The Role of Email In Your Marketing Communication Plan
Explore the invaluable role a marketing communication plan can play in planning email campaigns with this comprehensive guide by Jarrang.
November 29 - 2024
Article 5 min read
Marketing without a plan is a surefire way to waste resources and fail to achieve the results you want. Despite this, studies found that two-thirds of UK SMEs have no marketing plan. These businesses are likely wasting time and money, losing out on potential customers and increasing employee stress – all of which can be improved by introducing a marketing communication plan.
A marketing communication plan (MarCom) is a document that helps shape each marketing campaign. Ideally, a business should create a new plan for each significant opportunity within its marketing schedule – whether that’s a product launch, rebrand, seasonal promotional period or anything similar.
Building a MarCom plan helps you understand who your users are, what channels you have access to, what messages you want to convey and what goals you want to achieve. These factors will come together to help shape the focus of your marketing efforts for the entirety of the campaign.
Your MarCom plan serves as your broad strategy – but it also shapes channel-by-channel activity. Email marketers, for example, must always reference back to a brand’s MarCom plan to ensure their campaigns match its overall direction.
The importance of email marketing
Email marketing offers the potential highest ROI of any marketing channel, so it’s important to prioritise it within any marketing plan. The steps involved in creating a MarCom plan include setting goals, researching audiences, and planning content, all of which are crucial to email strategy.
That’s why anyone involved in email marketing activity can benefit from understanding what a MarCom plan is, what it achieves and how to build one…
Step 1: Define your goals
Any strategy is only as effective as the results it drives. To begin building a successful MarCom plan, you’ll need to identify which trackable goals are tied to business success. Begin by evaluating your current business performance and determining which metrics matter most, such as ROI or conversion rates.
Use these baseline metrics to set KPIs for every goal within your MarCom plan. When coming up with targets for your MarCom plan, make sure you start by framing all goals as S.M.A.R.T goals:
- Specific: Be as definitive as possible about the what, why, and how behind a goal. For example, you want to increase newsletter subscribers by 20% by implementing a new downloadable guide.
- Measurable: How will the goal be measured? Which KPIs can you use? For example, you can track a 20% goal via subscriber figures on your email platform.
- Achievable: Challenge your goal against resources, time and challenges. Is it realistic? For example, a 20% increase for a smaller subscriber count may only mean 100 new subscribers, but for a larger brand, it may mean 10,000 – a much harder goal.
- Relevant: Check to see if the goal aligns with your overall objectives. For example, will an increase in subscribers help drive product sales?
- Time-bound: Set a realistic deadline for the goal. E.g. by the end of Q2.
Step 2: Identify your audience
Any goal needs to be something that meets users' needs – so you need to know who they are. That means identifying your audience’s demographic, behaviours, challenges and buying habits.
Almost every business has multiple audience types, so you’ll need to split them out to be able to better target them with marketing activity. We would suggest splitting them by:
- Demographic: Age, location, gender.
- Behavioural factors: Purchase history, engagement level.
- Lifecycle stage: New customers/subscribers, long-term customers, or leads.
Each of these audiences will require different messages and approaches. A potential lead may need tailored brand awareness messaging using multiple channels, whereas a long-time customer may convert again with a single promotional email.
Step 3: Develop your messaging
Messaging is critical in capturing audience attention – but you must tailor it to each segment. You need an overall consistent brand voice, but that voice should be able to shift from friendly and humorous to more formal if you’re targeting a more serious B2B segment.
For each audience segment, you can build a messaging strategy by answering the following:
- What key messages do I want to communicate with my product and brand? How do these messages affect my audience?
- What do they already know about my brand/product/industry?
- What needs or preferences does my product or brand help serve?
- What types of content will be most effective and what do I need to create? Think of formats like promotional flyers, blogs, social media posts, email newsletters, downloadable guides etc.
After answering these questions, you should have a better idea of what your messaging style will be and what types of content you will create and promote. The most important thing is that all of your messaging is clear in how it demonstrates value to your audiences, as well as being reflective of your goals for the business.
Step 4: Channel strategy
Once you know what content you want to share and who your audience may be, it’s time to decide on a channel-by-channel strategy. To help you decide how to split your marketing efforts, consider the following questions:
- What content from the previous steps will you share on what channel?
- Which channel is most impactful for each target user?
- Is there specific messaging that is only relevant to one channel?
