Unfortunately, though, most of us plan for one or two of them.

As we enter that time of the year where planning swallows your calendar (especially around our emails - not just you DTC guys). The damn calendar.

Call it what you will, but any good sender has one. Or it’s nicknamed a content roadmap or sending schedule or heck, your map of the iron tangle.

But this email isn’t about that. We’re mentioning it because it’s often the thing we follow and work on most closely; however, there’s a fair portion of emails folks receive from you DON’T actually appear on that calendar/ plan…

Forget the campaigns for a second. Think about the workshop booking confirmation, those purchase confirmations, all those password resets. Extend that thinking further to those welcome emails and customer journeys. And go as far as the reply you sent someone back in March when they fired a question your way.

Those emails do a fair bit, and they're usually the first ones a reader notices when something goes wrong (yep, even those).

Yet "email strategy" tends to mean one thing: that campaign calendar.

Sends, subject lines, schedules, segments (give me something else with an “s” here, brain). That's a real part of it (and the fun one to plan, depending on how you go about it).

But it's one “job” out of several, and each job has a different purpose, a different reader mindset and, often (depending on your setup), a different owner.

Let’s give those a name to illustrate the point.

Email is email is email, you might be thinking. Yes, technically, they’re all the same thing. In practice and application, though, they’re all something completely different.

The idea here is to give these a name or a “bucket” because each on requires a unique approach (yep, even if they’re connected to the same darn thing).

Ideally, the way we want you to think about this is to approach looking at these with the same three questions in mind:

Job One: Newsletters (the relationship job)

The role of most newsletters is to provide the reader with a perspective (worth reading) and a reason to keep showing up. You want attention and trust over time, with revenue following rather than leading.

The “hat” we’re wearing here is that of the editor. So often, though, the trap is judging it like a sales channel (it's the job behind the word we poked at in Vol. 77, "relationship").

It’s important to think about it this way because as much as you can “sell” in a newsletter, if the aim is purely sales or marketing, then that’s the hat we need to have on when planning our approach, goals, intention and outcomes.

Job Two: Marketing/ Sales emails (the ask job)

This is often where confusion comes in because the thinking of “my newsletter sells/ markets something” isn’t necessarily true…

Before you hang us up on the pyre and light those torches, hear us out.

Sales and marketing emails have the sole intention of putting an offer relevant to the audience in front of them, with the action/ intention geared around exactly that: Take the offer.

The hat is the merchant's, and the trap is sending the ask to everyone because the calendar says “promotion/ launch/ day-of-the-retail-gods”.

There’s a place to sell or market in a newsletter (heck, we sprinkle this in), but the plan is built around intention. And if you’re not intentional in the strategy, the hope-and-prayer that your newsletter’s simply going to “sell” is a little misguided.

Job Three: Automated emails and journeys (the right-moment job)

Then come those automated journeys. Again, often highly confused with transactional emails (we’re getting there), where a reader gets the right message at the right moment, without having to necessarily ask.

You should know these well. Those welcome emails and onboarding flows and the retention stuff that runs while you sleep.

In strategising these, you’re putting on the lifecycle planner's hat, and it's the one most often left unowned once built (that welcome sequence from 2023 is still running, isn't it? 🙃).

We covered why the welcome matters most back in Vol. 66, but for all you newsletter senders, it doesn’t stop there. The lifecycle/ DTC/ SaaS guys build their businesses on these, but they’re so underutilised in newsletters where, honestly, they’ve got such insane potential.

The question, though, is whether you have the right hat on when thinking about these.

Job Four: Transactional emails (the trust/action job)

Again, do practically anything on the interweb, and there’s an email with an OTP, or link or receipt or shipping update or message from some AI deity commanding you to do the thing.

The goal for these is, most often, confirmation and reassurance. You want trust, fewer support tickets and delivery that (hopefully) never fails. So, in order to nail that, the hat is the operator's, which in a team often belongs to a developer rather than anyone in marketing, so the trap is treating it as somebody else's problem.

