A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Your Email Marketing Campaigns

No matter how many emails you’ve sent, there’s still a mini-adrenaline spike right before a campaign goes out.

There’s nothing worse than being head-down in the final QA of an email only to get the dreaded ping: Hey, can we just change xyz real quick? 🙄

Email marketers know that there’s no such thing as “real quick” when it comes to an email campaign.

When we asked folks for our State of Email 2021 report, 45% said they find themselves dealing with more last-minute email changes than they had in the past—and 70% said their workload had increased overall.

What you need is a plan. One that gets ahead of all of those little last-minute requests and competing internal priorities—so you can get those emails out the door, faster. Save yourself some zig and zag—and get everyone on the same page. We’ll walk you through how to plan an email marketing campaign from start to finish:

Why is planning for an email marketing campaign important?

There are tons of tips and tricks on how to cut through the inbox clutter. But the real secret behind a high performing email? A rock solid email marketing campaign planning process.

Nearly 38% of marketers say bad strategies, poorly defined goals, or poor coordination hold their email program back from reaching its full potential. And when there isn’t a clear path, it’s no wonder reviews and approvals take up the most time (over four hours, on average!) in the email process.

That’s where a great email marketing campaign plan comes in. Thinking through all the strategic elements ahead of time—like audience, timing, and internal stakeholders—can make the email build that much faster.

Here’s how to plan an email marketing campaign:

Step 1. Define your goals and what success looks like

Before you type a single word of copy or sketch out a single email design, you need to go back to your email marketing strategy. Think of your email marketing goals as a ladder, starting with your overarching company goals at the very top, your marketing team’s goals, your channel-specific goals, and then finally, the goal of the campaign. Ask yourself:

What do you want to achieve?

Every email campaign you send should have a purpose. (If you don’t know why you’re sending an email, then you shouldn’t send it—and this is coming from people who looooove email!)

You need to decide whether your email campaign will work toward a revenue goal, a brand-building goal, a partnership goal, or something else. Choose one main purpose ahead of the campaign. And no, “because my boss said to send more emails” is not a goal.

Set SMART Goals

If you’re still stumped, a popular framework for setting goals is the SMART goal system. SMART stands for:

• Specific: Be precise with your language on what you hope to achieve with your email campaign.
• Measurable: Whatever goal you choose, make it measurable. How many opens, clicks, or replies will you receive? Identify your key metrics ahead of your email send.
• Attainable: Be realistic about what your email can do based on previous results.
• Relevant: Connect the goal of your email campaign with your organizational or company-wide goals as much as possible. Email is one of the best ways to connect with your audience (and drive sales) so you’d be surprised how much you can impact the bottom line with a single campaign.
• Time-bound: Do you want to see results immediately, in 24 hours, or in several months? Be clear up front what kind of success you want to see and when so you can track your performance.

We often see email marketers trip up with the first part of SMART—the “S.” Email can serve so many purposes that it’s easy to say that it will do all! the! things! But it’s best to choose one primary goal for each email. You can always send another.

Step 2. Know your audience

It’s an oldie but goodie piece of advice for a reason. While your goals are the place to start, you have to filter them through what your audience wants to hear—and how they want to hear it.

The more you can tailor your email marketing efforts to your specific audience, the more likely they’ll engage with your campaign. First, ask yourself:

Who do you want to reach?

Before you craft an email marketing campaign, think about who you want to talk to. What do they care about? What kind of products do they purchase besides yours? What are they doing during the day? How you build an email campaign varies widely between B2C vs. B2B, by demographics like region or stage of life, or by whether or not they’ve already purchased from you.

Segment your audience

You don’t need to send every email you create to every person in your audience.

In fact, you probably shouldn’t.

The first step to a targeted campaign is working within your existing audience to craft an email that speaks to them. That may mean leaving some folks out entirely, or creating multiple versions of the same email campaign based on behavioral or demographic cues. This practice is fairly common—in fact, 44% of marketers build 2-3 versions of every email.

