When it comes to succeeding with your email marketing, there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there.

Should you have a million automations? Are you even successful if your list doesn’t have a million people? Shouldn’t you be making hundreds of thousands of dollars with every email you send?

It makes it incredibly hard for businesses to measure success or have any idea if they’re doing well.

While this won’t give you the guide to every part of email marketing (that will come soon!), it will certainly break down the basics of what you should write in your emails.

At the end of the day, email marketing is important because you don’t want people to forget who you are. When you can stay in their mind, and they associate you with making their lives better, it’s much easier to eventually sell something to them.

Let’s get into it.

Find your email marketing buckets

The first thing you want to do, whether you’re starting a new list or coming up with a new strategy for your current list, is to come up with your content “buckets”.

These are the three to five main categories that your readers care about that you can pull from when you need ideas.

For example, if you were starting a newsletter for your gym, your content buckets would include workouts, news about your gym, and recipes.

Finding your buckets will help you answer that dreaded “What do we write about??” question with every email.

Of course, your buckets can grow and evolve with time, but without these, you’re going to end up writing about things that your audience doesn’t care about.

Decide the goal and tone of each email

When you open up an email to start writing, you need to decide what the ultimate goal of the email is and also what the overall tone will be.

Some goals can include providing value, relationship building, surveying your audience, getting them to sign up for a webinar, educating your audience, or selling them something.

From there, you need to decide the overall tone because it will heavily influence the stories you tell in your emails and the words you use.

What should you write?

What most businesses default to is simply sending their newest updates, whether that’s on their physical store/products or their newest blog post or YouTube video.

However, the kiss of death with emails is when someone already knows what you’re going to say before they open the email. There’s no reason to open your emails anymore because they already know what’s inside.

Keep in mind, you must approach people with the “mindset” they’re in when they’re reading email. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this a lot where he describes people having “mindsets” when they’re on different platforms. When you’re on YouTube, you’re ready to watch. You already have your headphones on. You’re ready. On Twitter, you want to find golden nuggets or maybe find someone to argue with (it seems that’s what people love to use Twitter for, mostly).

For the audience, you must ask yourself what kind of mindset they’re in when they’re reading your emails.

Everybody wants to read high-quality, engaging emails. Most businesses just don’t put in the time and the effort to make theirs that way.

Prime them for sales in advance

If you are selling something, they should be primed well in advance before you start bombarding them daily with emails.

It’s like that friend from high school who comes out of nowhere to pitch you their latest MLM scheme — don’t do it! You want them to know you’re coming with a pitch and to get them excited for it in advance.

Sometimes, success with email sales is as simple as asking, “What would my readers care about?”

99% of email marketing is businesses and people saying, “Here’s why you should care about MY company” and if you flip it around to be focused on the reader, you’re going to be more successful than most.

Benchmarks for focus

While every business is different, there are a few general outlines of focus you can follow to make sure you’re not getting ahead of yourself.

• 0-1,000 subscribers: Somewhere between bi-weekly and monthly emails. Sprinkle in with some stories, but you don’t need to go crazy with automations. You CAN play around with some email opt-ins (aka give them something for free in exchange for an email address

• 1,000-10,000 subscribers: start playing with emailing more often, telling more stories. Think about creating a welcome sequence at this level.

• 10,000-50,000 subscribers: Start creating more elaborate automations, funnels, and customer journeys for your readers. Assuming, of course, that you have something to sell.

The only reason you’d want to set up automations and a ton of other advanced options is if you have a marketing budget to work with and monetization options on the backend. If you’re simply organically bringing people into your funnel, you don’t need to go crazy with it.

Don’t do giveaways to build your list

From managing huge lists to social media followings, there is one main controversial opinion I have with email marketing: giveaways are a dumb way to build a list.

Almost everyone who subscribes to your list will eventually leave because they just wanted to win. They don’t care about your business and they’ll almost never buy from you.

Don’t do them.

If you want to, feel free, but know you’ve been warned.

That’s pretty much the basics when it comes to email marketing. I’ll be doing future videos with deeper information and tutorials, but it’s the same as marketing with every other type of marketing medium — give people what they want and they’ll love to hear from you.