Even though email marketing has been around for decades, most entrepreneurs and marketers still struggle with creating an effective email marketing plan for their business.

We recommend first looking at the big picture of email marketing in your business - what are the key things you are going to accomplish with email marketing in the next 12 months?

For most businesses, the most effective email marketing strategy is a combination of evergreen campaigns and live launches.

For example, Amy Porterfield recently shared in an interview that her email marketing strategy is a mix of evergreen campaigns (for steady, consistent growth) and 2-3 launches throughout the year.

Practically speaking, we recommend setting a goal of running one live launch every three months, and then having at least one evergreen campaign running in the background the rest of the time.

You can create live (fixed-date) launches and evergreen campaigns with Deadline Funnel:

You can also set up rules in your email marketing platform so that subscribers going through an evergreen campaign don’t receive live launch emails simultaneously.

Once you’ve identified your marketing strategy for the year, the next step is to outline the components that you will use in each of your evergreen and live campaigns.

The good news is that the basic structure of your campaigns will always be the same - regardless of whether it’s evergreen or a live launch:

The main elements of a successful campaign are:

There are hundreds of different variations on this, but these elements should almost always be present in every marketing campaign that you create.

When you first get started with email marketing, usually you will want to create one core offer that you present to everyone who subscribes to your email list.

As your audience and business grows, you can create multiple offers, and start segmenting your email list to present specific specific offers to parts of your list based on what is highly relevant for them.

Deadline Funnel has built-in support for segmentation based on when someone clicks a link in your emails, when a tag is applied to a subscriber when they subscribe to your list, when they’re added to a group, and more.

It’s really important to understand that "offers" are not the same as "products."

You can re-use the same product in multiple offers, and adjust these elements to create unique offers:

One easy way to add multiple offers to your evergreen marketing is to convert your live launch to an evergreen campaign after the launch is complete.

So if you start with one evergreen campaign, and then do 3-4 live launches over the next 12 months, by the end of the year you will have 4-5 different offers can be running as evergreen campaigns in the background.