3 Mental Models for Email Marketers

Hi there 👋,

 We hope our bulletin has found its way into the sea of all the holiday emails. Honestly, this time of the year can be challenging for an inbox and even more for an email marketer. 😉

So, in this edition, we’ll discuss the pain points of an email marketer's life and how mental frameworks can help in their management.

Let’s get started 👇

3 frameworks that make an email marketer's life easier 💯 via Mailmodo

Framework #1 -  Decision tree for writing subject lines

You’re not alone if you find writing the subject lines more difficult than the email copy. It’s a sentence that contains around 5-10 words, but the fate of your entire campaign depends upon it. 

Thankfully, we found a solution to make subject line creation simpler. ⬇️
 

Our quick-fix 

Mailmodo has created an ebook and formulated a framework to craft subject lines easily in collaboration with 250+ experts. According to this doc, one must be clear about two factors before writing a subject line -

👉 The context and goal of your email - For example, do you want to educate your audience or upsell your services? 
👉 The audience segment -  For example, are they brand-aware, or you’re hitting them up for the first time? 

If you can define these parameters for your campaign, you will get a clear idea about what can trigger email opens. 

Based on them, use the below decision tree to find out what to include and avoid in your copy ⬇️

Our eBook also contains a worksheet to help you create multiple options based on psychological triggers and insights from other email marketers. Don’t forget to check it out here.

Framework#2 - Feedback loop for email review

According to Litmus, 53% of brands take 2 weeks or longer to produce a single email. Reason? The recurring and often inconsistent feedback by stakeholders. Or worse, too many stakeholders who aren’t aligned with each other.

This problem delays the deliverables and sometimes even impacts the quality of the campaign. 

Can you prevent this entirely? Maybe not, but you can give it a process.

Our formula

Many organizations follow a “feedback loop” framework to streamline the entire process and stick to timelines. In this framework, participants identify stakeholders and collect initial feedback about the idea/outline before proceeding.

This simple process helps save the entire team's time and effort. Here's how you can emulate this for your email marketing pipeline -

👉 Create the basic outline. 
👉 Get approval on the idea from first-level stakeholders.
👉 Once approved, proceed with the email design and copy.
👉 Get the final editorial review before going live. 
👉 Implement the relevant feedback from one email in the next cycle. 

Note: Clearly define the timelines for every round of approval.

We recently came across something similar to what Jess Cook said about the approval process in content marketing. Here’s a snippet 📸

That's one amazing insight by Jess, for sure! 💡

Framework # 3 - Checklists for pre-campaign anxiety

Sweaty palms, racing heartbeat, and an urge to keep checking the email template one last time - every email marketer can identify with these symptoms, and none of us like it. 🤐

Hitting the ‘send’ button can be stressful, especially when sending it to a large audience segment.

We were in the same boat until we came up with this savior! 

Our life hack  

At Mailmodo, we realized that the only way to combat these jitters was to have checklists for every stage, tick them off like a boss, and have solid proof to waive any irrational fears.

For example, your pre-campaign checklist could have these items -

👉  Check the sender’s email
👉  Confirm the sender's name
👉 Check for typos in the subject line and pre-header
👉 Check if you’ve picked the right template

In fact, our team has created an extensive checklist covering content, deliverability, and personalization for an entire campaign. 

Here’s a quick sneak peek. 🔎

We always use it in our campaigns, and you can access it right here.

🚀 Mailmodo Shoutouts 🚀

1. Discover the ABC of content with Joe Escobedo

We found this fantastic newsletter by Joe Escobedo, CEO of Esco Media & host of B2B Marketing Asia Podcast, where he discusses his content experiments and learnings. His course about editing and PR is a gold mine as well; the best way to upskill this season. 

 2. 5 Mental Models for Content Marketers by Animalz 

Stumbled upon this terrific blog by Animalz (of course, iykyk) while researching the connect between mental models and marketing. Written by Jimmy Daly of Superpath, it tells you different ways of training your mind to create better content and marketing strategies.

3. Aligning 8 Critical Stakeholder Groups in Content from Skywork 

This step, by far, is more time-taking and difficult than content or campaign creation. This article, though, outlines different ways you can bring everyone together (hopefully) and get that approval. 

With this, we come to the conclusion of this edition! If you liked this edition, please let a friend know about us and help them subscribe here. 

For now, we wish you a happy, happy December filed with love and cakes! 🎅 🎂👨‍👩‍👦

Mailmodo Technologies Inc.

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