Email Marketing Strategy
Deciding what the programme is for before you decide what to send: goals, calendars, budgets, audits and the compliance rules that constrain all of it.
Strategy is the part everyone skips, and it is the reason so many email programmes consist of a newsletter nobody has questioned in two years. The guides here are ordered the way the decisions actually get made: what the programme is for, how success is measured, what gets sent and when, what it costs, and who owns it.
Two of these are worth reading even if you think your strategy is settled. The audit guide gives you a way to check whether the programme still matches its stated goal, and the compliance guide covers the rules that decide what you are allowed to do regardless of what you would like to do.
Every guide in this topic
- 01 How to Build an Email Marketing Strategy From Scratch The six decisions that have to be made before the first send, in the order that stops you rewriting the first three.
- 02 Email Marketing Goals: KPIs That Actually Matter Which numbers tell you something, which changed meaning after Mail Privacy Protection, and how to pick three to report on.
- 03 How to Create an Email Marketing Calendar That Drives Results A planning method that survives a busy quarter, including what to cut first when the quarter goes wrong.
- 04 Email Marketing Budget: How Much Should You Spend? Where the money actually goes at 5,000, 50,000 and 500,000 subscribers, and which line items scale with list size.
- 05 B2B vs B2C Email Marketing: Key Differences and Strategies Longer cycles, multiple readers per address, and the send-time advice that is wrong for exactly one of the two.
- 06 How to Audit Your Email Marketing Program A twenty-two point audit covering authentication, list health, automation drift and the sequences still describing a product you no longer sell.
- 07 Email Marketing for Small Business: Complete Guide What to do when there is no team: the minimum viable programme, and the four things that are worth paying for anyway.
- 08 Omnichannel Email Marketing: Integrating Email With Your Stack Where email fits alongside SMS, push and retargeting, and how to stop the same person getting the same message four times.
- 09 Email Marketing Compliance: GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA Explained What each law actually requires of a sender, where they contradict each other, and the defaults that satisfy all three.
- 10 How to Build an Email Marketing Team Structure Who owns what at one, three and eight people, and the handoff that breaks first as the programme grows.