- Are there any restrictions or limitations to certain channels – i.e. the costs of paid advertising
Once you’ve answered the above, you can map your content efforts to the channels that suit them best. The value of email marketing is evident at this stage – it is the channel that allows you to most effectively target each audience with the exact type of content they need. Other marketing channels can support these efforts, but email provides the most cost-effective approach.
Step 5. Set frequency & allocate resource
If you know what type of content you want to create and who it will target, you also need to decide who will be responsible for it. That means allocating the appropriate resources to creating and sharing each content/message.
Setting the right frequency and allocating resources to ensure assets get the attention they need without overwhelming your team is key to building a consistent, impactful campaign. Here’s how to plan for both of these essential campaign factors:
- Frequency: Balance any potential targets against audience fatigue. Every activity needs to have a certain cadence based on your goals and any past data. This is where email reporting plays a critical role, as having a strong reporting system in place means you can critically review past performance and use your findings to help decide on future frequency.
- Resource: All activity has a resource cost, whether that’s cash to fuel paid advertising or the price of an employee’s salary. Consider all potential activity against how long it may take and try to optimise who tasks ba
5. Create a delivery plan
You’ve now taken care of the ‘research’ side of things – it’s time to move onto the more active part of the planning process. Taking your goals, audiences and messaging into account, you’ll begin to map out a delivery strategy that addresses the channels you have access too, establishes frequency and sets responsibilities.
The best way to illustrate this is to create an example plan. We’ve created this basic plan for a fictional seasonal marketing campaign to keep things simple.
| Objective | Overall campaign objective
Increase seasonal sales by 20% |
| Target Audience | All potential audiences split by segments
Existing customers, new subscribers, and high-potential leads segmented as follows: |
| - Loyal customers: Purchased multiple times | |
| - Seasonal shoppers: Engaged during previous seasonal events | |
| - New subscribers: Joined in the last 3 months | |
| Key Messages | Core messages built around brand opportunities and audience needs
- Seasonal promotion to clear current stock: "Santa’s big savings" |
| - New product launch: Just in time for Christmas | |
| - Limited-time offers with expiring discount codes | |
| Channel Strategy | Potential campaign activity mapped against channels
- Email welcome series for new subscribers: Introduce brand and share exclusive discounts and deals - Social media posts encouraging new subscribers and exclusive deals - Paid campaign to encourage new sign-ups on landing page |
- Email promo series: new flash discounts and expiring deals to create FOMO - Blog promotion curating the best deals on site | |
| Frequency & Timing | Set frequency based on audience engagement and available resource
- Frequency: 2-3 emails per week during the Christmas season, 5 social posts per week |
| - Timing: schedule based on optimal send times. Social posts between 11am-3pm Mon-Fri | |
| Design Elements | Establish visual elements important to your campaign
- Branded templates with seasonal colours |
| - Strong, prominent CTAs (e.g., "Shop Now," "View Deals") | |
| - Mobile-first design to capture mobile users | |
| Channels & Tools | What channels and tools will you use?
- Email service provider (ESP): Salesforce Marketing Cloud |
| - Social media management tool: Hootsuite | |
| - Analytics tools: Google Analytics and Salesforce Marketing Cloud | |
| KPIs | Which KPIs are tied to your goals?
- Open rate: Target 35% – see our guide to average open rates to see why you need to set this yourself. |
| - Conversion rate: Target 5% | |
| - Revenue Increase: 20% over last year's Christmas’ sales | |
| Timeline | Plan the timeline for your campaign, keeping your SMART goals in mind and being realistic about timeframes
- Pre-Launch: October - Set up campaigns, finalize designs, segment lists |
| - Launch: Early November - Begin email series | |
| - Campaign End: Late December - Final holiday sale reminders |
Step 6: Review & refine
When a campaign finishes, you’ll have your planning document to refer back to. Review metrics against KPIs and summarise overall campaign performance in a report. Make sure you don’t get stuck on the numbers – adding some human commentary about what did and didn’t work will help add a layer of value that is often missed by stats alone.
By comparing these post-campaign insights against your plan, you can begin to spot areas for improvement, which you can implement as soon as you start planning your next campaign.
Plan email marketing campaign success with Jarrang
With everything we’ve covered in this guide, we hope you can see the value of planning for your marketing campaigns. Considering the high ROI offered by email, going without a plan means you’ll only ever achieve sporadic success and often waste time and resources.
Revitalise your efforts by building your own marketing communication plan – or borrow Jarrang’s expertise and we’ll plan, design and deploy email marketing campaigns that drive lasting revenue for your business.
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