How to Prepare an Email Marketing Plan: Process and Best Practices

Think email marketing is a thing of the past?

Well, it’s time to rethink and rejig!

Why?

Even now, email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for driving business.

Numbers don’t lie!

A HubSpot report suggests that 77% of marketers have seen email engagement grow over the past 12 months.

Indeed, it is effective. But running successful email campaigns requires a strategy — an email marketing plan. This should also align with your business goals, boost customer engagement, and keep conversions rolling.

What should your email marketing plan include?

It should outline how you’d execute marketing objectives such as generating leads, nurturing customer relationships, boosting sales, driving brand loyalty, and more.

You can also plan your email marketing for remarketing efforts, feedback surveys, and personalized promotions. But rather than “how to execute,” we’ll focus on “how to plan” from the ground up.

Let’s explore how to build a powerful email marketing plan that drives home success.

The email marketing plan process

An email marketing plan is your roadmap to executing all tasks related to email marketing. It spares you from blasting emails into the void and instead helps you stay focused on your marketing goals.

Here’s a straightforward process that helps plan email campaigns to drive conversions, build loyalty, and generate leads. 

This is the 8-step process, which contains the nitty-gritty of building that email marketing plan.

1. Define your goals and objectives

What are you trying to achieve with your email marketing efforts? Are you looking to generate sizzling leads, nurture existing customer relationships into brand evangelists, or boost sales through the roof? 

Clear, actionable goals help you shape your content and determine success metrics.

For instance, you can begin by using the SMART framework to set these goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

So, when you plan your activities with clear goals and objectives, you’ll be more specific about the outcome you want to achieve.

This should look something like — 

“I am looking to increase email open rate by 15% in the next three months”.

OR

“I want to use email for generating 500 qualified leads from the next product launch”.

Here’s how you define goals and objectives for email marketing:

• Start with broad marketing goals and narrow them down to email-specific goals.
• Align your email objectives with overall business outcomes, whether driving revenue, increasing brand awareness, or boosting customer retention.
• Define KPIs to measure success: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and list growth are key metrics that should be tied to each objective.

Read more: 7 Popular Goal-Setting Frameworks to Achieve More

2. Identify and segment your target audience

Generic emails are useless. Give your audience the relevance and connection they crave. This requires you to understand your audience well before you craft messages. 

Segmenting your target audience based on demographics, interests, behavior, and other relevant factors allows you to understand them.

Such email segmentation helps customize your messaging and creates maximum impact.

You’ll have to check with your existing customer data, conduct surveys, or leverage social media insights. Use this data to create ideal customer personas. 

Then, use your email marketing or marketing automation platform to segment your audience based on these criteria. 

Here’s a quick list of action items at this step:

• Analyze your customer data to segment your audience by key factors, such as industry, buying behavior, or engagement with previous emails.
• Use tools like CRM platforms, email marketing software, and ERP solutions to manage your audience lists.
• Leverage advanced segmentation strategies like predictive analytics or interest-based targeting. This will drive personalization and meaningful interactions.

3. Monitor and analyze previous performances

Past performance often indicates future potential. Familiarize yourself with performance appraisal software tools to evaluate employee achievements and areas for growth. That’s the same approach you’ll need to take for email marketing efforts.

If you’ve run email campaigns before, analyze the data to see what worked, what didn’t, and where there’s room for improvement.

This data drives decisions, whether you need to tweak your messaging, A/B test new subject lines, or identify the ideal time to send.

Check for open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and other key metrics to gain valuable insights to guide your future campaigns.

Start using your email marketing platform’s analytics dashboard or integrate with tools like Google Analytics to track your campaigns’ performance. Check trends and patterns to identify areas of strength and weakness.

Here’s what you can do at this stage.

• Break down your email performance by segment to identify trends or opportunities for improvement.
• Use A/B testing to try out different versions of emails and identify what content, designs, or calls to action perform best.
• Monitor bounce rates to identify and clean up inactive or invalid email addresses, improving deliverability. Use a marketing automation platform like Encharge that comes up with a built-in free email verification. 

4. Choose the email marketing platform

The email marketing platform is a command center where you design emails, manage lists, automate workflows, and track results. Check if the platform offers marketing automation, A/B testing, advanced segmentation capabilities, and detailed analytics. 

Since each platform has distinctive features and pros and cons, it is best to choose one that aligns with your goals, budget, and technical expertise.

