Outline Your Goals
The first thing you need to do is clearly outline your goals for what you’d like to accomplish with your business this year.
Then define how your mailing list goals will help you achieve your overall goals.
For example, your goals might include using your mailing list to:
- Build relationships with your prospects.
- Generate sales.
- Promote your joint venture partners’ products.
- Generate referral traffic.
- Help kick start viral campaigns.
Define a primary goal (the one that you’ll focus on), as well as your top secondary goals. Then keep these goals in mind as you outline you promotional calendar.
Detail Your Promos
Now your prime concern is to make sure you devote time and mailings to your own promotions.
So take these steps: Write down the new products you plan on launching this year, along with the release date for each product.
- Determine how long your pre-launch period will be. This is the time you spend building anticipation for a launch, such as one week before the launch date.
- Determine how long your active launch period will be. This is time you spend actively focusing on promoting the newly launched product, such as five days or one week.
- Determine how many emails you’ll send during the pre-launch period.
For example, perhaps you’ll send three emails – one a week before the launch date, one email three days before launch, and one email the day before launch.
- Determine how many emails you’ll send during the active launch period.
For example, you might send one email the moment the product launches, plus one email every day for the first five days.
- Determine what sort of promotions you’ll extend during the launch period.
For example, maybe you’ll offer a 40% introductory discount for the first three days.
In House Scheduling
At this point, you can now fill in your promotional calendar with your upcoming product launches.
Be sure to schedule each email you’d like to send during both the pre-launch and launch cycle.
Next, let’s sketch out promotions for your existing products. Here are the steps:
- Write down which of your existing products you’d like to promote over the next six months to a year.
- Determine what types of special promotions you’d like to showcase for these products.
- Figure out the promotional period.
- Outline the types of emails you’ll send before and during the promotional period.
For example, perhaps you’ll launch a three-email series to build anticipation for a one-day flash sale.
Or perhaps you’ll create a five-day eCourse to promote your coaching and consulting offer. E.G., “The Five Secrets Of [Topic]…”
Now fill these existing-product promotions into your promotional calendar.
Use This Software (Free)
You can manage all of your promotional schedules using TeamUp – https://www.teamup.com/ it’s a great tool and completely free to get started.
The free account includes:
- Up to 8 sub-calendars
- 1 year of historical data
- Unlimited # of viewers
- Use as long as needed
This should be sufficient for all your needs but there are Plus/Premium and Enterprise version upgrades if you need more later.
JV Promotion Planning
As mentioned, your own promotions should be your top priority.
Now that you’ve filled in your promotions on your calendar, your next step is to fill in your joint venture partners’ promotions.
Here are the steps:
- Contact your top JV partners to let them know you’re creating your promotional calendar, and that you’d like to know about their upcoming product launches.
- Be sure to get details about the pre-launch and launch cycles, so that you know how many emails you’ll be sending, and when you’ll be sending them.
Once you know the details, then you can fill these in on your promotional calendar as well.
Promotional Tie-Ins
Next up, consider major holidays and other events around which you may consider running a promotion.
Examples include:
- Christmas
- New Year
- Valentine’s Day
- Summer promos
- Back to school savings
- Halloween
- Business anniversary promotions
- Niche specific holidays, like “Adopt a Shelter Dog Day”
Those are just examples, some of which may not be a good fit for your type of business.
Go month-by-month through the calendar and determine what types of holiday or event promos you’d like to run.
For example:
- Run a 40% off everything flash sale on New Year’s Day.
- Create a buy one, get one free offer on your business anniversary.
Resources
Need a little inspiration to find some days worthy of celebration? Check out these calendars:
Fill In The Blanks
Now that you’ve outlined all your promotions on your publishing calendar, the final step is to fill in the other sorts of content you’d like to send.
In most cases, these content emails will include a pitch for a product embedded right into the content.
Examples of emails you may send:
- How to and tips articles, where you promote a related product within.
- Emails where you send readers to your blog (with the goal of engaging them there and getting them to click to your products).
- Product reviews and comparisons.
- Invitations to download freemiums or join webinars.
For example, you might decide to send an email about how to set up a mailing list, and then promote an email service provider from within this email.
Go ahead and plan these out, being sure to put these emails in close proximity to similar emails.
So, for example, let’s suppose you are going to launch a blogging product in three months.
In the second month, you may focus on talking about blogging issues by sharing lots of good “how to” content, pitching blog-related products such as plugins, and all the while dropping hints about the upcoming product launch.
