How to Plan A Month’s Worth of Email Newsletters

Two years ago, I landed the role of digital content specialist and immersed myself into the world of email marketing, creating email copy, designing them, A/B testing emails, and all the great stuff that comes with email marketing.

My journey started with MailChimp and has since evolved to using Klaviyo for email marketing. In the beginning, I’d get scatterbrain on what to send, subject lines, best days to send, and the analysis would paralyse me into creating no emails or taking longer than expected.

Here Are Tools That Helped Me Conquer Email Marketing

To date, I use Advanced Marketing Institute and Coschedule headline analyzer to A/B test subject lines. I come up with four subject lines and the winning two get A/B tested to see what my audience responds to.

I also use Really Good Emails to look at sample emails that people in various industries have done before. This site has over 6,981 emails in categories like fashion, eCommerce, retention, and also brand emails.

These tools help inform my email campaigns and remove any mental barriers I might have before creating a campaign. In addition, I keep an email swipe file with great email campaigns and newsletters I have received from brands and they help with inspiration and looking at emails from different angles.

If you’re a marketer in the content industry or your brand is a purely content brand, here are some content email ideas:

Share key findings in your industry

For example, Ezoic shares weekly emails on what is happening in the ad and publisher industry. The emails can be detailed or can lead to blog posts with detailed information.

Share blogposts

Repurpose existing blog posts into email newsletters. These can have a “Take Me To The Site/Read More” call to action or you can share the entire post in the email. With the first option, you’d want to drive people to click through while in the second option, you’d want to drive people to open.

Share content from other brands that’d be really helpful for your audience

Key industry findings don’t have to be necessarily your own blog posts but they can be another brand’s, as long as they help your audience solve a problem there and then.

Sell real estate in your email newsletters

If you have a huge and well-segmented email database, you can sell ad space to brands whose target audience is similar to yours. With these four points, go ahead and create a weekly or biweekly email plan which can feed into your social media plan.

Supposing you’re an e-commerce platform; the process is similar. I’ve had the opportunity to use both MailChimp and Klaviyo for e-commerce and Klaviyo is much better in terms of automating processes and data reporting. If your brand is e-commerce reliant, Klaviyo is the way to go but if you’re content reliant, try MailChimp or Convertkit.

Types of e-commerce emails:

Promotional emails

These include top pick(s) of the week, new arrivals, back in stock, and emails on deals and sales happening in your shop.

Blog posts that sell products

If particular products don’t sell well, consider writing blog posts answering answers people might have about the product, which you can then share as an email to your list or to people who have shown interest in that product or to similar products.

Create flows that make your work easier

Abandoned cart emails, Browse abandonment flows, Customer win-back, retargeting flows to help you automate your email flows and capture people who left in the middle of the sales funnel and customers who’ve bought only once in the past.

Finally, study your email data to see how you could optimize your emails and flows. If you use Klaviyo, Flowium sends monthly emails to show you where and how to optimize your flows, and where you could be leaving money on the table. To help me optimize the flows, I also watch Youtube videos which give me insight into other people’s Klaviyo accounts and what to create for our account.

This article first appeared in Better Marketing.