Content is the most important aspect of your email strategy, but it is also the hardest. You may be pleasantly surprised to learn that the way you structure your marketing emails can really help you when planning and actually writing them up. 

At Yawn, we like to start with a skeleton template for a business’s marketing emails and to create content around that structure.

So, how do you go about structuring your marketing emails?

Refer Back To Your Overall Aim

The structure of your email may change depending on the overall aim of your emails, so make sure it is in the forefront of your mind throughout the process.

We covered this in the first blog post of this mini series, Where Do I Start with Email Marketing. 

Divide Your Content Into Categories

With our clients, we tend to use two main ‘categories’ of content – Hooks and Highlights.

Whether you will be featuring products, pushing your social media accounts, or asking for reviews, all of your content can fit into one of these two categories.

Hooks refer to the focus of your email. The aim is for this to be ‘clickable’ content that encourages people to open your email and lend it some attention.

Hooks hold pride of place at the top of your email and will be the first thing that openers read. The content may be something along the lines of a featured product collection, a company announcement, a new product launch, or a promotion.

For service-based businesses, this could be a team update or some exciting industry information.

Highlights are all other bits of content in your email aside from the primary focus, often referred to as ‘soft sells’.

This might be a second (less-important) product range you want to focus on. Maybe you’re asking people to leave a review or to follow you on social media. Either way, it’s not a showstopping piece of news and it isn’t the main thrust of your email.

Example:

If the main push for one newsletter is announcing your summer sale, then you want this to be front and centre on your email (Hook). But you’ll also want to include some other points that complement the Hook, perhaps focusing on last month’s bestsellers, pushing your socials, or a discount code (Highlights).

Create A Skeleton Template

Once you have your content types and they’re divided into categories, you can create your template. For the purpose of the skeleton structure, you could draw boxes and label each one ‘Hook’, ‘Highlight 1’, ‘Highlight 2’, etc. 

Primary content will always go at the very top of the email. Secondary will always go underneath; if you have more than one piece of secondary content, you can decide on the order of these based on their importance.

How does this structure help with content creation?

Having a clear structure that you use for all of your emails will help you to create content worth sharing. Look at your content types and write a list of primary and secondary content you want to share. 

By categorising all of your content in this way, it will help to avoid the intimidating task of content creation from scratch. Focus on your content types, create your lists, and you have a nice bank of content ready to mix and match in your emails.