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The Highest ROI Task in Ecom 📈
Max Sturtevant
April 18, 2024
The Inbox Newsletter
Hello Inbox Newsletter subscribers.
Max here, again.
Today I want to talk about one of the biggest levers you can focus on in your account.
Campaign planning.
How to Effectively Plan Your Email Marketing Calendar
We do NOT want to be the marketers who decide what our emails are going to be the same day / week the email is supposed to go out.
Couple of reasons why:
Bring rushed impacts quality (and leads to more errors)
You are unable to view your macro strategy (balance and variety of campaigns)
You usually don’t base it off past results
Other channels (social media and paid ads) won’t be aligned with the email strategy.
We need to be sure we’re planning at least a month in advance for our campaigns to avoid the above mistakes.
But mainly we are building a monthly calendar to be sure we have the right balance of different types of content.
Value, education, nurture, direct response, sales, etc
Set aside time to review past email success and build your future calendars off those results.
PSA - Sending 3-4 times per week is always optimal in my experience so that’s what we are applying for this newsletter training.
Step 1: Determine and Insert Important Dates / Events
Get a blank calendar for the month, such as May, and figure out what events are relevant to your brand and want to highlight.
Common ones for May are Mother’s Day and Memorial Day.
Determine what you want to run for those days and for how long.
Run a sale? What is the offer? How long do you run the sale? What dates are you starting and ending?
Insert those dates into the calendar so we can build off of them.
You may also want to check a site like National Day Calendar to find any other random holidays you can plug to your brand (such as National Shrimp Day on May 10th lol).
Step 2: Add Supplementary Content to Important Dates
Now we have our important dates determined.
Let’s start inserting emails.
Add the main emails for the events into the calendar and any supplementary content.
For example, here’s what you could do if you were running a Mother’s Day sale from May 1st to May 8th…
May 1st: Sale Announcement
May 3rd: Sale Reminder
May 5th: Sale Top Picks
May 7th: Sale Expires Tomorrow
May 8th: Sale Last Chance
Then do the same for your other important even, like Memorial Day.
Maybe Memorial Day is a 48 hour flash sale and all you have is:
May 26th: Flash Sale Announcement
May 27th: Flash Sale Closer
And that will work great.
So now we have our base events locked in that our month is built around.
Now we can start filling in the blanks.
Step 3: Fill in Micro-Topic Campaigns for the Remaining Spots Equating to 3-4 Emails Per Week
3-4 emails per week is the sweet spot for getting the most out of your list and not burning them out.
With 1 email per week you just aren’t getting enough our of your list and you’ll get lost in the mix with the other brands.
With 5-7 emails per week, you risk tiring them out and losing effectiveness and ROI.
3-4 allows you to stay top of mind with your customer at a healthy cadence.
(We’ve tested all of them, test for your audience)
What Are Micro-Topics?
Micro topics are smaller sub topics of information on your industry, your process, and your product.
Rather than creating emails about wide over arching topics, microtopics allow the customer to digest the information easier (it’s easy to remember one point rather than 10).
If you try to give too much information and cover too many topics you won't get ANY message across.
Each email will only be looked at for a MAXIMUM of 3-5 seconds.
Focus on one specific point in each email you want the customer to take away.
Here are a few examples that you can create whole emails about:
One Benefit Of Your Product
One Feature
FAQ
What's Inside
How It's Made
How To Use
Back In Stock
Trending
Testimonials
Us vs Them
Myths vs Facts
Be sure in these emails you aren’t covering too much information. This will just overwhelm the customer.
Focus on one point and that’s it.
Write out the days in your calendar with the microtopics you want to cover.
By the end, your calendar should look something like this:
PS - I have a YouTube video dropping today all about campaign calendars.
In the video I create a mock campaign calendar for LuLu Lemon taking you through my exact thought process.
Check now if it’s out already: YouTube Video
Email Inspiration Of The Day
Brand:
MTN Ops
Notes:
The first half of this email is AWESOME.
A simple header layout with a clear display of the offer with added design (wood background)
And love the treeline transition to the product section showing the products and continuing to restate the offer.
Amazing.
Then it gets rough…
The campfire yearns section and all that text will NOT be read.
It’s good content, but just not in the right spot. It’s just clogging space and distracting the customer which will hurt conversions (usually).
Instead, they should make a full email out of that section.
The email would be much more effective if that section didn’t exist and they went straight to the photo section at the bottom.
A/B Test Result of The Day
Variation A:
No mention of discount size in the Preview Text
Variation B:
Mentioned discount size in preview text.
Insights:
Massive win here for this client, over 2x in revenue on this test variation.
It looks like adding the $ OFF offer in the preview text is more effective in campaigns for this client.
Likely because the people were so primed on the offer when opening the email and knew what they were getting into when they opened it.
There’s a different level of commitment for someone clicking an email they know the offer of vs someone who doesn’t know and they’re just clicking to find out.
Interesting…
Helpful Links Of The Day
Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.
Cheers,
Max
PS - If you’re an ecom brand doing over $50k per month interested in working with my full stack email marketing agency, book a call here.