It sounds self-evident to say that your email marketing has to be relevant to your audience if you’re going to achieve any meaningful engagement.
And yet, too often we see marketers who, feeling the pressure to stick to the schedule they’ve committed to, publish content that is not relevant, not interesting, and not any different from so much of what’s already out there. Clearly, that’s not going to be an effective long-term strategy.
If the thought crossing your mind right now is, “He’s giving me permission to publish whenever the spirit moves me!,” then you may want to reconsider how committed you really are to your email marketing efforts.
What I am suggesting is that though there is an art to email marketing, it’s not “Art.”
There’s no need to wait for the muse to visit before you create your content.
Instead, you should devise a plan that goes along with your schedule. Something that goes far deeper than, “It’s Tuesday, so it must be time to hit ‘Send.’”
Interests, Resources, Formats
Critical to that plan is identifying what will gain and keep your audience’s attention. (I’m assuming you’ve already identified your audience and their primary motivations.)
Then, it’s time to assess your resources. Can you publish every day? Great. Just be sure you can stick with it. If monthly is more your speed, that works, too. If you track your metrics, your audience will let you know whether you’ve hit the right frequency.
With your topics and schedule in mind, you can turn your attention to the kind of content can you produce. If the content you need to create to engage your audience requires gathering research data, interviews or other time- and labor-intensive work before writing even begins, perhaps you need to reconsider a publishing schedule if it begins to interfere with other responsibilities.
The Content Ecosystem — Big, Little, and In-Between
It can be helpful to think of every content idea as a piece of a larger whole. Is something you just said to a prospect the perfect encapsulation of an idea that would make a great slide in a presentation? Or perhaps you’ve just thought of a topic that could be a presentation itself. Either way, that one concept can lead you to a tremendous trove of content. A presentation becomes a keynote; individual slides become online articles; pull quotes and bullet points become social media posts.
Thinking in this modular way not only helps keep your content on task and relevant, but it can also ease the burden of having to create what may feel like too much content. Avoiding burnout and the fear of not having anything to write about are both critical to keeping your content quality high.
