Lessons

Lesson Info

Create an Email Editorial Calendar

I am actually a big fan of email editorial calendar. Ironically, I'm actually not an editorial calendar person when it comes to blogging, but I am very much an editorial calendar person when it comes to email marketing. And there are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is that an editorial calendar gets you over the fear of the blank page. If you have an idea of what you're supposed to be writing about, it's not like, "Ah crap, it's Thursday morning, and I gotta send an email." Instead it's, "Oh, it's Thursday morning, "and I get to share this with my customers." Right, it changes your whole approach. It also gives you a chance to plan photo shoots in advance. So sometimes, you're gonna have a content idea that requires an image. When we did Kailyn's hot seat in the last segment, it was like, "Okay let's talk about pattern on pattern." Well do you have an image of that? No. And ultimately, she can probably do it pretty quick with a flat lay but looking a little bit in advance g...

ives you a chance to shoot some of that stuff so it's not, "Oh it's Thursday morning, "and I don't have an image. "Crap." So we wanna make sure that you're not scrambling with photos when you should be sending the email. An editorial calendar also gives you a framework and a starting point, but you don't have to be married to it. If you had it in your head, if you have it in your calendar that next Thursday you're gonna send out this email about pattern on pattern, but you wake up and you have this burning idea that you have to send out instead. That's fine. You bump that other email further down your calendar. So you're not married to this calendar, but it gives you a plan. The other thing that I think that's really important is that email marketing is hard to sustain if it isn't in alignment with what's happening in your business. I know personally it's hard for me to write an email about a product that I'm not excited about. And generally, for me, I'm most excited about either A, what I'm working on at the time, or B, what I'm wearing a lot of. Those are for me the two things that I'm like, "Oh, been wearing these earrings all the time, I love them." Or, "I'm working on this new thing, I love that." So that's for me what makes it so much easier to write an email. So if you're trying to write emails that just feel out of the flow of your business, it's hard to generate that energy and that momentum. An editorial calendar lets you put your email plan in alignment with your business. So we're gonna start putting together your email editorial calendar by taking a look at the next few months of your business. I like to plan three, four-ish months out with a general guideline. After that, it all starts to get a little fuzzy. I'm like, "I don't know what I wanna make four, "five months from now, but I have a pretty good idea "over the next couple of months." So the first thing that you wanna look at is do you have new products that you plan on releasing? In the next three, four months, is there something new that you're working on that you're gonna release? Are there any products that you haven't released yet so that you've designed but are coming soon or haven't promoted yet? So did you release something recently, Kailyn, and not really promoted to the best of your ability? Right, so there may be that. Very honestly, something else I look at is is there a time where I really need to make money? Is there a month (chuckles), okay sometimes it's everyday (group laughs) but I know for many of us, there's definitely months where cashflow is tighter than others. I like to work that into my editorial calendar. Some of the big events or sales that I do are to help with cashflow. Obviously, my big birthday sale, I can't change my birthday. But my sample sale, that slides around in the year depending on when I need a little bit of extra cash and also when I have a big pile of excess stuff that I want to sell. There's a two-fold factor there. So I might look at, is there a time where I really need to make money? Because then I might schedule an email that's gonna drive more traffic. Let's be honest, a big sale is probably gonna generate more revenue than a simple product email. They're both important, and you can't send those big sale emails every week because they lose their power. But I might look at, is there a time where I really need to make money? Is there a time where cashflow is gonna be tight? We also wanna look at, are there shows or events coming up? You've got a craft show or something you want to tell people about. You wanna build that into your schedule. And then you also wanna look at what holidays or seasons align with your product, and also are there holidays or seasons where you want to avoid? And this could be two-fold. Sometimes it's just like, you're like, "I'm not doing it." Like I don't do any kind of Mother's Day promo. It's just not my jam. It's not my thing. Alright, so I skip it. That's cool. But I also look at what I want to avoid as in, I don't really wanna send an email out over Fourth of July weekend because people are at the beach, and they're not really so excited about buying jewelry. So I'll look at that and put it into my editorial calendar. And so even if you're committed to a very weekly flow. Like I'm gonna email every Thursday. If