How and why should you create an email marketing strategy plan? What are the pros and cons? What can planning help you achieve in your business?

We're Kennedy and Carrie, and you're about to find out how planning your email marketing activities can be super simple and effective.

Ready?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:32) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. 
(3:23) How do you create an email marketing strategy? 
(6:23) Why is having an email marketing strategy effective? 
(9:55) What to look out for when building your email marketing strategy. 
(14:07) Why plan your strategy quarterly. 
(18:25) What if you only have ONE product?  
(23:31) Think of your subscribers as 3 separate segments. 
(26:23) Link your promotions to your financial goals. 
(29:21) Join The Email Hero Blueprint. 
(29:46) Subject line of the week.

How do you create an email marketing strategy?

There will always be times in your business when you’re in between things, and you have a bridge to the gap with something unplanned in between strategic activities. And that's fine! But when it comes to email marketing and promotions, we recommend planning each quarter ahead of time. This allows you to decide, in advance, what you will promote in your business to the different segments of your audience.

Planning for an email marketing strategy can be as simple as opening up Asana or your calendar and looking at the next quarter, week by week, to decide what you will promote. Depending on how long you need to run each promotion and the time you have available, you can then plot on the calendar what offers you're going to run and when.

Sometimes you may be promoting your flagship or main offer – we call that your ‘Rome' (because all roads lead to Rome). For us, it's our programme The Email Hero Blueprint. But other times, you’ll be promoting something different.

Why is having an email marketing strategy effective? 

Every time you offer something different to your audience, it resets their attention. You don’t have to fill every single day with a different promotion. You can if you want to – it may be great for revenue but also exhausting to manage. So what we choose to do instead is to promote our main offer most of the time. Then, every 6-8 weeks, we'll promote something else. This could be an affiliate, for example.

And while we don't do that often, when we do, our campaigns are extremely successful. We get high conversion rates because we plan – we think of interesting and engaging angles to make the campaigns work. We put effort in – we're being proactive. And this allows us to be more successful, earn more, and have the energy to promote the next offer.

Even if you promote your flagship offer all year round, you can still have a strategy – you can still plan. Because you'll want to sell your main product from different angles.

What to look out for when building your email marketing strategy

Carrie says she didn’t have a ‘proper' strategy for years. While she used to run her business around a young and growing family, she felt she was ‘in survival mode'. But to an extent, she still planned. She'd still look at the calendar and consider:

• When she needed money for bills.
• When the majority of the people in her audience would typically get paid and have money available to spend.

She'd then work backwards to understand how long her launch window would need to be. And based on that, she'd send out the emails.

Another thing Carrie suggests we're all mindful of when planning is major holidays. Even if a particular celebration isn't part of your belief system, be respectful. You may not be, but your audience may be taking time off, for example.

With that said, you can’t always make everyone in your audience happy! So if you want to run a promotion during the summer holidays when the children are off school (generally a quiet time for business), don’t let that stop you. Run the promotion anyway!

Why plan your strategy quarterly

Our advice is to plan your strategy quarterly, rather than monthly. This allows you to have a better view of what you have coming up. For example, if you’ve just promoted a piece of software (i.e. high-ticket item), you might want to follow that with something educational or informational (i.e. lower price). Planning quarterly allows you to run a variety of promotions.

As you go through each one, you can also plan what conversion mechanisms you’re going to use for each. Will it be a sales video? Will it be a sales page? A webinar? A challenge or a summit? You can also vary the conversion mechanism (promotion by promotion) to keep things fresh. Similarly, you can plan how your promotion is delivered. If you’re teaching list building this month, maybe next month you can follow up with a course about webinars.

All you have to do to build this email marketing strategy is to spend one hour four times a year and work out what you can promote. This allows you to spot any gaps. And if you have any, you could promote an affiliate product, for example. Or even create a new offer. Overall, planning stops you from being reactive.

Planning also allows you to have some boundaries in your business. When people approach you to ask if you can promote something for them, you're in a position to say no if you don't have a gap. If you don't have time, you can ask them to get in touch before you do your next quarterly planning, or you can propose an alternative window. It also means you're not overwhelming your audience with too many different offers. You're putting your business and your people first.

