5 Ways to Streamline Your Email Newsletter Process

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

There’s been a lot of talk recently about email marketing and some shifts that have been happening. The reason these shifts are popping up everywhere is because email marketing is a crucial part of every business.

That’s why it’s also incredibly important to streamline your email process so that emailing becomes easier and can be done more efficiently. In this episode, I’m sharing 5 ways to improve your email processes to help you email more consistently with confidence.

Links Referenced in Episode:

▶ Check out the Email Marketing Planner Template

▶ Check out the How To Organize Your Email Swipes Workshop

Connect with me:

Website | Instagram

Watch on YouTube:

Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Episode Intro

There’s been a lot of talk recently about email marketing and some shifts that have been happening, and the reason why you’re hearing about this everywhere and that they’re popping up everywhere is because email marketing is a crucial part of every business.

That’s why it’s also so incredibly important to streamline your email process, so that way, emailing becomes easier and can be done more efficiently. So in this episode, I’m sharing five ways to improve your email processes to help you email more consistently with confidence. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, where I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’re going to learn strategies that will boost your productivity so that you can scale your online biz and impact lives sooner. It’s your time to shine. So let’s get started.

Hey, Hey, welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. I’m excited about this episode because we are actually heading into a mini series all about improving your email marketing processes, because it is so, so important.

Importance of Emailing Consistently

In this episode, we’re starting with improving your email newsletter process specifically, because as you might already know, emailing your list is so, so important. It helps build that trust with your audience and keeps you top of mind.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I don’t like it when I only hear from someone like twice a year when they are about to launch something and they just come in your inbox hard.

I can clearly see the names of those people who do that. And that’s not something that I like. Sometimes I’ll stick around to see if it’s just like a one-time thing. And if it is, it’s like, okay, it’s an instant unsubscribe. And I don’t like that. And a lot of people might not either.

So that’s why it is so important for you to just email your list consistently, whether it’s once a week for you, whether that’s biweekly, whether that’s every other day, whatever that means to you.

It’s just important to stay top of mind and find a consistent pattern that works for you. And it also helps your audience remember who you are and why they signed up to your email list in the first place.

And you may have heard this phrase, but emailing is where it’s at. This is where you make the most sales. Everyone says that. Even social media experts say it! They say social media is to get them on your list because the list is where you make the money.

So by emailing more consistently, you make more sales. And when you make more sales, you make more profit and that’s what we’re in business to do.

5 Ways to Streamline Your Email Newsletter Process

So here are five ways to streamline your email newsletter process, so that it’s easier for you to email more consistently without feeling overwhelmed each time you sit down to write an email.

#1: Create an email newsletter calendar.

The first tip that I have for you is to create an email newsletter calendar, which is pretty much a fancy way of saying a content calendar, but specifically for your email newsletters.

This way you can really zone in and focus on the amount of emails that you’re going to send. Whether that’s, like I said, once a week, every other day, once every two weeks, whatever that looks like for you, you can see how many times you’re emailing your list and about what.

You can reference one that I have in my shop. I have a Trello template to help you plan out your email newsletters and stay consistent with them, but also keeping them flexible, which we’ll go into in the next tip.

But really this email newsletter calendar is going to be your planner for your email newsletter specifically, so that you know what you’re emailing at all times.

#2: Plan your emails ahead.

Which leads me into tip number two, which is to plan ahead. What is the point of that email that you’re sending? Every single email should have a purpose. Every single email should have a call to action or a goal. So what is that going to be for that email and make sure to plan it ahead.

Sometimes it’s a flash sale. Sometimes you’re announcing a new podcast episode. Sometimes you’re just wanting to get them to click on something or sharing about a bundle or event that you’re in.

Or maybe you’re asking them to reply to help boost your deliverability, whatever the case is. There’s something that you’re usually asking your audience to do, and that is your call to action.

And that is what you’re planning ahead because let’s say you’re like me and you record a podcast episode every single week. You want your audience to know about it so once a week, if you send them an email, your call to action is probably, “Hey, go listen to my new podcast episode.”

You can plan that in, and then when you get into launches, when you get into flash sales, then you’re probably emailing multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. That can get really messy if you don’t have a streamlined way to help you keep up-to-date with all the emails that you’re going to be sending and when, and to who.

So we’ll actually get into that tip. I think that’s the fifth tip. So we’ll get into that later. But the thing that I also want to point out here is to keep it flexible. And this is why I personally love using Trello and the power-up called the Calendar Power-up, because it allows you to move the email newsletters around as you see fit.

Like sometimes I have planned to send out an email about this new podcast episode, but then something else comes up and I’m like, “Oh, I should really send an email about this instead.” Let me just go ahead and drag this card over to Thursday instead of Wednesday.

So I will let them know about the podcast on Thursday. And now on Wednesday, I’m going to email about something else. That happens. And it’s totally fine.

And it’s so much easier to do when you have this calendar already in place, specifically in a project management tool, like I said, I use Trello. I have the Trello template in the shop if you want to check that one out. Plan ahead and keep it flexible is tip number two.

