4 Ways to Prep Your Email Marketing for the New Year
As the year comes to a close is your email marketing ready for 2020? Keep reading to learn four things you can do right now to set your emails up for success in the new year.
If you want email marketing to be a big part of your business in 2020, you are going to love these tips. Let's go over four things you can do right now to get your email strategy dialed in for 2020.
#1: Clean Your Email List
Alright, tip number one is to clean your email list. Make like Marie Kondo and tidy that thing up.
If you’ve never cleaned your email list, basically, what you want to do is go through your subscribers and segment the ones that have not been reading, opening, or engaging with your emails.
Every email service does is a little bit differently but most of them have a way that you can go in and look at the subscribers that have been deemed “cold” — meaning they haven't been opening or engaging with your emails for a set period of time.
I use ConvertKit (affiliate link) for my business and they categorize cold subscribers as any subscriber who has not opened any of your emails in at least three months.
That's a pretty good time frame to use. If someone has not opened anything I've sent them in three months and I've been regularly emailing them like weekly stuff, it's a pretty good indication that they're no longer interested.
Before you clean your list, you can send a re-engagement campaign to that segment of your list that's gone cold to try and warm them back up and encourage them to interact with your emails again. But if after a few emails, they are still not interested, they're still not showing any activity on their account, it's a pretty safe bet that you can delete them.
Once you tidy your list and delete those cold subscribers, you'll have a leaner more engaged list that's ready to hear from you in the new year.
As a bonus, you'll see your open rates go up because all those cold subscribers tend to drag your open rates down. So if you've been seeing your open rates decline and you haven't cleaned your list in a while that could be why.
#2: Update Your Newsletter Schedule
Alright, tip number two is to update your newsletter schedule.
Maybe have the best intentions to email your list every week this year. Or maybe you have been emailing them every week, but you want to email a little more often.
This time of year is a great time to sit down and figure out when you want to email your list. Right now things are slower, but things are going to pick up in January and you want to have all of that stuff figured out and planned so that you are ready to jump into the new year with some emails already written.
If you want to change up your newsletter strategy take some time now to make plans for 2020. Go ahead and decide on your new frequency. Pick whatever frequency works for you and make a commitment that you will stick to that in the new year. It's like a New Year's resolution for your business.
Once you've picked a new frequency, go ahead and plan out a month's worth of newsletter content right now. If you're going to do weekly emails, go ahead and plan out your first 4 emails that you'll send in January.
Then actually schedule a time to write them. You could go ahead and batch them all in one go and get all four emails knocked out in an afternoon. If you're not into batching, you could go ahead and schedule some time every week to write your emails.
Then you're all set for the new year and you've got some time in your schedule to dedicate to your email list. No more ghosting your subscribers in 2020.
#3: Update Your Welcome Sequence
Another thing you can do right now to get set for 2020 is take some time to evaluate your welcome sequence. It's a great time to look back and reflect on what's been working in your business and what needs to change. Take some time to actually look at how a key sequence like your welcome sequence is performing.
If you haven't done this for a while go into the back end of your email service provider and dig into the stats for your welcome sequence. You can take a look at the stats and see what story they're telling you.
Are people opening your emails? Are people dropping off at a certain point in the sequence? Maybe you have really great open rates, but then you have an email where open rates just dip that could be an email that needs a subject line change or something else is going on with that email or the email before this making people drop off.
You could look to see are people unsubscribing at a certain point in the sequence. And then you can look at engagement. Have you been getting replies to your emails? Are you even asking people to reply?
Is your welcome sequence leading people deeper into your community? Like maybe you have a free Facebook group. Are you getting members from your welcome sequence?
Are you getting people checking out your offers and is your welcome sequence selling for you?
Take some time now to actually look at the sequence and evaluate how it's been working for you in the past year. It’s something that can continually be optimized and improved for better performance.
#4: Plan Your Promotions
The fourth thing I want to talk about today is planning for 2020. Right now is also a good time to start to map out your launches for the new year.
Do you have a new program that's launching? Are you reopening something? When are those launches hitting and what pre-launch content do you need to slot in? And when does that need to be created?
Take some time now at the end of the year to plot out those email campaigns to support those launches. You'll need your launch emails, of course whenever the cart opens. and the cart closes.
But before then you'll also need some pre-launch content. Pre-launch content gets people excited for what you're offering. It’s when you start talking about some of the problems that they might be having that your offer ultimately solves. It’s when you might start inviting people to a webinar or a free video series.
You want to have that stuff mapped out on your calendar so that you have plenty of lead-up time to your launch so that your audience is primed and ready when it's time to open the cart.
If you're planning multiple launches throughout the year, you want to start chunking this out on your calendar right now, so you can see when you need to be creating content around which specific offer.
You don’t have to get super specific right now. This can just be a big picture plan and then as things get more locked down as the year goes on you can fill in with what exact emails you need on what exact dates. But just having the basics mapped out is a great place to start the new year.
These 4 tips can take your email marketing strategy up a level in the new year.