I recently sent out a survey to my audience, which included the question, “If you are using email marketing in your marketing mix, what do you struggle with the most when it comes to your email marketing?” The responses varied, but the #1 thing that most business owners, coaches, and consultants said they struggle with was staying consistent.
It’s easy to start sending emails to your list, but it’s hard to stay consistent, and only when you are consistent with your email marketing will you get results, so I decided to put some tips together on how you can stay consistent with your email marketing.
- Create an email marketing plan– in your email marketing plan you will outline your email marketing goals, types of emails you will be sending (e-newsletter, autoresponders, drip campaigns, etc.), how often you will send your emails, when you will send your emails, your email flow, specific topics, etc.When you have a plan, you are better able to execute and to stay on task with getting your emails out.Many business owners, coaches, and consultants, skip the step of creating the email marketing plan, and then they don’t have anything to refer back to and therefore, they become very inconsistent with their efforts.
- Select a specific day and time that you would like your emails to go out– this can be really helpful in staying consistent with sending out your emails. For example, my monthly e-newsletter goes out the second Wednesday of every month, because I know that it goes out the second Wednesday of every month, I plan my activities around that time frame to make sure that the e-newsletter goes out.In addition, after a couple of years of testing days and times, I figured out that on average I get the best open rates on Wednesdays after 3:00 pm, so now I schedule my e-newsletter to go out the second Wednesday of every month at 3:30 pm.Knowing the time and date my email needs to go out, helps me to stay consistent.
- Put it on your calendar– if you put your publishing dates on your marketing calendar you will be forced to make sure you get your emails out, because you now have a deadline that you have to send out your emails. If it’s not on your calendar, you will tend to forget to send it out, or because you don’t have a deadline, you will continuously put it off, so place it on your calendar so you can stay consistent.
- Plan your topics- included in your email marketing plan should be what topics you plan to write about and promote in your e-newsletter. The information you will be sending in the series of emails for your autoresponders, and/or drip campaigns should also be included in the plan. When you’ve planned out your topics and information, it makes it much easier to create your emails and to stay consistent.
So, if you create an email marketing plan, set a day and time to publish your emails, put it on your calendar, and plan out your topics in advance, these four things can help you to stay consistent with your email marketing.
Do you have an email marketing plan? Do you need help with creating your email marketing plan? We can help, contact us for a FREE email marketing success strategy session.