A well-thought-out message map is the key to a successful multi-effort email series, and if you’re automating that series for use over the long term then it’s doubly important to get the message map right.

The message map is an outline for which key topics will appear in each of your emails. The idea is that each email should stand alone – but together they should be greater than the sum of their parts. Here’s a message map from a client project I did a few years ago:

So here are six tips to leverage when you’re planning your next multi-effort email campaign.

Some people skip this step because they believe they inherently know the features, benefits, and advantages (FBAs) of their product or service. Don’t be one of these people.

If you know them, then it’s easy to put them down on paper – and that makes it easier to share with your creative team. Also, you might find yourself fine-tuning some of the FBAs you already had in your head, or expanding into new Fs, Bs, or As you hadn’t thought of before.

Quick primer on FBAs… in my standard FBA template (feel free to steal – you’re welcome!). The description of each is in the light green shaded cell; samples of each appear in the white cells. Start at the left by entering a feature. Then write down the corresponding benefit and advantage in the same row.

Did you see what I did with the second example? There’s one feature, one benefit – and two advantages! You can totally do this. You can also have more than one benefit for each feature. You might also find that multiple features have the same or similar benefits and/or advantages.

Obviously, these examples are for two completely different products/services. For your FBA exercise, all of the features you list will have to do with your product or service. How many features should you have, you may ask? It should be easy to come up with three; I suggest you push yourself to get to at least five features, with at least one benefit and one advantage for each.

Once you have your FBAs, you can choose which to use in your message map.

You know what else can make great additions to a message map? Objections/resolutions (ORs).

Objections are reasons your prospects will give for not buying or taking whatever action you want them to take. Resolutions are how you address and hopefully overcome objections. By including these in your message map and in your email series, you can often convert people who would otherwise decline due to an objection you address.

See my template for this below, along with descriptions of each and samples.

Once again, each objection may have more than one resolution, and sometimes there’s a single resolution that addresses more than one objection.

The examples above are again for two completely different products/services. For your OR exercise, all of the objections you list will have to do with your product or service. How many objections should you have? Once again, it should be easy to come up with three; I suggest you push yourself to get to at least five objections, with at least one resolution for each.

Segmentation and targeting increases relevance. And this is even more true when you have audiences with different concerns and hot buttons.

For instance, let’s talk about the industry association membership examples above. Industry associations often have members from a wide variety of companies.

For prospects who work for enterprise-sized organizations, the $400 membership fee may be a small portion of the annual budget. These folks may not be price sensitive, and so it might not make sense to include the ‘it’s too expensive’ objection and resolution in your message map for their email series.

But maybe you are also marketing association membership to prospects who work for small businesses. Here $400 may be a larger portion of the budget, making them more price sensitive. And so it might make sense to give the ‘it’s too expensive’ objection and resolution an email all to itself, so you can fully address the objection and hopefully overcome it.

In this case, with two target audiences that have different concerns, it makes sense to create two different message maps.

Once you have your FBAs and ORs, it’s time to start building your message map. Think about which of these will best make the case for the action you want the prospect to take – then make a list. You don’t have to use all of your FBAs and ORs in every campaign.

Going back to the message map I included at the top of this email, the four benefits that we felt would most resonate with my client’s prospects were:  

• Speed: meeting accelerated timeframes and expediting the distribution of ARRA funds
• Value: making sure taxpayers get the maximum benefit from money sent through the ARRA
• Transparency: ensuring that ARRA funds are distributed in a way that is fair and reasonable
• Accountability: protecting against fraud, waste, error, and abuse in ARRA projects

You could end up with three, four, five, or more key topics – and that’s fine. There’s no perfect number of key topics for a series, although I recommend you choose at least three.   

I like to ‘bookend’ the series I create; it just makes them feel more cohesive.

What do I mean by ‘bookend?’

It’s pretty simple. I add one email to start the series, and a second email to end it.

In the first email, I introduce the series, providing a bullet-pointed list of what’s to come with brief descriptions (in fact, we used the descriptions that appear above verbatim in the first email). Then in the final email, we use the same bullet-pointed list and descriptions to close out the series.

Why do this?

I liken it to this piece of advice which you often hear about public speaking:

“Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what you told them.”

Voila! Once you have your key topics and your ‘bookends’ you’ve got the number of emails in your series!

In the case of the ARRA example, that was six.

When you do it this way, you let the amount of content you have drive the number of emails (or efforts) that you send. Which is the right way to do it.

If you pre-determine that you are doing to send twelve emails and you only really have content for six, you’ll end up watering the topics down to make them fill more emails.

And if you decide at the onset that you only have to send three emails – you’ll end up trying to ‘smoosh’ the content that should be six emails into three. Or you’ll forgo three of the key topics you need to make your case, which will likely weaken it.

I hope these tips will help make your next multi-effort email campaign more effective and more profitable. Give them a try and let me know how it goes!

Or better yet, bring me on board as a consultant to help you and your team develop and implement a kick*ss message map and a more effective and more profitable email series.

Be safe, stay well, keep warm!