Planning Your Email Marketing

On a training call today, the question was asked about the best way to start planning your email marketing. It was a great training so I decided to post some information about that here!

Your best chance of success with email marketing is to create a plan based on the products that you want to promote. It all starts with your product funnel, which leads to your content marketing plan, which leads to your email marketing calendar. All email marketing should be focused on promoting your products and/or services and that requires planning. The following steps will help you increase the results of your email marketing.

Craft a Working Product Funnel

You probably already have various products and services, but you may not have designed a product funnel yet that helps you understand how everything is interconnected and works together. Understanding this can help you keep your different lists and promotions in order.

Design Sales Pages for Each Product

Each page should tell your audience the benefits of purchasing the product. Remember, a sales page’s focus is on the audience, not on you. Benefits over features, always – pretend you are the client and answer all the questions and concerns they might have right on the sales page.

Start Appropriate Email Lists for Each Product

Using your autoresponder, create the lists for each product or service you promote. At the minimum, you will want a general email list for people who visit your blog’s front page and then two lists for each product you sell. Create one list for people who purchased the product and one for people who want more information about the product. Name them appropriately so that you know where to put the messages based on where the audience joins your list.

Develop a New Product Launch Calendar

Knowing when each product is being launched for new upcoming products and or services will help you identify which lists you can include the announcements and information on. Plus, it will remind you to create new sales pages, lists, blog posts, and email marketing messages for each new product.

Create a Blog Post Publication Calendar

Based on the product launch calendar, write blog posts, and set deadlines for them to be scheduled. Develop a content marketing calendar that you can use. Ensure that some blog posts promote the various sales pages, and other blog posts are designed for those who purchased already. Consider who will see each message and where they come from.

Create a Social Media Content Publication Calendar

Develop social media messages in a series based on your blog posts that will attract your readers to click through to your sales pages and purchase or sign up for your email lists.

Create an Email Publication Calendar

Based on how everything works together above, create a series of emails that you can edit appropriately for each separate list that you may want to promote the new product to. Load them into the right auto responders, ensuring they link to the right sales pages depending on the audience they are sent out to.

Craft Follow-Up Messages

Don’t forget to craft all your follow-up messages for each product you sell. Once sold, you will want to keep in contact with the customer who bought it so that you can market future products and services to them.

By creating a plan of action to follow, you can make sure every single time you launch a new product that you can cross-promote other products and services without bombarding your list too much with messages they donít need, thus increasing your conversion rates exponentially. If all the content you create goes together like a puzzle to promote all of your products and services in a seamless way, itíll be that much easier each time to set up for each new product.

Note that this post was originally published earlier and has been updated for relevancy.