Last time, I started off with saying that people shy away from email marketing because they don’t know how to do it. Almost as bad is the lack of an effective plan. In fact, there are so many questions to ask in email marketing before you send out even one issue of your newsletter because of what’s at stake – thousands of dollars in profits, your company’s reputation, customer confidence – that its no surprise to see big companies spending a lot of money just to get email marketing right. So…what does an email marketing plan consist of?
* A strong content base.
* A newsletter template.
* A strategy for acquiring subscribers.
* A publishing schedule.
* An advertising plan.
Let’s look at each individually.

A Strong Content Base.
If you want to gain and maintain subscribers, you must have something valuable to offer. Usually that comes in the form of expert knowledge, unless your business is in providing the latest news about a particular subject, in which case your newsletter can write itself (although if you don’t include any original content, you’ll lose subscribers fast).Email marketing is most successful if you make the commitment to give something valuable to the subscriber first. Everything I’ve said so far about building trust applies here in spades. Make sure you offer something unique and useful to your readers.

Publishing Schedule.
A major debate in email marketing is the question of frequency – how often should you send out your newsletter? Daily? Weekly? Once a month? The truth is, there’s no set formula for this. Instead, the answer lies in your business plan – what you want to achieve from your email marketing, and what sort of relationship you expect to build with your readers. If your newsletter is a "how-to" resource (like this one), you may consider weekly mailings (or twice a week, if possible). The problem then becomes content generation – do you have enough new topics to cover in your next newsletter, and can you write two newsletters in a week? My advice would be not to settle for anything more frequent than a weekly newsletter, and depending on your business model, you might even want to opt for a biweekly or monthly newsletter. On the other hand, some marketers totally ignore such guidelines and publish irregularly , whenever they please (or whenever they have something useful to say). If you’re undecided, you might want to try that approach until you can figure out what’s best for your particular list.

Newsletter Template.
Most email marketers prefer to include the whole newsletter within the email. This however raises a whole set of problems – email deliverability becomes a major issue, as long emails (especially ones that talk about making money) trip spam filters on most email networks. Another problem is how your newsletter is displayed – if you have an HTML formatted newsletter, it might break up or display incorrectly. Worse still is the case with images – many email providers (including GMail) don’t display images by default. Such issues can seriously downgrade the visual impact of your newsletter. And of course, bandwidth becomes an issue if you have a medium to large list. Sending a 100k image-laden, html formatted 1000+ words newsletter to 20,000 is, despite being an exaggerated example, stupid. Third party list management tools can often charge you for high bandwidth, and you don’t want to incur unnecessary costs.

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