How time flies.

With mid-Feb almost over, majority of our internal copy and graphics requests have been sent out for our March emails.

And whilst it’s still fresh in my head, I wanted to walk you through how we view content planning, and why we plan our emails one month in advance.

Let’s get into it.

So. Why One Month Ahead?

There’s two sides of the coin here.

The ‘selfish’ side first. We run an agency, and service multiple 7 - 8 figure brands.

If we did last minute work (ie. 1 - 2 day turnarounds) for every single brand we managed, our team would die of stress and burnout, without a question.

The unselfish side now. It allows us to:

• Plan far out in advance
  When we put emails on our content calendar (see below for example), we’ll be able to get a high level pulse of the week. If we’re going too hard with sales, we might move a couple emails a week back (similarly for educational/value based emails).

• Gives our clients ample time to vet our work
  We’re all human. Sometimes we misunderstand briefs, or word things in a different way than our clients envision. This gives us time to go back and forth with revisions, without an impending deadline of email needing to go out by tomorrow.

• Gives us time for the real last minute stuff
  We understand it’s an incredibly dynamic space. Last minute offers, stock running low, sales crushing it.etc that all call for a sudden last minute email. By having the ground work already established, this gives us the headspace to really focus on the ‘this needs to go out tmr‘ emails.

So. What goes into the planning?

The first thing that we do is fill in all the big events. These are our ‘anchor points’, where we’ll spend a good chunk of time.

For example, we’re looking at International' Women’s Day as well as UK Mother’s Day in March.

Next, we take a look at all the products we have, and try to feature them in some way or another. 

This is different if you have 100+ SKUs, in which we would feature collections instead.

We typically do these through a blend of educational/content/social emails, with of course the standard direct response emails.

There are also some things we do once per quarter. 

We look at the typical lifecycle journey of a customer. Are they near the period of a second purchase?

Have they lapsed and not purchased from us in awhile? This allows us to plan the necessary campaigns to try to win them back (after all, LTV is the game we’re playing here).

Finally, we make sure our content covers all aspects of our list.

Whilst the standard engaged Lxx days is a strategy we deploy, it’s merely the base. We try to collect a ton of zero party data to split our subscribers up into segments.

For simplicity sake, let’s take fashion. These segments could include whether they’re shopping for themselves or for a gift, male or female, casual or formal, the list goes on.

This ensures our emails are always hyper relevant, and not just dependent on who clicked the most in the past time period.

And if you’ve read this far, definitely look into perplexity and the other AI softwares to help with discovery :)

And that’s a wrap!

My analytics shows me that some of you guys have been reading for over a year!

First of all, we’re all incredibly honored. Thank you for the vote of confidence :)

But I have to ask… Is there any reason why we haven’t spoken?

You see the work that we do, and the results that we bring.

Incredibly curious to what’s holding you back.

I love to know, just send the raw, unfiltered thoughts our way (no need to hold anything back).

On the other hand, if you decide now’s the time to hop off the fence, you can book a call with the team here - we would love to help you crush retention (like we’ve done with the 500+ brands we’ve worked with 😉).

Cheers.