Planning Your Email Marketing

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 toward promoting your products and/or services and that requires planning. The following steps will help you increase the results of your email marketing.

1. Build 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.
2. Design Web 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 your business. Stress “benefits” over “features”, always pretend you are the client and answer all the questions and concerns they might have right on the website page.
3. Build Email Lists for Each Product– Using an email program, or “autoresponder”, create lists for each product or service that you will promote. At a minimum you’ll want a general email list for people who visit the front page of your site and then two lists for each product you sell: one for people who purchased the product and one for people who just want more info about the particular product. Name your email marketing lists appropriately so that you know where to put the messages based from where the audience joins your list.
4. Develop a New Product Launch Calendar – Knowing when each product or service is being launched will help you identify which lists you can include the announcements and information on. Plus, it will remind you to create new website pages, lists and email marketing messages for each new product.
5. Create a Blog Post Publication Calendar – Based on the product launch calendar, write blog posts and set deadlines for them to be scheduled. Ensure that some blog posts promote the various product or service web pages, and other blog posts are designed for those who purchased already. For each message, consider who will see it and where they come from.
6. 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 website pages and purchase or sign up for your email lists.
7. 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 autoresponders, ensuring they link to the right website pages depending on the audience they are sent out to.
8. Craft Follow-Up Messages – Don’t forget to craft all your follow-up messages for each product  or service 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. Be careful not to bombard your list too much with messages they don’t 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, it’ll be that much easier each time to set up for each new product.