What if you only have ONE product?  

If you only have one offer, use all your channels to promote it, such as your social media and your podcast (if you have one). You can still be strategic in the way you do this.

A couple of things to consider:

• Use surveys to segment your audience.
• Keep your list clean by running re-engagement campaigns and unsubscribing people who aren’t engaging. Sometimes when re-engaging your audience, you can use affiliate promotions. This helps because your audience might be temporarily ‘blind' to your marketing but interested in something else. So think about catching their attention in different ways.

If you only have one main product, it doesn’t mean you can't offer anything else. Think of offers differently. For example, you could:

• Promote your social media, like a new YouTube channel, for example. You can ask people how to engage, comment, or share.
• Run affiliates.
• Offer upgrades to your product. If your audience pays monthly, you could offer your members an annual deal (if applicable).
• If you have the right idea and a gap in your calendar, launch a new product. Maybe you can teach something different that doesn't fit into your programme. If you launch something new, do it in an interesting way. Always be proactive and make time to plan so your campaigns are engaging.

Think of your subscribers as 3 separate segments

Something that makes creating an email marketing strategy a lot easier is thinking of your audience as three different segments. If you're starting from a blank calendar, you can simplify the process by splitting your 3-month period into three 30-day chunks and dedicating one month to each of your segments.

Your 3 segments are:

• People who haven't bought from you yet. These are the subscribers on our lists that we all tend to pay the most attention to. They haven't bought anything yet, and, naturally, we want to sell! We acquired these leads at a cost, and we need a return on our investments. Promotions you could run to this group are splinter offers or affiliate offers. Or maybe you could think of a special way of repackaging your Rome offer.
• People who are your customers or active members. These people have bought from you, so don't make the mistake we made when we first started our business of not trying to sell more to them. Because these are your biggest fans and your best customers! They’ve already bought from you, so they have the least resistance – they’re open to buying again. What can you offer them? An annual upgrade? A mastermind, an accelerator programme, or something like an inner circle that further helps people with what you teach?
• Lapsed customers. These are people who bought from you in the past but are no longer active customers. Maybe they were in your membership, but they’re not anymore. Or they bought something from you a long time ago and then never again. What can you offer to them to bring them back?

Thinking about your list in this way helps you come up with promotions as it allows you to identify offers that target each segment separately.

Link your promotion planning to your financial goals

When planning your email marketing strategy, link it to your financial goals. How much do you want to earn each month? How much is what you’re going to make contributing to your annual income?

Another financial goal to link your planning to is how much you’re earning per subscriber each month. If you have 1,000 subscribers, and you’re currently making $1 per person, how can you increase that figure?

Remember that people who don’t engage with your list impact that figure too, so make sure to unsubscribe anyone who hasn’t engaged with your emails for over 60 days. You want the people who aren’t paying attention to leave your list so you can better serve the ones who want to stay. 

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Implement these tips, and you’ll be more proactive and intentional, and make more money in your business as a result. If you want to know exactly how to do this (and want all the campaigns to speed the process up), we have more than 45 email campaigns that help you dress up your offers differently. You can find these inside our programme, The Email Hero Blueprint.

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Three things to do for more sales in 2024”. The first reason why this subject line works is that it has a clear outcome in it – more sales. That’s what people want! So what outcome does your audience want? 

The next interesting piece in this subject line is the phrase “things to do”, which indicates you can take control to get the outcome you want. But it also says “three things”, which sounds specific and manageable.

Finally, the last bit that’s interesting and important is that it includes the year – 2024. This makes the subject line current. So think about these ingredients and see how you can apply them to your business and your email marketing.

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

The 7 Proven And Essential Email Campaigns To Add To Your Marketing Strategy And Elevate Your Business.

Mistakes You’re Making With Your Email Marketing Automation Strategy.

7 New Ideas To Build Your Email List In 2024 (With Extra Tips!)

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. Here's a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

Join the FREE Facebook group

Do you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Want to connect with Carrie?

You can find Carrie on her website!

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