#3: Repurpose your long-form content.

Tip number three is to repurpose your content. This is something that I am personally going to be focusing on a lot more this year. I think I said the same thing last year, but I really did not repurpose as much as I could and I can see it. I saw the end results of that by the end of the year and I’m not letting that happen again.

And so I’m bringing this tip here for you too, because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you create and send a newsletter, especially if you have one form of long piece content that you can pull information from.

You have something that you can repurpose, whether that’s a blog post, a podcast episode, a YouTube video, you could even repurpose social media captions into emails.

That’s something that I started doing recently for a different email and newsletter that I’m sending. It’s called the Sunday Booster and it sends out on Sundays to my email list. A lot of those have been repurposed from Instagram captions.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel and by not reinventing the wheel, it helps you write faster because you already have a starting ground that you can work with.

Even sometimes podcasts episodes! Sometimes you can take the podcast description and put that as your email and then your call to action is, “listen to this episode,” right in the email.

Maybe it’ll get engagement, maybe it won’t, it’s up to you to test it out with your audience and see, but the point is you don’t have to start from scratch. So repurpose your content to help you send those email newsletters consistently.

#4: Find email swipes and templates to use.

The fourth tip is you can also use email swipes or email templates to help you write these emails faster, even if you are repurposing your content.

Sometimes repurposing content can look like a literal copy and paste from your blog posts to your email newsletter and the call to action could be “read my blog post.”

Or it could look like taking an email swipe, looking at which one fits the description of what you’re trying to do. For example, there might be an email swipe out there that says whenever you’re going to send a podcast episode to your audience, start with “why this topic is that important.”

Maybe give them one tip directly from the episode next and then give them a sneak peek of what else they can listen to on the podcast and then your call to action.

That might be still repurposing your content, but using an email swipe or template to help make it a little bit more enticing for your audience to actually click through and listen or read or watch or whatever the case is.

But, you want to have those organized too. If you have email swipes and templates, which many of you probably do, they’re probably sitting all over your drive. You probably have some in Dropbox. You probably have some on Google drive. You probably have someone saved to your desktop.

Some of them you don’t even know exist. And so you want to make sure that you keep those organized because then it’s easier to find them when you need them.

I have a workshop on how to organize your email swipes inside of the Cheerful Productivity Shop if you want to check that out. I’ll be linking to everything that I’m mentioning in the show notes as well, but keep them organized.

I also have a blog post that I’ll link to that talks more about high converting email swipes and where you can find them. So I’ll be sure to link to all of that in the show notes, but that is tip number four: use and take advantage of those emails, swipes and templates that you probably have access to in some way or another.

How to Organize Email Swipes Using A Visual Library product mockup

#5: Segment your list based on their behaviors.

Lastly, the fifth tip here is to segment your list based on their behaviors. Whenever you’re sending your email newsletters, sometimes you want to make sure that they’re only being sent to certain audiences.

The most common example of this is if they’re going through your funnels, you want to make sure to exclude them from your email newsletters so that way they’re not one getting confused as to what you want them to do.

Do you want them to follow what your email from the funnel says? Or do you want them to follow what your email newsletter says? You’re not confusing them. And also, so that they’re not getting multiple emails in one day. So whether that’s one or whether that’s two or more.

You want to keep them focused in their funnel versus sending them everything. That might overwhelm them and cause them to unsubscribe, even though they might be your ideal audience.

You want to use your tags. Specifically your tags, your groups, however, your email marketing platform calls them strategically whenever you are sending email newsletters. Sometimes I’ll call this tag “in current workflow” or “do not disturb.”

Another example of this is whenever you’re sending a promotional email to an audience to promote a certain course. You want to exclude people who have already bought the course from receiving those emails because they already bought it.

What could happen is they’ll either be like well already bought this, why am I still getting these emails. You’re adding to their inbox overwhelm or you might sell them on it again, and they might buy it again, later realize they just bought it twice, and then you have to process a refund.

We don’t want any of that to happen. So it is important to have your email list segmented, and for you to use those tags and segments strategically when you are sending your email to newsletters.

And so, the way that you name these tags and these segments and these groups is so important because that way you know who to send what to.

Episode Wrap-Up

In the next episode, we’re actually going to cover the three elements that I recommend when you create a naming convention for your tags, segments, sequences, automations, etc. So stay tuned for that.

But these are the five tips that I recommend. Simplifying your email newsletter planning process is all about being organized, strategic and efficient in delivering that valuable content that you create to your audience.

Now, like I said in the next episode I’m going to share the three elements to creating a good naming convention to help you keep your email marketing platform organized. Be sure to follow or subscribe to the podcast so that way you know once the next episode is released.

Thank you so much for listening to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast with me Lucy Reyes. To view the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today’s episode, visit cheerstoproductivity.com/58. And before you go, make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening. So you know once the next productive chat is released! Talk soon and cheers to your productivity and success!