Email Marketing Calendars: Let’s Get Planning
Email Marketing - Justin Premick - January 16th, 2008 - Permalink
This is the second post in a series; you may want to read the first post on why email marketing calendars matter before reading this one.
Do you feel like you’re constantly working at the last minute to get an email out to your subscribers?
Many publishers just like you often fall behind on their email marketing campaigns. You’re focused on getting a new product ready to go to market, or improving an existing one, or working on any one of a mountain of other important areas of your business.
Your sending frequency falters, and when the realization sets in that you haven’t emailed your list in a while, you rush to get an email newsletter out to it.
Playing Catch-Up Is Exhausting
Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that… but yet you’re here reading, so maybe you’re not as on top of your email marketing campaigns as you’d like to be.
Maybe you’re looking for a way to relieve some of the burden of trying to publish a newsletter at the last minute.
Now, one of the topics we discuss in our email newsletter seminar is where to quickly find content that you can copy and paste into a future newsletter — places like your sent folder, your blog/forum/FAQ, and article sites like EzineArticles.com.
However, if you’re waiting until the last minute to go and find/create your email content, those content sources can only relieve so much pressure.
To stay in touch with your subscribers consistently, and not feel like you’re rushing at the last minute, it’s best to space out your writing/publishing duties over time. This is where an email marketing calendar can do you a world of good.
But before we can go plugging schedules and send dates into our calendar, we need to take a few minutes to think about how we’re going to improve our campaigns using that calendar.
We need a plan.
Planning, Step 1: What Do Your Readers Want to Know About?
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’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.
Like the last example, there’s now a difference between what subscribers expect to get, and what they actually 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.
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:
Consider: If You Send 2 Emails per Week, That’s 104 Emails per Year (or About 9 per Month)
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:
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:
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:
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.
Next Up: Content Ideas
Our series on email marketing calendars isn’t over yet — next time, I’ll give you ideas for content to send to your subscribers, and to work into your budding calendar.
Talk to you soon!
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Other Posts In This Series (Updated As New Posts Are Published)
Why You Need an Email Marketing Calendar
What to Put On Your Calendar: Content Ideas
January 16th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
[…] Planning Your Campaigns and Calendar This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink. […]
January 16th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Hi Justin, thanks for this calendar idea. very valuable.
could you publish a list of holidays/events days and suggest days that we should mail or avoid
eg
Dec 25 Christmas (note, PC terms like "happy holidays")
mail 23
don’t mail 24/25 (statistically response is low)
mail 26 (boxing day offer)
above is an example of the info I would find useful and the layout.
I don’t know really if mailing 24/25 is bad or not.
thanks for all your hard work on this site!
January 17th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hi Victory,
Check out our Holiday Marketing Calendar - it’s packed with major - as well as lesser-known - holidays that you can plan campaigns around.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Here’s a helpful idea. In a Word document I cut and paste all my email campaigns. After it is sent, I add comment such as date, open/click thru rates etc. I then can easily reread all the email campaigns I have sent, it is all on one page and then work on the next to give it a proper flow form one email to the next.
January 31st, 2008 at 4:49 am
Good point Florence!