To filter further, factor in the ease of use, deliverability rates, automation capabilities, integration options, and customer support. 

Here’s what you can do at this stage.

• Identify your needs based on your goals. If automation is key to your strategy, find platforms that offer robust automation workflows.
• Consider ease of use, scalability, and integration with other tools in your tech stack, like Salesforce or HubSpot.
• Evaluate the platform’s reporting capabilities to ensure it delivers the insights necessary to track your KPIs and optimize campaigns.

5. Build and segment your email audience

The foundation for your email execution — your email audience. 

A large email list does not automatically mean you have a great audience. The quality of your subscribers matters more than quantity. Your email engagement rate depends on this quality.

Your email marketing platform should allow you to identify the most engaged subscribers. Look for a platform like Encharge that enables you to segment your audience based on their email and website/app activity. 

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building and segmenting your email audience as part of your email marketing plan.

You’d need to have a multi-dimensional approach to:

• Attract new quality subscribers.
• Incorporate alluring lead magnets.
• Strategically placed opt-in forms on your website.
• Engage the audience with social media promotions.
• Blend in offline events to capture valuable contact information.
• Segment audience based on factors like purchase history, browsing behavior, geographic location, or customer lifecycle stage.

6. Create an email marketing calendar

An email marketing calendar is a strategic timetable for your campaigns that facilitates organization, proactive planning, and consistent communication with your subscribers.

You’ll also plan to balance the frequency not to overwhelm your subscribers and keep them engaged. Use a calendar to map out campaigns, promotions, and nurture sequences in advance.

First, map key dates and events related to your business or industry. Strategically define the purpose of your email campaign around these pivotal moments to maintain adequate pacing between them. Otherwise, your campaign will overwhelm your audience, leading to unsubscribing.

Apart from that, here’s what you can do:

• Based on data from past campaigns, set specific send dates and times.
• Leave room in your calendar for A/B testing subject lines, CTAs, or send times.

7. Write and design engaging email content

Adding content to your email isn’t just about producing well-written text. Instead, drive a message that makes it easy for the audience to consume and inspires them to act. 

So, think about ways your content adds value, builds trust, and motivates recipients to take the next step — making a purchase, downloading a resource, or signing up for an event.

You’ll need to ideate for subject lines that pique curiosity. Think of ways to maintain conciseness, relevance, and visual appeal within your content.

Here are some critical steps you could take when planning email content.

How to implement:

• Craft compelling subject lines that drive curiosity or clearly state the benefit of opening the email. (e.g., “John, here’s your exclusive offer”).
• Design clear, scannable layouts that are mobile-optimized.
• Personalize the content by leveraging data (previous purchases, browsing history, or geographic location).

8. Automate and schedule email campaigns

Automation does one thing — it delivers the right message to the right individual at the optimal time, eliminating the dependency on manual intervention.

You’ll thus have targeted messages triggering specific actions or time-based events. It ensures your emails land at the most relevant moments.

How to implement:

• Set up drip campaigns to automatically send a series of emails that nurture leads over time.
• Use triggered emails for real-time engagement, like abandoned cart emails, post-purchase follow-ups, or birthday discounts.
• Schedule emails based on audience behavior patterns. 

Need help automating your email marketing with a best-in-class platform? Book a free strategy call with our customer success team. 

The email marketing plan best practices

Now that you know how to plan your email marketing campaigns, it’s time to check out the industry-proven best practices.

Aligning your email marketing processes with these tried-and-true strategies helps create campaigns that consistently perform well, resonate with your audience, and deliver measurable results.

Let’s explore.

Involve different stakeholders and team members

Email marketing requires alignment to maximize its impact. So, key stakeholders and team members — marketing, sales, customer service, and legal. 

Involving the right stakeholders early on makes sure your campaigns are aligned with broader business goals and don’t just function in silos. Also, it considers the legal standards while aiming to resonate with the target audience.

This way, you’ll get input from sales, customer service, product development, and other relevant teams. Use their insights to shape your messaging, target audience segmentation, and campaign objectives.

Here’s how you can implement this tip:

• Organize a kickoff meeting to align all relevant teams on goals, audience, and messaging.
• Collaborative tools like Google Workspace, Slack, or project management platforms (e.g., Trello) can streamline communication.
• Establish clear roles for each team member and assign tasks like content creation, design, analytics, and compliance reviews.

