How often should you send emails? How to create email marketing calendars? How to stick to email marketing calendar to the bone?
These are questions most brands have when it comes to email marketing best practices. The answers are, thankfully, simple enough.
Trust is built on consistency.
Consistency is all about taking action. On schedule. Without ever stopping.
Email Marketing success comes to individuals and brands that are consistent with their schedules, which is largely achieved by learning how to stick to email marketing content calendars and publishing schedules.
The first few steps are, needless to say, fairly intuitive:
- Deliver what you promised in your campaigns: The discount coupon or sales coupon code? The PDF checklist? The whitepaper? The eBook? The content upgrade piece? Deliver what you promised with an instant first email that carries this information upfront.
- Frequency of email messages: Whether you’d create an actual email marketing calendar or not, the key is to maintain a frequency of email messaging such as 1X, 2X, or 3X per week.
- Always Keep Testing: You don’t know what type of content, images, and other elements click with your audience. Since we all want the best combinations in your campaigns, it’s a good practice to run A/B tests (or split tests) to learn what works.
With these out of the way, here How to Stick To Email Marketing Content Calendar and thrive:
Mark & Highlight Subscriber & Customer Segments
Email marketing segmentation is powerful since it allows you to send precise, targeted, and relevant email messages to specific segments (subscribers and/or customers).
The first step, before you get anywhere near actual email marketing content calendars, is to identify target segments and sort them. Highlight all of your segments that you’d like to address on a rolling basis with one or two segments specifically targeted every month.
Some crucial segments you should have for your eCommerce brand are as follows:
- VIP customers or customers who’ve been associated with you for a period of time or those that purchased above specified threshold limits.
- Email subscribers or those that are a part of regular audiences for blog posts, YouTube Channels, Live Streams,with high-intent (but not customers yet)
- One-time customers below threshold spends.
- Repeat customers, etc.
Some pieces of email content can be the same for all subscribers and customers (Eg: blog post updates, news, product updates, etc).
Others should be specifically targeted to certain segments (excluding others).
Plan Emails & Setup a Timeline: Monthly Or Weekly
This is the part where rubber meets road. At this juncture, you’d need actual content sculpted out in a sequence.
With the exception of impromptu emails (such as email broadcasts), all other emails are planned out well ahead. Have a clear timeline setup -- depending on the schedule and the frequency of email messages that you’d decide.
Plan emails monthly or weekly. Then, list out emails with subject lines to send out each week or month (depending on the frequency you pick).
The more visual this calendar is, the more likely you'll stick to the schedule.
Create goal-based Email Content
The thumb rule for successful email marketing is this: never sell too much. For this reason alone, you’ll do well with specific goals for each campaign you send.
Most email marketing messages can be categorized under content types that achieve different things for your target audiences. You’d have emails that are educational, promotional, inspirational, community-based, announcements, informational, and direct sales emails).
The ratio should be 3-5 educational or inspirational email messages for every one direct sales email you’d send.
Going by that ratio, create content based on these goals (with one mandatory promotional or sales-oriented email per targeted period such as a week or month)
Set the Right Goals or Targets
Newsletters and announcement-style broadcast email messages don’t exactly have the same goals as those of a one-time sales email with a discount, for instance.
For each email message you send out and for the target segment that emails are sent out for, you’d need to set up specific goals [ any extra sales are a bonus]
One-time broadcasts could be for information dispensing, one-time delivery emails are for delivering freebies.
Discount or coupon-based promotions could have “sales” as the direct goal, automation sequences could all be about nurturing subscribers, while the goal of a newsletter could just be engagement or clicks.
Get Inspired. Find content ideas
One of the primary reasons why brands fall through the cracks when it comes to working through email marketing calendars is lack of inspiration to go through with it.
Thankfully, finding email marketing inspiration is easy with robust and capable tools such as Panoramata.
Use the “Inspiration” tab in Panoramata and find tons of ideas from actual campaigns (updated in real-time). Take note of:
- Subject lines
- Copy or content of the email messages
- Angles within these emails
- The frequency of publishing,
- Choices of emojis used (if any)
- Images or graphics used within emails
- Call-to-action and prompts used
Fire up your own email marketing campaigns by riding on brands that have done this before you.
Panoramata also helps you create email marketing inspiration lists, benchmarking, keep tabs of your competition, learn from other eCommerce brands, track eCommerce store design changes, and more.
Use Panoramata for free now.
