Have you ever asked: “What emails should we actually send?”
The problem is we usually ask this when we’re staring at a content calendar thinking “we need to send something this week.”
But good email marketing NEVER starts with the campaign.
It starts with the audience and the outcome you want to create.
Once you shift from “what should we send?” to “who should we be speaking to right now?”, email content suddenly becomes much easier.
Your content will fall into three core types:
1) Intent-driven emails
Triggered by behaviour - things like abandoned baskets, pricing page visits, webinar attendance, or trial activity. These emails respond to a moment that already exists and will always generate the best results.
2) Awareness emails
Educational content and VALUE (helpful, knowledgeable, value led content) that builds understanding, trust, and familiarity over time.
3) Specific campaign emails
Launches, promotions, webinars, events, or announcements tied to a specific business moment. When you map these against audience signals, then you have a good strategy.
A simple framework for you to plan emails:
1️⃣ List the audience groups in your database
(new subscribers, prospects, engaged readers, customers, inactive users, etc.)
2️⃣ Identify the signals they’re giving you and what intent signals you can collect
(page visits, downloads, purchases, form fills, inactivity, repeated content engagement)
3️⃣ Map the three content types to those groups
(intent-driven, awareness, campaign)
4️⃣ Look for the questions people are already thinking, feeling, doing or saying
(support tickets, sales calls, Reddit, reviews, comments, user research - even ask ChatGPT!)
5️⃣ Turn those questions or objections into emails.
That’s it!
Most teams aren’t short of content ideas - they’re just looking in the wrong place.
Full framework below 👇