After talking with hundreds of businesses about email campaigns I find one theme seems to come up again and again.
Emails are rushed or last minute or late and that means you aren’t doing your best work…
…but more importantly you’re probably missing out on opportunities because you don’t give yourself time and space to create GREAT email campaigns.
The problem goes something like this: you know you want to send a monthly e-newsletter and suddenly it’s the third week of the month and you haven’t got content pulled yet.
Or. You just remembered there is an event coming up and you want to make sure as many of your customers attend as possible. Do you have time to send a series of messages? Do you have time to give your customers who like to plan time to put the event in their calendar? Do you have time to fit the event invite in between your other regular messages?
All of these symptoms can be addressed with a simple fix: set up an editorial calendar to control your email campaign management.
Editorial calendar
There’s nothing magical about an editorial calendar. Put it on paper or set up a common Google Editorial Calendar or throw it on a whiteboard in someone’s office. How you do it isn’t really all that important.
You just need to do it.
Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you use email for the following purposes:
- You send a monthly e-newsletter
- You have two trade shows approaching in the next 90 days
- You have an excess of inventory and want to make a special offer
- You have a new product on the way
Take your editorial calendar and post these events in the dates they occur.
Then create your ideal email sequence for each one.
- You’ll only send your e-newsletter once
- You want to send 2 messages 2 weeks in advance of your two tradeshows
- You want to send a 3 message sequence about your inventory
- You want to build some announcement excitement (pretend you’re Apple) about your product before the announcement
Place these on the calendar and see where they fall.
***Here’s the payoff!***
Once you see these emails on a calendar you can step back and see what this looks like through the eyes of your reader!
When you place the emails beside one another you’ll suddenly see ways to make your message stronger.
Here’s what not to do…
Do NOT be tempted to take all the items and combine them into a single, comprehensive, efficient email. Do not do this!
Why?
Because it will sound like this. “Blah blah blah, tradeshow, blah blah blah sale price, blah blah blah new product”. Your reader cannot be expected to stop everything and take the time to read this longer email and decide what’s really important.
Send a separate email for each
Your reader will:
- See your powerful subject line and decide to read, delete, or ignore
- Read your compelling copy
- Make one decision to click or not
And… your email has done it’s job.
You really have to get over your feeling that people don’t want more email and will be annoyed that you are attempting to connect with them.
Send short, relevant emails and your readers with Thank You for it. That’s what you’re after.
I don’t give this advice lightly. I simply know it to be true after sending over 2,750 email campaigns in the past 5 years and watching the results like a hawk.