In the business world, part of a good business plan always includes areas that you, the business owners, will want to own and put your hands on and other areas that make more sense for you to pass off into other hands. Email marketing is no different, but if you are new to the marketing world, it may be difficult for you to intuit what should be passed along and what should be kept. This is by no means a definitive guide, but these are the guidelines we typically pass along to our own email marketing clients.
Depending on your business, email marketing may mean different things for you, but in general email marketing typically means a newsletter that is sent to a list periodically and promotional emails that are sent to a different list. If you decide that email marketing is in your future (and you absolutely SHOULD because it is still the biggest bang for your buck in the digital world), you will want to have an idea of what you will need to do yourself and what you will assign out.
What You Should Keep
- Assets: You should plan on getting together and sending to your marketing team approved assets before each publication. Some marketing teams can pull assets for you, but you will be happier with their work overall if you give them a pool of preapproved photos to pull from.
- Promotions: Plan on either working closely with your marketing team to map out a what you expect your upcoming sales to look like or plan the time to provide them with the types of sales you are comfortable running and your current inventory reports. Promotions will only be successful if you have the inventory to back up your sales.
- Personal Touches: One of the keys to a successful newsletter is keeping it true to your brand and if YOU are your brand, then your customer base should periodically hear from you! Much like how Colonel Sanders still posthumously voices Kentucky Fried Chicken, you may want to inject your voice into your brand and the best way to do that is by writing something yourself. Whether it is bullet points or paragraphs, the most authentic words and phrases will come straight from your pen, so plan on writing a bit even after you have made the decision to bring on an agency.
- Final Approval: Although it would be nice to have so much faith in your marketing team that you can completely forego a final stamp and formal acknowledgment back to your team that the email is good to go, the final approval is a vital step in the process. And it is not explicitly for catching mistakes! You may have changed a sale date and forgotten to let the team know or a draft could have had a different plant than the finalized sale. Things happen. Life happens. Make sure you schedule yourself time to give your final drafts a read-through.
What You Can Give Away
- Pinpointing Your Target Market: The main reason you should bring in a professional is to help strategize and grow your business and a great way to do that is to identify who you are selling to and make sure your message is getting to them, but also to identify new opportunities places you haven’t even considered.
- Email Platform Selection: The general idea here is to use your marketing team to help you grow your business and what better way to do that then to use their expertise! If you are open to changing email platforms or have yet to set one up, ask for your team’s recommendation. They will have good insight based on their experiences. (…And if they don’t you can always email Katie and set up a Discovery Call!)
- Email Drafting: Typically, the “drafting” stage of setting up an email is when the content of an email is taken from the documents and folders where the words and photos are aggregated and slapped into the email template that has been set up with your branding and pertinent information. Your marketing team will be able to expertly create email drafts for you.
- Interpreting Data: Anyone can collect data, but generally, you should be able to leave the interpretation of the data to the professionals.
- Mapping Out Sections: Your marketing team should be able to offer good ideas about what sections your emails should include to maximize all of your KPIs that includes jazzing up headlines and making sure the content is relevant to your audience.
These are just a few ideas, but the general rule of thumb is to keep the parts that you need to keep and give away the parts that are better suited elsewhere. The trick is knowing which tasks are on which side of the line. If you need some help figuring all of that out, drop Katie a line at Katie@mygardenofwords.com.