And even for you solo senders…the system says “confirmation sent”, but have you checked that (like, what it looks like and works and stuff)?

When it shares a sending domain with your newsletters, automated emails or marketing, what happens to one can follow the other (and yes, promo content stuffed into a receipt changes what that email is…so approach carefully).

If this fails, it’s often unseen stuff that impacts everything else in a rather dramatic fashion.

Job Five: 1:1 emails (the human job)

The one we send most, but think about least…yes, the ones we spend our lives fighting towards inbox zero for. People talking to other people (and no, copy-paste GPT replies don’t count; we said it). Sales follow-ups, support, partnerships and, yes, cold email (shiver, for another day) all sit here.

You want a conversation or a solved problem. The hat is yours personally, and it's the one with the least process behind it.

We let this environment often slide in our planning when, honestly, it’s one that’s got the biggest impact on the future value of relationships. We could even throw in internal comms here, to some extent, but you get the drift.

It’s also, and often, different infrastructure from the rest of these emails, and it slips through our planning when it’s the one that ties it all together….

Yes, these overlap.

One welcome journey can carry marketing, newsletter-style content and a transactional confirmation all at once. That's fine, folks. What we’re banging on about here is knowing which hat you’re wearing when approaching these.

If you're on a team, these five jobs probably belong to different people, working in different tools and chasing (mostly) different numbers.

Marketing wants the campaign out. Product wants the reset link there instantly. Sales wants the follow-up to sound like a human wrote it (because you guys are all using AI, be honest).

The trap we all fall into is approaching these all with the wrong hat on. Strategically, yes, they’re interconnected, but they all play a pivotal, individual role in your email success. And because they’re all likely leaning on the same sender reputation, getting one wrong is a broken link in the chain across the board...

We get it - The calendar is the aspect that often screams loudest because Q4 is here and ya’ll gotta send them all. But if that chain is broken somewhere, you’ve got a problem.

The fix looks the same for these all: name the hat before you open the platform. Are you the editor, the merchant, the lifecycle planner, the operator, or the person in this inbox?

That's the glue, by the way. The same reader, same address, often the same sending reputation, holding all five together. It’ll only hold when each job is done properly.

And if it’s got no one “owning” it, wearing the right hat…yeah, you know what happens next.

Pick the one job in your world that nobody has properly planned. Who owns it (or which hat should)? What does the reader actually get from it, and what do you want from it?

It might be tough to figure out, and that’s okay. Start there, but also remember, this is a community for a reason, and we’re here to help.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes, that's what we're here for. Choose the part of your email environment you feel needs the most work (the environment itself, rather than one campaign), fire over the email or journey you've been meaning to look at, and, honestly, we'll gladly run a free session on it with you.

Tell us which hat to put on to help you.

Now, go forth and give every job an owner, each with their own nifty hat 🤠

What have we found to expand your email knowledge today?

Here are a few of our favourite links from across the email and business world, carefully curated just for you:

Find of the week ⭐

Verifying your list before a big send is one of those jobs we all know we should do…but we all put it off because sometimes it’s a bit of effort, isn’t it? The typical export, upload, wait and re-import shuffle.

That’s why the brilliant team at Bouncer's new MCP server caught our eye (we all love a good MCP). It plugs Bouncer into Claude, ChatGPT or another compatible AI assistant, essentially helping verify emails without leaving the chat.

We tested this and, man, what a time-hack! Paste in an address and ask if it's safe to send to, or upload a CSV and ask who should get booted before the campaign. The assistant sends the addresses to Bouncer and brings the results back, ready for your next question.

And it's the same verification engine as their app and API, on any existing credits (with no extra fee for the connector). And because sending to a clean list is something we preach almost every week, that whole process just got a lot smoother.

Oh, and let’s not forget Q4 is on the way; a cleaner list is always a good place to start your big sending prep 😉

Check out that MCP here.

We're also constantly on the lookout for new resources, news, tools and links, so hit us up if you've got something valuable to feature!

Speaking of hats today…🧙‍♂️

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