Save time, drive impact, and go on holiday

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

— Michael Porter (Harvard Business School professor, and one of the most influential thinkers on business strategy)

If you are the email team, and also the designer, the copywriter, the analyst and the deliverability consultant, this edition is for you.

It's the reality for most of the marketers I talk to — even those in large organisations.

While it can feel like you're often a step behind, small teams often have tremendous advantages over larger ones.

You have very few approval chains, you can operate with one consistent voice, and you might actually know your subscribers.

What you don't have is time to waste.

And I don’t want to waste yours.

Here are three core ideas: something to stop doing, something to automate, and what you should document.

1. Stop: audit what you send

List every email you sent in the last two months and dig into each one.

Go through section by section: did this move the needle? (sales, donations, relationships), did this keep the lights on? (receipts, confirmations), or was this added as a matter of habit?

You can assess this based on asking recipients, going through feedback, and by looking at click-through rates. Specifically this is a great use for seeing which links are getting the most clicks.

The sections that you create by habit are likely where a lot of your time goes. The extra monthly update nobody ever clicks, the roundup that exists because it always has, or the “in focus” section nobody has questioned in years.

Pick one (or more) and stop putting it in. If the email still has a lot of value and nobody notices after a few months, you may have an answer: cut something here and you can focus more energy on making the rest great.

2. Automate: let your best emails work while you sleep

Automated emails made up just 2% of sends but drove 30% of email revenue.

A recent report found automated emails made up just 2% of sends but drove 30% of email revenue, earning 16 times more per send than regular scheduled campaigns.

That's ecommerce data, but the principle holds for charities and B2B too. An email triggered by what a subscriber just did can arrive at exactly the right moment.

Automation can feel daunting — it’s a huge topic, relying on good data, systems, and some technical implementation. But it can be easier to embrace than many think.

If you only build one automation, I always encourage teams to set up a welcome series for new subscribers — it doesn’t rely on any new data or systems, and it’s guaranteed to go to the most people, so has the highest chance of impact in a short period of time.

If you already have a welcome sequence, you might want to look at one of the following as your next step:

• A thank-you series after a first purchase or donation.
• A re-engagement email for anyone who's been disengaged and inactive for 90 days.

While automation is often touted as “set it and forget it”, it should really be "set it and check in with it”. I realise that’s considerably less catchy, so sorry to dampen the excitement there.

We find it works well to set a quarterly calendar reminder to review our automations — there is so much untapped potential here, so it’s absolutely worth it.

3. Document: make yourself replaceable (in a good way)

This is always the easiest thing to put off because it is never urgent or required for sending the next campaign.

You ideally want to write a one-page playbook covering how you do email marketing — what templates do use? What is your sending cadence? Which segments do you focus on and why? It’s also a great idea to have a pre-send checklist (luckily for this you can steal ours).

Documenting processes is rarely anyone’s idea of fun. But it can be incredibly helpful for even reflecting on your own workflow and where it could be more efficient. It helps you remember things and make fewer mistakes when you’re in a rush. And rather crucially it makes it easier to take a holiday without the newsletter taking one too.

If you use AI, put it on the chores, not the voice

As we touched on recently when looking at how charities can use AI in their marketing efforts, AI can be brilliant at grunt work. Generating subject line ideas, turning a report into bite-sized chunks, catching typos, and spinning one newsletter into three social posts.

What AI can't supply is the thing your readers came for in the first place: your perspective.

As inboxes fill with competent, bland copy, a human point of view is becoming quite a scarce thing. You have one. Nurture it and protect it. Please. For all of us!

Smaller can be stronger

A small team can be bolder, more decisive, and faster. You have to be selective but you can achieve a lot with a little. This also applies to list management — a few well-kept segments (three is often plenty) and a list pruned of inactive subscribers will help further with achieving the results you want without adding more people to your team.

Try it now

Over the next week, try at least one of the following:

• Stop including just one section in your next email.
• Create one automation or review the one you haven’t looked at since it first went live a year ago.
• Document one process, even if it's five bullet points.

Three small moves, and I promise you will start to feel the difference — in impact, time, and effort.

If you'd like a second opinion on anything you’re working on, you can temporarily add me to your team. Hit reply and send me what you’re struggling with. I'd love to see if I can help.

Until next time,

James

This week's illustration is Muusoctopus levis, a deep-sea octopus with eight arms, three hearts and no colleagues. It comes from Carl Chun's The Cephalopoda. Atlas, digitised by the Smithsonian Libraries and made freely available by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public domain.