How To Unlock your Email Marketing Potential

Has your company grown an enormous customer or prospect email list, but failed to follow up by regularly sending out high-quality content? Are you stuck producing last-minute campaigns because it has been too long since your last email communication and you just need something to go out? If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Creating valuable content, particularly for email, is one of the most common bottlenecks we’ve seen small businesses struggle with. Here are three steps to improve your email marketing.

STEP 1: Build an email / content marketing calendar

By building out a calendar you are committing to a cadence of communication, and defining some of the topics you will need to produce content for. This should be creative brainstorming time, not nitty-gritty, work-through-the-details time. This means getting all this planned out in an afternoon should be enjoyable and feel like time well spent. If you are doing this right, you’ll be building enthusiasm around the topics chosen and getting the required sign-off on the content strategy.

3 quick tips:

• I’d suggest planning 6 to 12 months out, but leave some built-in flexibility for new and relevant topics that may emerge throughout the year.
• This is not the time to get lost in picking the right subject line or stuck in a discussion on whether you should offer discounts or free shipping.
• Keep it high-level; turn off your internal editor that is trying to perfect or critique your creativity, and you’ll be surprised at how many great content ideas emerge.

STEP 2: Start leveraging your evergreen content

When you mention email marketing to a small business manager, they most commonly think in terms of newsletters, announcements, and special promotions that get sent to their list throughout the year. But if things are running properly, their email list is growing. And if they are thinking clearly, they should start asking, “Why did the 5,000 people who joined our list in February not receive the super popular article we wrote in January? Maybe we should re-send it to just them?”

Trying to resend old content manually is inefficient. Instead you should evolve your strategy by flagging all content that is evergreen and then developing a strategy for upcycling it.

What’s evergreen content? Evergreen content is content that stays relevant over time. So your new features, company updates, or flash sales should not be considered evergreen. But articles, guides, tips, and testimonial videos could likely all fit within an evergreen content strategy.

Once you’ve determined what content is evergreen, start utilizing campaigns to leverage its value. Here is a hypothetical example of a company’s four-week calendar illustrating how evergreen content fits within the workflow:

1. Monthly Newsletter
2. Evergreen Campaign 1 (product guide)
3. Promotional Offer
4. Evergreen Campaign 2 (guest article)

The product guide or guest article evergreen campaigns would typically be a sequence of 6 to 12 emails. They could contain evergreen content on products, usage, or comparisons, or just shared industry knowledge from a guest writer. Remember, you can still always add to or edit evergreen content over time. Your evergreen campaigns may start as just a few emails, but grow into a 12–16 email sequence over time.

This strategy is effective because it expands the life-cycle of your content. Once written, the content becomes part of a strategic sequence that is filling gaps in your email marketing calendar. Remember, producing content is typically the biggest bottleneck.

STEP 3: Enhance your campaigns with automation

Automation is a hot topic, but it can be hard to know where to start. Email automation involves using an advanced feature set to build out logical workflows that are designed to mimic and replace human processes. Email automation can be used in so many different ways. And it is so easy to get so caught up in the wow factor and complexity of all the features that you never actually launch a workflow.

My suggestion would be to start small. Launch your first simple workflow and then build from that success. To get you started I’ll touch on two different use cases that should be easily adapted to most businesses.

Example 1: retail / e-Commerce

Let’s use the same hypothetical example and calendar used above, but give it more context. This is a high-end bike company. Their evergreen product guides include emails that compare ultralight wheels, titanium vs. carbon fiber, the benefits of tubeless tires, etc.

In this use case, the business could use automation to have trigger links used to read the full article on the website. The workflow is set up to listen for trigger links so that when a recipient clicks to learn more, they get a free shipping offer or a more detailed product comparison guide.

Another use case could be to build rich customer profiles. Perhaps this bike company has several product verticals like mountain bikes, road bikes, children’s bikes, trail bikes, and even some nutritional products. Automation can be easily used to listen to the email activity and start filling in tags in the email list that indicate user interests. These tags then get used for generating dynamic content in newsletters, dynamic product offers, or even just customer research for company’s next marketing report.

Important tip: Most small business won’t be ready for building dynamic emails; but by starting with just the tag building, they leave the door open for doing customization once their list has grown.

Example 2: B2B SaaS

This hypothetical company sells an advanced research platform for analyzing real-estate trends in specific markets. The company’s goal is to get banks, hedge funds, and institutional investors excited enough that they want a free ‘customized’ demo showing the data that is most relevant to them.

In the company’s existing workflow, when a user signs up for a free trial, they receive a sequence of emails verifying their account, gathering data, offering usage tips, and finally inviting them to connect with an expert to get a live demo.

In this use case, automation can be first used to filter interest levels based on email or even website activity. As users progress through the flow, their lead score can be adjusted. This will help the sales team prioritize which leads to follow up with first. It will also provide the marketing team with data on where the bottlenecks in the process are.

To expand the automation, it is quite simple to provide alternative workflows based on activity (or inactivity). If a user didn’t open the data request email, you can resend it. If they opened but didn’t respond, then perhaps send a second email attempt with a value-add. If after three attempts they are still unresponsive, the lead can be moved over to a long-term nurture sequence that provides useful guides and free planning tools.

I wouldn’t recommend starting with the advanced automation. Even if you just start with the listening and scoring, you’ll learn from the data and can then start adapting the more complex workflows to solve the obvious bottlenecks.

Here are the top benefits of using email automation:

1. Automate the busy work of your sales team
2. Improve email performance by providing more relevant content to your users
3. Get deep marketing insights into your bottlenecks
4. Build rich user profiles that will improve all your sales and marketing efforts.

In Summary:

If you follow the steps outlined above, here are the benefits you’ll start seeing:

1. Content production will no longer be a bottleneck for your company
2. Your email list performance will start to improve from your improved frequency and increase relevancy.
3. You’ll start to gather great data on your prospects and content performance.

BONUS: you are in B2B, you’ll start to isolate blockages in your sales funnel.