how to create an effective email marketing calendar

Summary

email marketing is the simplest, most underrated channel in online business. when I finally took it seriously and built a calendar, monthly recurring revenue went up 400%. here’s the framework.

1. gain, logic, fear. three emails per promo. gain email leads with the benefit, the upside, the dream. logic email lays out the rational reasons it works. fear email introduces real scarcity, a deadline, a cap, a closing window.

2. find excuses to email. holidays, anniversaries of the company, milestones, seasons, current events that tie loosely to your work. you are not “spamming” your list. you are talking to your customers like a brand should.

3. discount the auxiliary, not the core. discounting your main offer trains people to wait for the discount. discount add-ons, bonuses, payment plans instead. preserve the value of the thing.

4. scarcity has to be real. a deadline that’s a deadline. a cap that’s a cap. fake scarcity erodes trust fast and never comes back.

an email calendar is boring infrastructure. it makes everything else work. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the importance of an email marketing calendar

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Today we’re going to dive straight into setting up an email marketing calendar. I’m going to teach you how absolutely easy it is. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I do want everyone to have an email marketing calendar.

You should be doing this in some capacity, and I’m going to tell you exactly how easy it is. Truly an easy, it’s simple, it’s easy. It’s all the, all of the things. It just takes a little bit of effort. So back in the day, I had signed up for this email marketing service, this email service provider.

my personal journey with email marketing and the initial challenges

And I’d been collecting a lot of email addresses, but not making a lot of money. And the problem with that is when you have a large email list with any email service provider, it costs a good amount of money every single month, just a half, hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars a month dependent on the list size.

And I signed up for this more expensive platform. It was really cool. It had a lot of automations. It could do a lot of things. And one of the things when I signed up, what it came with was basically coaching, coaching on how to use their service. But not only like technical level coaching, they were helpful in the email marketing world of what to do.

And they had some basic recommendations, but I had one mission. I was like, I need to not only make it like break even with what I’m paying per month, but I have to make money. There has to be a significant ROI to justify this piece of software. And I don’t mean I was making no money at all. It’s just that’s how I look at a new hire of an employee, or that’s how I look at a new expensive software.

how the email marketing calendar transformed my business

Anything is, I will keep it around so long as I see an ROI from the effort of the person or the software that we’re using and I can track it. And so that’s what I did with this email marketing service. And it was pretty simple. I decided I was just going to stick to an email marketing calendar, and I was going to follow this three part email series every time I did a promotion, and I was just going to see what happened.

And then I remember I’d had these check-ins with that marketing coach that it came with when I signed up at the three month mark and the six month mark. And they were just blown away. They were like, you’ve seen like a 400% increase. This is how much MRR you’ve added to your business, because you could tie all these things in to see all these numbers.

And they were just like blown away. And they’re like, what have you been doing? They were blown away at what I, they like, they didn’t think, they weren’t coaching anymore. They were like, you tell me, what are you doing? We want to tell more people to do what you’re doing. And I was like, I’m not doing anything special.

detailed explanation of setting up an email marketing calendar

I’ve just decided to stick to an email marketing calendar. So I have my calendar that I do, like I stick to it. These are the dates I send emails. Here are the email types that I send. It’s three emails every single time for every single offer that I do. And they were just blown away. And I saw massive growth when I decided to do that.

And so how can you see the same type of growth? What were the emails that I was sending? All this kind of stuff. Let’s talk about it. Step one, all you need, and it really is this simple, all you need is an excuse to email people. Okay, that’s it. An excuse to email people. Now you could Google example email marketing calendar for the year.

If you don’t have any ideas, that’s great. Just go Google it. All you need is an excuse to email people. Now what’s an excuse to email somebody? It could be the fact that you hired a new employee. It could be the fact that it’s your birthday. It could be a fact that it’s the birthday of the business.

breakdown of the glf email sequence and its effectiveness

It could be Christmas. It can be Black Friday. It could be beginning of the month. It could be anything you want. It’s any excuse. Because after you have the excuse out in two sentence of the email, hey, it’s June 1st. I decided I’m going to do something special for a summer kicking off this month.

Or first day of summer. Or first day of winter. You see how easy this is? All you need is an excuse to email people, an excuse to do a promotion if you want to do a promotion, and that’s it. And so what you do, step one, find all the excuses, whether that’s Memorial Day, first day of summer, Black Friday, Christmas, your birthday, company birthday, all these things.

Write them all down on a calendar, and it’s going to be real easy to get 12 of these. Say you’re doing one every single month. This will be super simple. What happens in January? Oh, okay. What happens in February? It’s so easy to find all the excuses to email people, and then you let people know, hey, we’re doing a promotion because of, boom, insert excuse.

tips for crafting impactful gain, logic, and fear emails

It’s January 1st. It’s the new year. Whatever. So that’s all you need. So just get that out of your mind. You don’t need these robust reasons, right? Because after you have the reason, people don’t really care so much. They want to get into, okay, what’s the offer? Now what were the three emails I would send when I would do this once a month?

