Of course, picking out dates to send campaigns might seem pointless if you don’t have any idea what your emails are going to be about!

So today, let’s get into some email content ideas.

Annual Industry Events

Many of us work in industries that follow relatively fixed annual cycles, where certain things take place at the same time each year.

Since we know about such cycles/events well in advance, we can plan individual emails or multi-email campaigns to send in the time leading up to (and in some instances after) them.

Major industry conferences and trade shows

Other Consumer or Product Cycles

A publisher in the music industry might send an email newsletter about the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference (occurs every March); if you write about cars, you might put a campaign together around the North American International Auto Show (each January); golf experts could talk about The Masters.

Other industry cycles work well, too. Are you an accountant? Create a campaign to send your subscribers from January up until (and through) Tax Day. Winery? Let readers follow the winemaking process along from harvest through crushing, pressing, aging and bottling.

Don’t Forget Holidays!

Industry-specific events aren’t the only annual occurrences that you can work into your email marketing calendar.

Holidays, while they shouldn’t be a cause of empty greetings, can provide a backdrop for thought-out campaigns.

Many businesses create a series of emails for the “12 Days of Christmas”

The floral, candy and jewelry industries are known for putting together strong campaigns in the months leading up to Valentine’s Day, but this holiday can work well for anyone marketing a unique product/gift idea.

Creating email marketing campaigns around the holidays may sound tired/trite to some of you — and in some cases, it is — but in my experience it’s all about the planning and execution, and how narrowly you define “holidays.”

For more holiday ideas, check out our holiday email marketing calendar. It contains plenty of celebrations that you might never have considered…

“Special Features” — Narrowly-Focused Email Campaigns

Just as in other media, you can drill down to one particular area within the broader focus of your email newsletter and publish a group of articles on that topic.

Example: our features on email marketing for doctors, restaurants and realtors.

This type of “special feature” (to borrow the term from more traditional media) can be a welcome diversion from your typical email newsletter content, and grab the interest of particular groups of subscribers.

Are you a travel agent? Highlight 5 destinations that offer exceptional value. Interior decorator? Show how different color palettes can make a room exciting, calming, bigger, smaller, and so on. A woodworking expert could take a little-used wood and showcase 3 projects that your readers can tackle using it.

The beauty of special features is that they:

Spice up your email newsletter.

Have natural cohesiveness, making it easy for you to keep your content relevant (example: a 5-part series on “readying your classic car for the next show” gives you 5 emails that logically tie together).

Give you plenty of email content to spread over multiple messages and keep in touch with subscribers while providing value.

Unless your email newsletter focuses on so narrow a topic that there’s absolutely no room to vary your individual message content, you can benefit from this type of campaign.

(If you think your email newsletter’s focus is too narrow to do this, please explain in the comments… I’d like a shot at giving you some ideas for possible “special feature” campaigns!)

Small Series of Tips: Break Up the Monotony

The other ideas discussed so far are all for creating “primary content” — the main focus of each campaign you send.

Even with an idea of where to start, and plenty of writing experience, you may find it exhausting to continually crank out thoroughly outlined, researched and proofread articles for your email newsletter.

Quick tips/ideas can supplement your main email content. They fit well in the sidebar of a 2- or 3-column HTML email, or near the end of a plain text one.

The tough part about motivating yourself to keep doing those types of campaigns is that you know that some people simply won’t end up reading the article thoroughly. They won’t have time, or they’ll want something they can scan through quickly.

This is where little “asides” or “mini-articles” can help. Since these are short, people are likely to read them, and they also require less of your time than a full-fledged article (so you can write a bunch of them in advance, and then just drop them into your campaigns as needed!).

Take a topic that you’d planned to turn into a full-fledged article — the primary content for one of your email campaigns — and break it up into bite-size packets of information. Then, put each of them into a different campaign under its own heading.

For example, a chef could use part of each email newsletter issue to highlight a little-known cooking tool and what it’s used for (maybe linking to a page with more details, a demonstration by video, recipes and/or a purchase link).

Multichannel Marketing: Sync Your Communications

If you’re taking advantage of other marketing channels like direct mail, radio and/or print media, think about how you can tie your email marketing campaigns in with those other media.