a major holiday falls on a Thursday, you may wanna shift around that week and find a better time. So then you can do this in two ways. You can plug these into a calendar, or you can just make a list and note the dates. So I am not a big paper calendar person. I keep my calendar on my phone. But then in terms of my email editorial calendar, it's usually a list. I'll plot out all these things, and then I'll just go back in and plug in dates. So whichever works best for you. But then you're gonna take these events, your launches, your seasonal aspects, your sales, whatever it is you're doing, and you're going to match them to your email frequency goal. So we talked about one of these strategies working for you. Right, you're either gonna do the weekly thing, where you're committed to like every Thursday, I'm sending an email. Or maybe you're doing the bi-weekly thing plus adding in your launches. Or you're just doing a launch build-up and then filling in content if you've got a big gap. So you'll go ahead, and you'll plug in your email ideas based on if you've got an event, a product release, or a planned sale. And then, you're gonna fill in any gaps in your frequency with content that promotes existing products. As you guys saw on the last lesson, there are a lot of content ideas for existing products. So in the example that I'm gonna show you guys, which is my example, I have a lot of kind of launches and releases plugged in, which may or may not happen. Let's be honest. But I always am pretty ambitious with those, so I have less existing product content that I feed in. But you guys may be the opposite. You may have sparse launches. And so you'll fill in a lot more existing content, and that's fine. Alright, so let's look at an example. So for me, new products, I've got some new earring designs I'm working on, and what's funny is probably some of this is gonna flip even from when I put this keynote together. 'Cause I'm like, "Well that order doesn't work anymore." But I've got some new earring designs. I've got this new Botanica collection I'm working on. I've actually got like 12 pieces from my Contra collection that I keep not getting into my online store, so I've got a handful of things that have to be released. I know probably in about the middle of July, I kinda wish I had a little more money. So that feels like a pretty good time, somewhere in there, to have my sample sale. That's usually a pretty big revenue generator for me. I haven't run one yet. It's been July of last year was the last time I ran one. So I'm gonna throw that in somewhere. And then shows or events, I'm actually doing this little pop-up in New York in August, and even though it's mostly aimed at wholesale, I think we're gonna do a couple hours of retail shopping. So I wanna be able to promote that to my list. And then, I want to avoid Memorial Day and Fourth of July because those are holidays where people are outside, and so I just wanna skip 'em. Alright, so now I'm just gonna start to plug these into the calendar, so I went through pulled out my calendar, looked at these dates. So what we have here. And now, to just make this a little bit more visual and easy to see, I went through and I kind of plugged these in. So the week of, I'm generally aiming for Thursdays with my emails, but again, I can mix things up if I need to. So based on the events that I listed, I'm saying, okay, here's when I'm gonna launch new Contra, here's this new earring release, here's this collection, some of this is probably gonna get flipped, sample sale. That seems like a pretty good week to have it, kinda people are back from Fourth of July. And then up here, I'm gonna run an email to promote my New York pop-up. So obviously, there's still a lot of weeks where nothing is happening. So first of all, again, I am not a weekly content person. I do with some teaser stuff. So I'm looking at where do I need to tease? Okay, sample sale, I like to give a little bit more teaser time, so I've got an email the week before. I've got an email a couple days before. Right, so I've plugged that in. This week I'm avoiding 'cause that's hitting Fourth of July. That's Memorial Day, so I'm avoiding that. And then I realize as I was looking at my calendar that I'm on vacation that week, so why schedule an email 'cause I'm not gonna be in the studio to fill it. And then I went in and I also plugged in that I wanna tease out these two new collections. So instead of doing an email, say, the week before, I'm gonna skip that week but then Monday of that week, I'm gonna say, "Hey, later this week I'm launching "with something new." And then what it turned out was that for me, I only had about one week where I really needed to fill something in, and I thought, "Alright, let's do a little highlight of some silver jewelry "that's great for summer." Because a lot of my jewelry is steel, and steel is not really ideal if you're sweating. But I do actually have a lot of silver, so let's highlight that for my customers. So that's that process, make sense? And then you can always add in extra emails if something exciting comes up. So maybe you design something new, you're really excited, you designed a necklace for your friends birthday and then realized you should just sell it in your store. You can pop those in as well, so there's always room to play. This gives you that big picture.