Follow company and email compliance standards

When planning, ensure your emails follow company policies and industry regulations. This will protect your brand reputation and avoid legal pitfalls, which can incur hefty fines, loss of customer trust, or blocklisting of your email domain.

For starters, get acquainted with laws like the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, and CASL. 

Next, you can follow these:

• Review legal requirements specific to your industry or region, including consent, opt-out processes, and data storage policies. To help manage these, use HubSpot or Encharge, which has compliance tools built in.
• Include an unsubscribe link in every marketing email, as it is required by law in most regions. Note that transactional emails should still be sent without an unsubscribe link. 
• Document consent that shows all subscribers have opted in to receive your emails.

Include branding

Your email planning should involve brand guidelines so that the emails reflect your brand identity, from visuals to tone of voice. Remain consistent in those aspects, as your emails often reflect your brand identity, from visuals to tone of voice.

Consider the basics, like incorporating brand colors, logos, and fonts into your email templates. 

Apart from that, you can also practice the following:

• Use branded templates incorporating your company’s colors, fonts, and logo in every email. 
• Add branded elements like custom imagery, icons, or buttons that echo your website design to make your emails instantly recognizable.

Set deadlines

The success of your email campaign depends on its timely execution. Thus, you’ll need a well-structured email marketing plan with realistic deadlines for each phase of your campaigns.

Working without a deadline may cause missed opportunities or inconsistent communication with your audience.

Here, you can consider the following:

• Creating a project timeline with the help of project management software or email marketing tools.
• Coordinating with stakeholders so that everyone understands the timeline and their respective deliverables to avoid last-minute rushes.
• Monitoring progress regularly through tools like Asana or Monday.com.

Test, Improve, and Adapt the Plan

Don’t stop refining and improving your emails. Continuous refinement is necessary, such as testing, analyzing, and adapting your strategies based on real-world data. 

Testing will help determine what works best for your audience. You’ll also need to keep adapting your plan to keep up with changing trends and behaviors. Use tools like Optimizely, VWO, or built-in A/B testing features within your email marketing platform.

• Choose tools to A/B test marketing emails. Litmus, Optimizely, etc., provides built-in testing features.
• Regularly review analytics from your campaign that focuses on metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
• Test one variable at a time, such as send times, content length, or email format, to generate actionable insights.

Delegate tasks

Email marketing will have multiple moving parts, from content creation to design and technical setup to sending emails. 

Delegate tasks so that every team member has a role, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

By assigning clear responsibilities, you maintain accountability and streamline execution.

Here’s what you can do:

• Break down tasks into specific roles, such as content writing, design, A/B testing, and performance analysis.
• Use project management tools like Jira, Trello, etc., to keep track of task assignments, deadlines, and progress.
• Conduct regular check-ins with team members to ensure tasks are on track.

Track deliverability

Once you have delegated email tasks, track their impact. This requires effective monitoring and optimizing deliverability rates. For instance, you’d use tools like Mail-Tester or GlockApps to assess your deliverability health and identify areas for improvement.

Such deliverability monitoring helps identify issues with your sender’s reputation or email hygiene and address them proactively.

These are some actions you can take:

• Monitor sender reputation using tools like Sender Score or Postmaster by Google to check if ISPs aren’t flagging your domain.
• Maintain list hygiene by regularly cleaning your email list — remove bounced emails, inactive subscribers, and invalid addresses.
• Use a double opt-in for subscribers to ensure they genuinely want to receive your emails. This will reduce the chances of complaints or spam reports.

Use a plan template

Use a structured email marketing plan template to ensure your campaigns are organized, comprehensive, and consistent. 

Use a pre-designed template to get structure and guidance and cover all the essential elements for this. Templates streamline the process, offering a clear roadmap for execution and making it easier to track progress and results.

Research and use proven email plan templates that fit your campaign’s needs.

This is what you can do:

• Here are some email templates to check out.

• Customize the template to align with your campaign goals, whether they focus on lead generation, nurturing, or customer retention.
• Regularly update the template based on feedback from past campaigns, incorporating any learnings or improvements into plans.

Here’s an example of an email marketing planner template:

Such templates serve as a helpful framework, streamlining the planning process and keeping you organized.

Email marketing plan: conclusion

A successful email marketing plan needs a perfect blend of well-defined processes and industry-proven best practices.

We’ve defined processes and best practices that help you successfully plan your email marketing goals. 

A structured email marketing plan will align with your business objectives and deliver measurable results.