Making Email Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

We all love creating content for social media, but have your emails received some love lately? Your company’s email marketing strategy should be in place before anything else. Yes, that means right after your website is complete and before you start promoting your services and products to the world on social media. Your email marketing strategy is your number one way to build authentic brand awareness with your potential customers. So have you given your email strategy an upgrade? Let’s press refresh together.

Step One: Type of Content

First things first, what type of content integrates best with your overall strategy? Email can be a great part or contribution to your content strategy but typical sales emails or newsletters just don’t cut it in this case. You have to be providing value and sharing content that your reader cannot find anywhere else. You also need to ensure that the email doesn’t include “EVERYTHING” as it should be a stepping stone to what you REALLY want them to do- a purchase!

Step Two: Be A Gatherer

Once you have an idea how your emails play into your content strategy, you’ll need to gather sign-ups or identify ways to segment your existing audience. How will you encourage people to sign up for your email list if you don’t already have a list? Who within your audience will your email content benefit from? Is this email campaign part of a larger lead generation or drip campaign? 

All of these are questions to ask when figuring out who this is going to be and further identifying what to include. Don’t be afraid to do a deep dive into your email marketing platform to utilize what it offers when it comes to segmentation, targeting, email behavior and list building.

Step Three: Determine Your Cadence & Subject Line

How often will you send your emails? What will your subject line include? These are two concepts that oftentimes aren’t prioritized enough. Knowing your purpose will help you identify cadence. Looking at the subject lines in your inbox that grab your attention is a good place to start when writing yours regularly.

Step Four: The More Content, The Merrier

What other pieces of content will you include? Does your email contain more than one piece of content like video, photos and text? What intended action do you want your reader to take once they consume the content in the email? 

Consider the entire journey that you intend for the reader to take, the pieces of information and calls to action that you plan to include along the way. A good way to get these answers is to write the client journey from point A to purchase! That way you can create the best pieces of content to include in your email strategy. 

Step Five: Do You Have A Drip?

When your customer journey is mapped out, it’s a great time to consider building multiple emails to create a lead generation drip campaign. This drip campaign will nurture your leads and get them to take an intended action or build a relationship with them. Most likely, your email platform will have templates in place for you to just design and implement! Easy peasy!

Step Six: Plan Your Content Ahead

If your email content won’t include content that already exists, be sure to plan far enough ahead to allow time for all the creative that you’ll need prior to your actual launch of business, product or strategy refresh. Especially if your emails are part of a lead generation campaign centered around a specific event, you’ll want to cater the content towards that audience and their needs to allow enough time to create your emails prior to that date. 

Is your email marketing strategy singing Beyonce’s “Upgrade You” yet? If you’ve been creating email content for an extended period of time with no results take this as your sign to upgrade your strategy. 

Content Creative provides a place for clients to receive a quality experience with one full-service team to help execute a marketing strategy in alignment with your brand and message. We understand as a business or marketing team sometimes you don’t have all of the resources that you need to create a successful content program. Want a helping hand creating your content strategy? Reach out to us here.