's per campaign. What if you have multiple campaigns and you're sending to each one twice per week?

I'm not trying to scare you away from sending that often. My point is this:

If it takes you just an hour to create an email (going from nothing in front of you, to written, tested and ready to send), and you always wait until the last minute to create your campaigns, that's 104 hours each year that you're unnecessarily stressing yourself out by not planning and using an email marketing calendar.

I sure don't want to be stressed out unnecessarily, and certainly not for 100+ hours a year.
Wouldn't it be easier to spend a little time each day planning your future campaigns, instead of the odd panicked hour here and there on the days you send?

Planning, Step 3: How Far In Advance Will You Create Your Content?

For many email newsletter publishers, this can be the hardest part of planning. They think:
“I've promised my subscribers the latest news in my industry, so how can I possibly write my emails in advance? They wouldn't contain the latest news!”

Please don't take this line of thinking. It's a productivity-killer.

Consider the following:

News that is "old" to you typically isn't old to your readers. You're much more aware of the latest news in your industry than they are (after all, they're waiting to hear it from you!)

Even major weekly news magazines like Time and The Economist contain news that's a week old.

Not all readers are going to open/read your email the very day you send it… so even if you did wait until the last minute to get the latest news, by the time they read it, it's a day or more old anyway.
So it pays to put our campaigns together in advance. But how far in advance?

For me, this depends on the frequency you choose for your messages, the amount of content you intend to put in them, and whether or not you're sending a series of closely-related messages on a certain topic.

Frequency

The more often you intend to email your subscribers, the further in advance it pays to plan — if you think it's bad trying to put one email together at the last minute, try doing it for two or three at the same time.

Amount of Content

The more you intend to put into your individual messages, the further out you should plan — instead of creating the email all at once the day you want to send it, try doing it in thirds, starting 2 weeks (or as far as you can) ahead.

By breaking up the amount of time you need to dedicate to that email, and giving yourself plenty of "buffer" in between when you create the email, and when it has to be sent, you take a lot of stress out of your email marketing.

Closely-Related Email Series

Think of these as mini-campaigns within your larger email marketing efforts, where you have so much to say on a topic that it can't fit into one or two "normal-sized" (for you) messages.

You'll want to plan these out furthest of all, to make sure that:

Content flows well from one message to the next

The size of each message in the series is appropriate and consistent with what your subscribers expect

The messages are spaced out at appropriate intervals
These "features" or mini-campaigns require a little more planning than your typical messaging not only because you have so much going into them, but also because your subscribers are going to realize that these are special (after all, you're going to market it to them, aren't you?) and may notice if the planning isn't there.

So today, let's get into some email content ideas — that way, when we talk next time about how to make all this even easier by using calendar software, you'll be able to jump right into coordinating your campaigns for the upcoming months/year.

To be continued…