Who should be sending your emails?
Plus the future of belonging and building your engagement ladder
Welcome to Connectable #017 🧑🤝🧑
I am so thrilled to have you here!
I want to help your business succeed. I want to inspire change. I want you to question your current processes and align yourself with the needs of your audience/community. I want you to attract the right people, solve the right problem and create superfans.
The medium? Email.
📮Want more email fun? SIGN UP to my personal email list.
🕸 Want to work with me? Visit my website.
For those of you who had the doomed clock change on Sunday, I hope you made it out alive and/or barely noticed it. I, unfortunately, am a light sleeper and get weirdly affected by seasonal changes, so when you also throw in an hour less sleep my body gets very confused and likes to keep me awake and on high alert in case something else strange is about to happen… Let’s just say it’s been a fun few days adjusting and it might be why it took me until today to piece together my newsletter.
In other news, I will be finally taking my email writing and strategy business full-time as of July! I can’t wait to have more time to find and work with dream clients. If you know anyone who wants to secure my services, make sure to reach out ASAP!
Who should be sending your emails?
Today I’m taking a break from the theory and talking a little more about the practical and planning side of sending emails. Sometimes I think businesses can overlook the basics of running a smooth email machine—simple considerations which will lead to recurring success. The main question I want to address is one many businesses, both small and large, will undoubtedly ask themselves “who should be writing/sending my emails?” and “how should I structure my email operations?”.
When you start out as a small brand or businesses owner, it’s very common for just one person to do everything from planning and writing emails, to scheduling, sending and optimising them. Email, however, can quickly become a full-time job and as soon as more people enter the email space, it’s time to tightly align your team and your operations. Here are some things to consider:
Team size, structure and send frequency
How many people do you want on your emails? The bigger the team, the more difficult the collaboration and execution can become. If you start off small, get yourself a copywriter who is also a strategist (some just do words). Allow them to plan the sequences and write them. If you don’t work with designs, then they can also look after your email system, add the emails and press send. However, I would definitely get them to work with an editor or Q&A specialist (which may even be you) to make sure your messages are on brand, there are no mistakes and segments and tags are in order. As you grow, you can definitely split all these roles.
Consider also how often you will be sending emails, if you’ll have to handle a lot of customer replies/support, and how much responsibility you’re willing to give away. Ultimately, I find the fewer people the better. If you start splitting every email task around 6 different team members all working on it part-time instead of having 2 full-time staff, things will get difficult to manage and ideas will be lost. Added to this, readers very quickly notice a change in voice and style, if you’re able to, try and have just one person to write each email for consistency.
It’s great to collaborate, but do so within a tight structure
It is crucial that everyone works closely together to protect the customer experience. Do this by getting everyone to work from a single source of truth. Have systems in place to foster positive and frictionless collaboration. As Magan nicely puts it:
“If you must have multiple senders, I still suggest having a global center of excellence to manage. There you can have a single email design system and schedule, so there's still oversight on who's getting what when. Otherwise, it's like the Wild West with everyone doing their own thing, and it makes your company look like you don't have it together.”
Create templates and style guides
Create an in-depth master document for everyone, new and old, to return to so everyone is on the exact same page. Keep all your information about TOV, writing styles, inspiration guides, past flows, segmentation and data analysis, checklists for quality insurance and past designs and templates all in one place.
Pick the right ‘sender’
There’s a lot of pressure on the person who hits send—make sure they are up for the job. As part of this, centralize the pre-send QA process to reduce the risk of sending incorrect and/or broken emails, which could be deleted or marked as spam/junk.
Have an emergency plan
Mistakes will happen, we’re all human, but make sure people know who to contact if they happen, and make sure they aren’t afraid to do so. However, if you’ve formed a trusting and honest relationship with your customers then that will make mistakes even easier to deal with—never be afraid to show your human side.
Something awesome for the week 📖
The Future of Belonging Newsletter - Vanessa Mason
As a regular reader of my newsletter, you’ll know that human connection and community are big parts of my work, so when I came across Vanessa’s newsletter I had to share it with you.
The Future of Belonging is a wonderfully insightful and provoking newsletter that explores how belonging is being redefined and renegotiated as traditional understandings of places and institutions fall apart.
“This newsletter will explore principles of technology development that build and reinforce real and meaningful relationships missing IRL. As ties to place become less and less common with gentrification, climate disruption, conflict and violence, the search for belonging to place may shift to articulating trust building signifiers, literacies and approaches that people to make safe spaces wherever and whenever needed and desired.”
Some great ones to start with:
Article of the Week 📜
Building Your Engagement Ladder: Five Practices to Start Advocating for Resilience
- Tiffany Owens
Cultivate Curiosity
Follow Your Strengths/Interests/Frustrations
Build a Tribe
Expect Resistance
Know Your "Why"
Tweets(perations) 🐦
That’s all for this week, thanks so much for the support.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please give it a like or share. I’m still a newbie, so any help would be awesome! 💚
Want more than just my newsletter? SIGN UP to my email list for more fun.
If you have any questions or want to say hi, my DMs are always open.
Have a fabulous week full of connection!
- Lisanne 🌻