Your email marketing plan simplified: The content
An email newsletter is nothing without content. But what content should you include? Let’s take a look at how to plan the content for your email campaigns.
It’s all about focus
When planning your email newsletter’s content, remember to focus. Write each newsletter as if it were directed towards your ideal customer. If you can actually pick out a specific customer and write the email as if it were only going to them, that’s even better.
If you have multiple target markets, pick out the ones that are easiest to write to, and don’t worry about the rest. Of course, that may mean you have a few highly-targeted email newsletters, rather than one really broad one. But they’ll be much more effective.
Don’t be purely promotional
Even if you’re building up your email marketing to create a cost-effective marketing platform, make sure every email you send out isn’t purely promotional. The content of your email newsletter needs to balance three things, represented in the acronym P.I.E.
- P – Promotional
- I – Informational
- E – Entertaining
Everyone’s specific recipe for their email marketing will be different. The key to remember is that nobody likes too much P. in their P.I.E. If you’re purely promotional, people will ignore your emails.
Avoid too much content
Too much content in your email newsletter will cause people to get bored, and frequently miss any content they could have actually benefited from. Avoid content overload.
A good rule of thumb is to have three or less sections in your email newsletter that change. You may have information about your company and contact information in the sidebar or at the bottom, and that’s fine. Those sections don’t change. But for the sections that do change, limit yourself to three or less.
Some example sections include:
- Blog entry
- YouTube video link
- Featured client
- Special
- Upcoming events
- Quick tips
Whatever sections you put in there, just don’t overwhelm your subscribers.
Next time we’ll finish up the series by looking at the frequency of your email newsletter. As always, if you need help designing or running your email newsletter, we would be glad to provide that help. Just contact us for more information.
Email Marketing Series
- Your email marketing plan simplified: The purpose
- Your email marketing plan simplified: The content
- Your email marketing plan simplified: The frequency