You might use email to alert subscribers of an upcoming promotion, or to look out for a flyer/catalog/postcard you’re sending them (or vice versa — you could use email to follow up after a campaign run in another media).

Marc recently blogged on multichannel marketing and gave an example of how a retailer coordinated email and postal campaigns to raise their response rate.

To learn more about multichannel campaigns, check out the MineThatData blog.It’s very advanced stuff, but if your business makes or plans to make significant use of multiple media channels to market to your prospects, it’s well worth your time to stop by.

source : http://www.aweber.com

Popularity: 4%

I know that the Facebook momentum has gained a ravenous pitch as I see more and more people jumping into it. And not only are they jumping but they are guzzling the addictive life streaming service at a pace that is at times scary. So as the Nigerian email scammers that rose to rapid fame/hatred have found it too. They realize that there is an opportunity to stop using email, as it might be played out, and now are using Facebook to run the same scams. Thanks for leaving email to us and jumping on the social media bandwagon. You will not be missed. 

Popularity: 7%

According to a recent article from B2B Magazine, while there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of best time to send email, a new study from Ball State University provides several valuable insights. The study followed working adults for a full day, recording what media participants used, where they used it, and for how long. Here are some of the findings:

• Working adults tend to log in to email first thing in the morning and have the longest period of uninterrupted time in their inbox.
• As the day goes by, inbox time becomes more fragmented.

So what do these findings suggest?

• People are most like to read a longer email message such as a newsletter first thing in the morning (between 8 and 9am).
• On the other hand, shorter email messages such as webinar invitations or white paper downloads may be best received later in the day when people are in “quick-hit” mode.

Popularity: 4%

Have you taken a look at your welcome email lately? Does it…

• Thank people for joining?
• Point them to helpful resources, such as an article, FAQ or product/service tour?
• Tell them how to connect/get in touch with you, and encourage them to do so?
• Anything at all? (Do you have a welcome email?)

I was reminded of the importance of a good welcome email last week after signing up with SlideShare to post the slides of my Podcasting and Email Newsletters presentation.

Shortly after signing up and confirming my registration, I received an email welcoming me to SlideShare. And I was impressed.

Their welcome email does a lot of great things that we can all learn from and apply to our email marketing campaigns.

SlideShare’s Welcome Email

Below is the email I received from SlideShare after activating my account (click the image to see the full email).

While it’s a short, simple message that anyone could write in minutes, it does a great job of getting me interested in using and exploring SlideShare.

Here are just a few things SlideShare does well in their welcome email:

Welcome New Users

Both the subject and first paragraph of the email are short and to the point: they tell me that my account is verified and welcome me to the service.

One often-overlooked purpose of welcome emails is to remind people that they signed up in the first place.

If your subscriber doesn’t check his/her email right away and/or is distracted when reading your first email, s/he may not understand why you’ve sent it, or remember signing up.

Point Out Helpful Resources

SlideShare links from their welcome email to an online tour, and their blog’s RSS feed.

On top of that, they list out a number of things that users can do with the service – in effect, pointing out extra features and benefits that the new subscriber may not have known about. (I think anyone running an email marketing campaign can see the value in doing this!)

These resources encourage users to get more value from their subscription (in this case, both immediately through the tour, and also later through the blog).

Is This a Perfect Welcome Email?

We’re doing a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison here since SlideShare’s welcome email isn’t designed specifically for an email marketing campaign, but even so…

I don’t think this is a perfect welcome email. There are a number of things I would have done differently.

I think SlideShare should promote other ways for subscribers to connect with SlideShare (through their Community section, for example, or through external social networks) and that they should link up a few other useful areas of the site (this email doesn’t even link to a login page, which is a definite “whoops” for an online service).

But those are really minor details. This welcome email does a great job of making me want to dig deeper into my new SlideShare account. And the more I do that, the more value I’m going to get out of it, and the more I’m going to tell others about it.

Your Turn: What Makes a Good Welcome Email?

• Do you think this is a good welcome email? What would you do differently?
• Do you do these things in your welcome emails?
• What other companies do you think create good welcome emails (and why)?

Share your thoughts and suggestions below!

Popularity: 5%

Really interesting presentation on What is the next in Marketing and Advertising.

Click here to see presentation

Popularity: 6%