For example, you wouldn’t want to send a “spring is here!” campaign in March to subscribers in the Northern United States when the crocuses and daffodils are still months away from blooming. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to send a “get cozy this winter” email to subscribers in the southern hemisphere—it’s summer there!

Personalize your content

80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences, according to Epsilon. And we’re not just talking about [first name] mergetags.

As you plan your email campaign, you need to think about how you will make it personalized to your audience. This could be including product imagery from recent browsing behavior in a follow-up campaign, pulling in local weather or maps, adding social signals like number of likes or reviews within an email, or running a live poll that delivers instant results. (Bonus: All of this is possible with Litmus Personalize!)

Step 3. Craft compelling content

This is the fun stuff.

Once you know what you want to achieve and which section of your audience you’re targeting with this email send, you can get into the weeds on the how. In the same way that it helps to write an outline before writing an essay, you’ll want to think through a few big questions to provide guidance to your copywriter or designer (or yourself, since we all know how many hats email marketers wear!)

Choose the right campaign type

What kind of email is going to resonate with your target audience the most? Whether it’s a standard newsletter, a one-off promotional campaign, or a triggered email you send automatically, you’ll need to assess what type of campaign is going to perform the best.

Take these three emails from Moment. They’re all planned around the same winter holiday season, but they are all totally different kinds of campaigns.

The first email campaign example is a gift guide:

Source: Really Good Emails

And the second is a longer note of gratitude for the year—more newsletter-y:

Source: Really Good Emails

While the third is a classic promotional email:

Source: Really Good Emails

You may want to build a series of emails around the same topic or call-to-action. This could be part of the same marketing push (like an end-of-season sale) or become a nurture email series triggered based on previous engagement with your brand (like downloading a freebie).

Write captivating subject lines

Your subject line is like the title of the email. It should pull readers in so they just have to open it without giving too much away. Adding a few subject line ideas to your plan can help cue your copywriter to the tone and urgency for a particular email and make it much easier when you write up your email brief. No matter what, keep it short and sweet—no more than a few words.

It may also help jog your memory in the future if you’re planning your emails well in advance of your drafting and designing. You’ll want to include more than one idea for A/B testing (more on that later).

Design engaging visuals

Copy and imagery work together hand-in-hand to deliver your email’s message to the subscriber. Whether you’re an email design pro or plan to use an email marketing template, including some guidance on what kind of visuals you think will work best is incredibly helpful to your design team.

Talk through layout, number of images, whether you want an animated GIF or video, and any color preferences beforehand. Keep in mind accessibility best practices and optimizing your email design for mobile devices. This is also where you should determine any ~fancy~ interactive content or other techniques for your email developer.

Do you want your email to feel like an old-school ‘90s zine? (This email campaign example is very trendy at the moment in the design world).

Source: Really Good Emails

Or do you want to keep your product imagery front-and-center?

Source: Really Good Emails

Remember, every email doesn’t have to be this gorgeous. You can always experiment with a simple, text-forward email too.

Source: Really Good Emails

Keeping design requirements in your overall email campaign plan makes it easier to get emails done more quickly and efficiently without stamping out all of the creative energy.

Step 4. Plan your send schedule and A/B tests

Finally, you’ll need to determine when you want to send this email campaign.

In some cases, that’s easy—if you’re creating a Black Friday campaign, you want to send your email sometime in the week before Thanksgiving—but for many promotional campaigns, you need to time your email based on the marketing efforts of the rest of your team.

Be intentional about your marketing calendar and how you schedule email campaigns so you’re not inundating the same segment of subscribers with email after email.

A/B test different elements

Part of planning out any email campaign should be determining what A/B testing you plan to do. Each email campaign is an opportunity to learn more about what your subscribers prefer—and what performs well. The key? Make sure you’re only changing one element at a time, so you know exactly what it was that increased opens or clicks. You can A/B test pretty much anything, including subject lines, CTA button size or color, layout, buttons vs. links, design vs. text-only, and so much more.