I learned this in a marketing course I took years ago, and it works great. It’s a three email series, and let’s say you send an email on Monday, you send an email on Wednesday, and you send an email on Friday. The first one is called the gain email. So we’re following the gain logic fear, GLF. So gain would be your first email.

In gain, you simply talk about what they have to gain from accepting your offer. So this could be, it’s a 40% off offer. If that’s what you’re doing, and real quick on discounts, if you’re going to do a discount, don’t discount your core offer. Discount all the things surrounding your offer. That’s just another pro tip, but I don’t have time to get into that right now.

the importance of consistency in email marketing

But if you had your core service, that’s the lifeblood of your business. Don’t discount that thing. Discount everything around it, either auxiliary treatments or services, auxiliary stuff. Like don’t, anyway, discount the things that surround it, not the core thing. Because you get in a weird, slippery slope if you do that.

So anyway, say it’s 40% off some sort of auxiliary treatment or nutrition coaching if you’re a fitness coach, something like that, 40% off of a macro plan, anything. And so the gain is the fact that they’re saving 40%. That’s the gain, right? And so you very plainly let them know what the offer is, what the discount is, what they’re getting.

That’s the gain email. It doesn’t have to be long. You just let them know what they have to gain by using the product or service and the fact that there’s a discount. So what do they gain and what kind of discount are you providing? You don’t always have to do discounts. You can also do add-ons. If you sign up in the month of May, whatever, get these things added to your account, so on and so forth.

recap and the power of strategic email planning

So you don’t always have to do discounts. Just be thinking of that. What can I add or what can I discount? The second email is the logic email. So this would be the email that goes out on a Wednesday. Now logic is exactly as it sounds. It can just be like straight mathematical, like, hey, this thing’s typically 200 bucks.

You can get it for 140 right now. Why aren’t you doing it? Basically, it’s just straight logic. It’s a rehash of the gain email, but you’re really getting into just the logic of it. Be like, hey, we don’t run promotions very often. We have this promotion going on right now. You’re going to save this much money.

We’d love to have you as a part of this service, blah, blah, blah. Now you have your logic email. That’s it. So the first one is like, hey, here’s what I have to gain. This is the what’s in it for them. You announce kind of the discount in this gain email as well. Logic is, hey, here’s the discount you’re getting.

Then you can still mention what they have to gain from it, but you lead with logic. Now the last email is the fear email. This is where we actually throw in some sort of marketing tactic. What the fear email is, is going to be typically scarcity based, and it has to be legit scarcity. I think scarcity is a phenomenal tool in marketing so long as it’s not overused.

I wouldn’t do this every single month, but if you can engineer legitimate scarcity into an offer, it will do better. Legitimate scarcity is if you only have 10 spots available, you have to decide up front, I’m only selling 10 of these. That’s it. I’m not going to sell more. And when they are gone, they are gone.

Once I’ve sold 10, I’m not selling any more. That way, when people try to sign up, number 11 or number 12 try to sign up after you’ve sold 10, you actually have to tell these people no, okay? This is how you have integrity in your business. This is how you can use scarcity, legitimate ethical scarcity, but not have to be sleazy.

Because if you say, I have 10 available and you sell 47, are you sure you want to build your business on that kind of logic, those kind of ethics? Probably not. And so you actually want to have legitimate scarcity, but there are all sorts of ways to do this. Sometimes we do this with our sales team’s calendar.

Basically our sales team will have a set amount of availability in a given week, and we say, if you book a call during this week, you might get something added on to coaching or whatever. You get an add on, right? If you sign up during this week, but we’re limited by how many calls are available from the sales team and we won’t actually honor it past that week of sales calls.

So you see how these things can be built in. You can find the legitimate bottlenecks in your business. Maybe it’s how many people you can actually help, how many people you can onboard, how many people you can see, what your schedule is like, all these kinds of things. There are legitimate bottlenecks in your business that you can model and you can craft scarcity around.

You can reverse engineer these to have legitimate scarcity. And then you have to, biggest part, enforce the scarcity. Say no to people who want to give you money. I know it’s hard to do, but you will have to do that. Now if you actually have 10 and you could have sold 47, you’re the one who screwed up there.

Maybe you should have limited the package a little bit higher. It is something that you want to work into your offers. So the fear-based email is not like crazy fear, like the sky is falling type stuff. Not those kind of marketing tactics, but just, hey, I only had 10 spots, there are only two left if it’s a legitimate, truthful statement.

And then you amplify that. Let them know it’s being taken away. You could also just do limited time. You might have unlimited programs that you could sell. Maybe it’s an online program. You could sell 1,000 of these. It doesn’t really matter. You’re not limited by anything. Then just limit the time.

Be like, I’m only doing this offer from this date to this date for the next three days, whatever it is. So that’s how you can reverse engineer legit scarcity into your business. And that’s it. So find an excuse to email people. Follow the GLF, gain logic, fear email sequences, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever three days that you want.

And you will start making more money in your business. The hardest part of doing any of this is the consistency. And to be consistent, you’re just going to have to try harder.