Secrets of Email Content Strategy

Email content strategy is one of the reasons email marketing can generate $42 for every dollar spent. That’s a 4200% return on your investment!

No, you’re not going to do that well by sending a random email. Those hefty returns come from thoughtful planning and strategy.

What Is an Email Strategy?

Email content strategy is the 30,000 foot view of email tactics.

Copywriting, lead generation, voice, and branding are among these tactics. The big plan for carrying all these things out is your email content strategy.

Why Trust Us? All beehiiv writers are carefully vetted for their knowledge and experience. Jacob Bear has been writing email marketing campaigns for more than 10 years and was personally coached by Daniel Levis, the author of Email Alchemy. His email newsletter, “Bold Words,” has been active since 2016, and he was recently named a Top Copywriting Voice by LinkedIn.

Email Content Strategy (Key Components)

Email content strategy starts with thinking about your target audience. More specifically, where are they in the buying cycle?

The real power of email content strategy comes from integrating your content with your email. This means most of your content should be written for the top of the funnel, where you can generate more leads and sign-ups.

Create incentives to sign up for your emails. These incentives could include lead magnets, additional guides and reports, special access to webinars or communities, and special discount codes for subscribers.

Pair these incentives with a sign-up form and add them to all your top-of-funnel content.

When it comes to email, you need a different approach to content. Your subscribers are interested in your business, but many of them have not yet bought from you.

This means most of your email content should be designed for the middle of the funnel.

Mid-funnel content is usually educational — and hopefully entertaining. It nurtures these interested readers and persuades them to become paying clients.

But it’s not that simple. To make sure your content shows up more frequently on social media and elsewhere, you need engagement.

One strategy to get more engagement is posting some mid-funnel content and promoting it in your email. Your loyal readers will give this content likes and shares, add comments, and increase your content's visibility through engagement.

How Do You Plan Email Content?

Email content strategy requires several steps.

First, you should have specific goals. Do you want more open rates? Do you want readers to share your content? Are you seeking more conversions?

Some of your content should be created specifically with each of these goals in mind. The rest should be a balance of nurturing and education. You’ll have to do some testing to find the right balance for your audience.

If you want more sales, you can gradually dedicate more emails towards nurturing and asking for a sale. If your open rates are hurting, then you’ll have to offer more value by increasing the amount of educational content you provide.

Another key part of your email content strategy is segmentation and personalization. If you have more than a few hundred subscribers, send out different versions of your email based on your readers’ demographics and interests.

How do you figure all this out? By testing. You should regularly take an educated guess on what you think will work, and then run an A/B test to see if it does.

Once you have a handle on the types of content you’re going to create, you can set up a content calendar to make sure it gets done.

What Are the 4 Steps of Content Strategy?

To develop your email content strategy, you need to be numerically clear on your starting point.

You should know how many subscribers you have, the revenue your email generates, your current open rates, and anything else you want to address in your content strategy.

Once you’re clear on your starting point, follow these steps:

Step One: Choose Measurable Goals

The goals for your content strategy should be specific — not just to increase conversions, but to increase your conversions by 20% in the next three months.

Other measurable goals could be to double your open rates, gain a thousand new subscribers, or increase your monthly revenue by 25%.

Step Two: Develop Plans To Achieve Your Goals

Think of your audience, why they follow or subscribe, and what they want.

Use this information to brainstorm ways to get the result you want. Maybe your audience will respond to more humor, for example.

Step Three: Execute and Test

The example above would be easy to test. Do an A/B test in your next email. Send a silly email asking half the readers on your list to make a purchase. Send a similar email to the other half, but without the jokes.

Step Four: Evaluate and Plan

Pretty soon you will know if your hypothesis is correct. If your funny email generates significantly more sales than the “plain” one, then you know your audience likes humor.

At this point, you could start weaving more humor in all your content.

How Do You Write Good Email Content?

To write good email content, subject lines should be one of the first things you focus on.

Every subject line should be short and interesting. Its only purpose is to get people to open the email and read it.

The first line is almost as important as the subject line. It’s going to draw readers in, so they will read the email.

Good email content should fit what your readers expect and enjoy. Usually, you want it to be conversational, as if you’re sitting down and talking to the reader.

Another big part of writing good email content is engineering it to avoid spam filters. Using an email service with a good reputation such as beehiiv will help a lot.

In fact, beehiiv has many of the key components of email content strategy built right in.

We give you an SEO-optimized website that hosts all your emails for top-of-funnel content that will show up in searches and increase your subscribers.

Our new landing page editor helps you gain new readers, and we have plenty of tools in place to help you generate revenue with a premium version of your email newsletter.

beehiiv gives you the ability to do A/B testing and we have features that allow readers to engage with your content inside your email.

We also have automated programs that enable readers and other creators to recommend and refer your email newsletter to others and even receive rewards for doing so.

Email content strategy often gets bogged down in technical details. We created beehiiv to handle these details, so you’re free as a creator to come up with original content and integrate it into your strategy.

Why not give it a try? Start your own beehiiv newsletter today.