Do you batch your emails? Can batching improve your email marketing? Does it make the process any easier or quicker? And does it help with your ideas and motivation?

These are some of the questions we answer in this podcast episode and blog post. Are you ready to find out how batching can help you elevate your email marketing skills and made your job much easier?

Let's go!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab Click Tricks.  
(3:35) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?
(5:19) How batching helps with motivation.
(7:37) How batching helps with inspiration.
(10:47) How batching helps you tap into your creativity. 
(12:35) How batching allows to subconsciously write your ideas as you go. 
(15:14) Why you should have a batching framework. 
(17:23) How batching allows you to create a ‘strategic narrative’. 
(19:01) Join our live class ‘Batch It Crazy’.
(20:25) Subject line of the week. 

Want to get more sales from your email marketing?

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That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here. 

What is batching? 

Batching means gathering lots of ideas for your emails in one go to make the process of writing emails quicker and easier.

Batching works in many ways. And one of these ways is that it gives you the ability to get your email marketing done when you feel motivated to do it.

You're probably familiar with the feeling you get when you're in a meeting with someone and ideas flow easily all over the place – you're productive and efficient. The same happens with your email marketing when you start batching your email ideas. You get this feeling of motivation to go and write more.

That's why we plot out ideas for our podcast episodes in one go and then record them in batches – it gives us the motivation to find new ideas all the time. 

Batching helps with motivation

People tell us all the time they don't send emails to their list because they can't get motivated. But we think that’s a big myth. You can’t simply wait to start with your email marketing until you wake up one day and feel motivated – that's not how it works. Sure, sometimes you naturally get up and feel ready to go. But most of the time it’s not like that.

What you have to do instead is to force yourself to get moving. Because once you’ve started, it becomes a lot easier to carry on. If you can get yourself to do one little thing to get started, everything else will feel a lot easier. It's like getting your kit ready the night beore if you're going to head out for the gym first thing in the morning. When everything's ready, it's easy to get moving straight away. And once you're moving, you'll find it easier to get going (and will be able to do a lot of work at the back of that). 

Batching helps with inspiration

Another thing that holds people back from sending emails is the thought that they don't have any ideas. And sure enough, if you open your email platform and stare at the blank screen, you will struggle to come up with ideas! You'll feel you have no inspiration. And that's because there's no starting block – nothing to get you going.

What you need to help you get started is a cheat code (more on that in a minute). On those days when you have no ideas at all, that's going to unlock something in your brain and help you go back to the ideas you’ve already had.

It's that same principle that getting started with anything is always hard, especially if the thing is stationary and not moving. If you’ve ever had to push a car that’s broken down at the side of the road, you’ll know how hard it is to get it going initially. But once the wheels are turning, and the car is in motion, it gets easier. A lot more effort is required to get it moving to start with than it is to keep it moving.

And it's the same with our brains. Once we get our brain moving (and not looking at a blank screen anymore), it’s a lot easier to get going. This is why we use the batching method – to have things already in motion.

Batching vs writing emails every day

When you don't batch and, instead, opt to write your emails in the morning when you wake up, it's easy to put things off. And when you eventually get to doing it, the process will be slower. You might make mistakes and send an email about something you've already emailed about, for example.

Plus, finding the idea for an email every single day is slow, hard, and it’s not particularly fun – even if it’s something you enjoy. And that's because finding the seed to plant is quite difficult.

Batching helps you tap into your creativity 

Another benefit of batching is that it helps you tap into your creativity. We all have days when we feel creative and have plenty of ideas to write about. But equally you’ll also have days when you’re not feeling the task – you can't come up with any ideas for emails and don’t want to write anything.

But if you’ve batch-created the concepts, ideas, and starting points for your emails (and you did that when you were in a great mood and a state of high motivation), it means you captured those ideas when you were in a place of creativity and inspiration. And by the time you sit down to expand on them, you’ve done most of the thinking. You’re done with the cognitive load. You've burnt the necessary mental calories you needed to come up with the ideas. And that’s normally the thing that’s stopping most of us from getting started with emails.

So once that’s done, all you have to do is open up a spreadsheet or document where you’ve saved all your ideas (the cheat code we're talking about), pick one, and write about it.

