Your Email Marketing Project Blueprint

"How on earth do we go from sporadic newsletters to a really fricken good email marketing programme?"

I get asked this question all the time, and for a good reason. Most businesses and organisations that collect email subscribers are stuck in one of two camps:

They're too busy to send more than their monthly newsletter
No one has strategic email marketing training, so automations, database cleaning and segmentation, and dynamic content feel out of reach.

What makes an email program ‘good’ depends on your goals: event attendance, discovery calls or even replies, but to get there, you’ve got a couple of steps you need to take.

So here’s an overview of a recent delivery, which I think is the perfect email project blueprint for purpose-driven brands looking to level up their email marketing.

Copy it to implement internally, or use the stats in this post as the nudge you’ve been looking for to invest in your email marketing.

The client

The client is a new venture within a national non-profit organisation with a small, brilliant, but busy team. Their work encompasses all of my favourite things: ambitious innovation with people and purpose at the core.

Before working with Maybe Later, the team sent a semi-regular newsletter but wanted to expand their email programme so that their team could spend more time on other aspects of the organisation whilst giving their email community an even better experience.

Project scope 📝

Email content, platform and data audit

Email strategy
Automated welcome journey
Re-engagement campaign
Monthly emails
2 Segmented campaigns per month
Training

The audit 📊

Email marketing is about so much more than just good copywriting. It encompasses database management, segmentation, sender reputation and deliverability, inbox placement and then good copywriting.

It can be so tempting to skip the 'mulling things over' phase and go straight to tactical execution, but without an audit, all the data you've collected about your email community remains just that: data. Its value comes from insight.

In this phase, I reviewed their Mailchimp account, data health, segmentation setup and email content, culminating in a report and recommendations spreadsheet, which created the foundations of the new email strategy.

The strategy

If you're a strategy purest, skip to the next section. 😅

It wasn't purely a strategy; we threw in some benchmarking, goalsetting, a content framework and tactical execution ideas, too. Why? Because at Maybe Later, every piece of work we create should be useful.

Email strategies by Maybe Later are a simple, no-BS document that acts as an organisation's single source of truth regarding email.

Why you're doing what you're doing?
Your goals and how you'll get there
How you'll measure performance
Held together by your internal and external email intention

The automated welcome journey 🤖

When someone first joins your email community, they are excited/inspired to take action, whether that’s to solve a problem in their own lives or in someone else's.

DON'T WASTE IT.

An automated journey builds your sender's reputation and, more importantly, trust.

The client’s automated journey slowly introduced people to the project, but also recognised that as much as we wish people would follow a predetermined path, they don't, so we gave readers different ways to get involved early on. We sent emails from different team members, so any replies went to the right person from the get-go.

*A snapshot of the automation’s performance* 🔥

The re-engagement campaign.

Email re-engagement campaigns usually consist of 1-2 emails to a highly targeted segment of your email list: people who are slowly engaging with your emails less and less.

The goal is to win back as many of these people as possible, prompt those no longer interested in unsubscribing and archive those who did nothing.

The campaign used subject lines and body copy different from the usual style to catch the attention of folks who had dropped off over the year.

💡 The campaign had a much higher bounce rate because several subscribers had moved to different organisations. If you engage with corporates or B2B, you want to make sure your emails are so good they resubscribe when they move.

The monthly email. 💌

Organisations with stand-out email programmes have regular emails that invoke feeling — not just regurgitate what's on our bulletin boards.

The client already had great emails, but they wanted a refreshed approach that inspired people who were passionate about their mission to get involved.

We refreshed the newsletter template and came up with a rough A/B testing framework. Because we were emailing more often (more on that later), the newsletter's stats have only improved.

We've even adjusted their newsletter schedule because online conferences and workshops keep selling out!

Segmented campaigns.

Email marketing truly comes into its own when you start playing with data segments and creating behaviour-triggered automation.

The first part of this project was to look at the team's repetitive email tasks and set up automations to support those. Using Zapier, we linked signup forms and toolkit downloads to Mailchimp, which automatically tagged subscribers and triggered emails. This not only freed up capacity in the team but also stopped anyone from falling through the cracks.

Other segmented campaigns include post-event comms, which now means their email database's tagging and segmentation capabilities have grown exponentially. As time passes, they'll be able to send incredibly personal emails en masse—pure community-building magic.

Training

From the outset, the client made it clear that it was important for them to take ownership of their email marketing, and to do that, they knew they needed to upskill.

Over five months, using a combination of screen share learning and practical application, their Comms Lead has developed new skills in database management, segmentation and Mailchimp's new template builder.

It means that when this project wraps up, they can continue building on all our progress so far.

The blueprint

Here's why each part of the blueprint is important:

Audit and strategy: email is more than copywriting. Your plan needs to combine data and segmentation and act as a roadmap for your entire organisation
Re-engagement: We all know retention is more cost-effective than acquisition, but more than that, this project protects deliverability.
Regular emails: Without these emails, you don't build trust or brand awareness. In a world where everyone is competing for attention, persistent emailing is key.
Segmented emails: Emailing more often doesn’t mean emailing everyone all the time. Sending at least one segmented campaign per month moves people along your customer journey quicker, builds better relationships and protects your sender reputation and email deliverability.
Training: We all know you'd like to keep Maybe Later on retainer forever. 😉 You know your organisation better than anyone else, so making sure you feel comfortable with everything email has to offer is key if you'd like to take your email programme from 'just a newsletter' to so much more.