Holiday Email Marketing Crunch
Project Overview
One of the agencies I had done freelancing work for had a huge issue in early November 2018. Two of their employees quit suddenly—a copywriter AND a project manager—right as they were hitting their Black Friday crunch. With 18 clients in need of Black Friday email flows, landing pages, ad copy, and more, this was the worst possible time for them to leave. While we’d been working together for a while, this was the first time they put out an urgent call for me.
I told them I would take over the dropped accounts (7 in total) for the month to make sure their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales went out. It was a tremendous haul—an additional 34 hours in a week ON TOP of my day job, but I was determined to help them out.
1. Creating Content Plans
The first thing issue was that the account manager had left WITHOUT creating a schedules and outline for their Black Friday sales. The plans were half-finished at best, with lots of them containing offers that didn’t make sense (80% off everything!) or had a sending schedule that didn’t match customer buying habits. I worked with the CEO of the agency to smooth out the plans for each of the 7 companies, streamlining them as much as possible in order to make them doable in a tight timeframe AND more likely to sell.
Within 3 days, we’d created the outline of the sales for each company, along with what members of the team would be involved in creating each portion of it.
Now it was time to WRITE.
2. Creating Copy (LOTS OF COPY)
The full scope of the work meant that I had to write copy for over 65 emails within a week. This was one of the harder writing assignments I’ve ever had, both from how fast it all needed to be turned around, but also because of they each were for different companies, which meant I had to juggle voice guidelines, offers, and brand tips for all 7 of them. It required lots and lots of close editing to make sure I wasn’t accidentally slipping phrasing or material that was part of another brand. In the end, I managed to get them done, and into the next phase.
3. Shepherding Emails Through Pipeline
By offering to help out as the temporary account manager, I also became in charge of getting the emails through production. After I completed the copy I would have to turn it over to design to create a banner image based on what I wrote. The goal was to have an image that clearly explains the purpose of the email immediately in case they don’t scroll to any of the text. This involved a good amount of back and forth, giving feedback on designs and item placement, and dealing with last minute changes brought on by companies themselves. After that, they were sent to tech to be built in Klaviyo, where we’d QA each set to make sure their were no typos, links were firing, etc. This also consumed a large part of my time, and was possibly the most grueling portion of the work (and yet, the most important).
In the end, we got them tech’d, scheduled and sent through. Here’s a small clip of some of the emails that had to be created.