(Note: This isn’t the same as testing your email in different email clients, which is also super important. Here’s the full email checklist of what to double- and triple-check before you send).

Choose optimal send times

For non-triggered emails, experiment with send time. While there is no “best” day or time to send an email you can look at your previous performance and your audience demographics to make an educated guess. Depending on the kind of campaign, you can also set a time yourself and stick to it—for example, delivering your weekly newsletter every Thursday at 11 AM ET (did you get your Litmus Weekly yet?).

Utilize automation tools

For transactional emails and triggered emails, use automation tools to your advantage and build multi-email flows that meet your subscribers on their schedule. Instead of focusing on send time, think through how you’ll respond to certain subscriber behaviors.

When you’re thinking through an automated email sequence, ask yourself:

• What behavior triggers the email?
• How many emails will you include?
• How many days between emails?

For example, whenever someone signs up for your email list, you’ll want to immediately send them a welcome email (or three!) that introduces them to your brand, lets them know what to expect from your email list, and nudges them toward the path to purchase.

Source: Really Good Emails

Even if you’re not doing an email sequence, you can still use automation to your benefit by scheduling emails ahead of time, which can be done in most ESPs.

Step 5. Analyze the results and refine your approach

It feels like a marathon to get to hitting the “send” button sometimes—but you’re not at the finish line yet. Your plan should also include how to measure the success of your campaign against your goals. It’s important to analyze how each campaign performs individually so you can understand what resonates the most with your audience and improve your email marketing. Here’s how:

Monitor your key metrics

For one-off emails, this is fairly straightforward. What was your open rate? What was your click rate? Did you get any responses? A few key metrics you should always track for individual campaigns include:

• Open rate
• Bounce rate
• Click-through rate (CTR) and click-to-open rate (CTOR)
• Read rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Spam complaint rate

For ongoing campaigns and triggered emails, especially ones that send out every day, like an abandoned cart, you’ll want to track your performance for these metrics over time.

Source: Really Good Emails

In your email marketing plan, make a note of how often you’ll check back on the email and schedule regular refreshes of the content as needed.

This is also a good time to run your campaign back through Litmus to make sure everything is still in ship-shape. You never know when an email client is going to change up support for something unexpectedly. (We’re laughing to keep from crying).

Reflect on your email marketing workflow

When we talked with email marketers about their production cycles, we found that 62% take two weeks or more to build one email—and at any given time, 23% of teams have up to 5 emails in production.

You need time to catch your breath.

At the end of every email campaign, reflect on what went well and what didn’t in your email marketing workflow.

Were you plagued by last-minute changes? Stuck waiting for approvals for forever? Stuck fiddling with workarounds or other code issues? We’ve seen it all ourselves, and taking a moment to think through the process can help make the next email go that much more smoothly.

Make adjustments to future email campaigns

Once you’ve analyzed your campaign performance, it’s time to make adjustments for your next email campaign plan. The more campaigns you analyze, the more likely you can spot trends and make bigger adjustments, like whether sending on a Tuesday or Wednesday is more likely to get opens. But this works on a small scale, too. For example, if an orange CTA button won your A/B test, try testing a square vs. rounded button for the next one.

Plan Better Campaigns with an Email Campaign Planning Template

The good news? You don’t have to do this all yourself. Our team outlined three phases to a successful email campaign that will empower you to create your own actionable (and effective) email campaigns in no time (You’re welcome! 😀).

Our step-by-step Email Brief & Planning Worksheet walks you through how to:

• Define your email’s purpose and goal
• Optimize for opens, clicks, and conversions
• Visually organize your email content

With this worksheet, you’ll be able to clearly outline your strategy for a successful email campaign, making it easier to get alignment so you can move forward with confidence.

Now who’s ready for better emails? Get your free worksheet.

GET YOUR WORKSHEET →