Thinking and writing are two different skills

The key is not to do the thinking and writing at the same time. Because they are two different skills! Ask any fiction author, and they’ll tell you they do the planning, research, and mapping out of the characters first. And then they do the writing. Because you’re using two different parts of your brain that work in different ways.

If you continuously switch between the two, you increase the cognitive load and resistance. It’s a bit like trying to push a stationary car with the handbrake on. You can’t do that. You have to take the handbrake off first and get things spinning.

And your batching document or cheat code helps you do exactly that. If you’re not in the mood today, that’s okay because you have a list of ideas that you collected when you were in the mood.

Batching allows you to subconsciously write your ideas as you go

Another advantage of batching is that you can do this idea generation piece anywhere you want. You don't have to be sat at your desk staring at your computer screen. You can do it on your phone while you're on the train or while you’re in the garden sunning yourself.

The more ideas you have, the more ideas you’ll come up with. For example, we've already decided on the ideas for all the emails we’re going to write over the next few weeks. At any given time, we have a long list of them, which means we never have to stop to think about them. We get to the laptop, pick one relatively random, and write the email. And when you start doing this, you’ll go about your day and subconsciously write your emails as you go.

That happens because our subconscious minds are always worrying, taking on things, and thinking about stuff. So once you have those ideas down, your brain subconsciously starts to figure out what lesson or offer could go with that idea or how you’re going to use a particular story in an email you want to write.

Obviously this doesn’t mean you actually write the emails as you walk around. But by the time you sit at the computer, a lot of the subconscious processing of those ideas has already happened. So when you sit down to write, it makes everything easier and quicker, and you’ll feel like you’re in a state of flow.

Batching doesn’t mean writing all your emails at once

Does batching mean you have to sit down and write a week’s worth of emails at once? No!

But sometimes you’ll have to come up with a whole series of emails for a campaign, and batching will make that process a lot faster. For us, batching is around creating the concepts and the starting points first, so your ideas never dry up. But it's not about writing lots and lots of emails in one go if that's not what you want to do. 

Why you should have a batching framework

Also, batching allows you to come up with a process which means you don't end up writing a lot of the same thing. You want to avoid constantly talking about the same thing from the same angle. And because our brains work in patterns, that’s easily done.

But you don’t want to send out emails that are very similar. Because if you do, you miss out on striking different chords for different people. Your emails need to come from different angles to evoke different emotions. If you don’t do that, you might end with ‘spammy’ content that doesn’t get much engagement or clicks and sales.

What you want instead is a framework that helps you create a broad range of topics that approach topics from different angles to create a three-dimensional version of you, rather than a series of one-dimensional emails where the stories are all the same. If you use the same angle again and again, it won’t appeal to 100% of your audience. But when you have different angles and starting points, then you have a much better chance of generating and peaking interest, of getting people excited, and getting them to take action at the back of the emails you’re sending.

Batching allows you to create a ‘strategic narrative’

What you want to create with batching is a map of things that take your subscribers from one place to another with what we call a strategic narrative.

We noticed that a lot of people's emails (and especially the daily ones) end up pointing in different directions every single time (this could be different offers or products). But batching allows you to shortcut and simplify that process so you end up with a series of emails that point people in the same direction. You want to build up the story, the case, and the benefits around the awareness of the thing you’re talking about.

And if you batch the ideas in advance, you’re able to plan the narrative and make sure that all of the stories you're telling are supporting a particular point and leading people down a specific path. You want your emails to lead your audience to the direction and destination you want – rather than distracting and confusing them because every email you send points to different directions.

If your emails take your subscribers off the path you want them to be on, they’ll end up in the wrong field in the middle of nowhere – not really knowing what to do or where to go next. Instead, you want to lead them to your door so they can come in and buy from you!

Join our live class ‘Batch It Crazy'

If this sounds interesting, we’re hosting a live class called ‘Batch It Crazy’, where we’re going to share our batching stratgies in a lot more detail and talk about how you can come up with ideas for your emails.

We’re going to give you our entire system with all the prompts you need to make this process easy so you can generate email ideas that give you variety and take your subscribers on a journey. In the live class, we’ll share all the resources you need to do batching right and in the quickest time possible, including the spreadsheet we use that helps us think about things in different ways and angles.

If you’d like to join us for that live class, here’s the link, and you’ll find all the details to register.

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line of the week is a nice double entendre from Kennedy (because double entendres are just his style). And it’s “Why be a juicy pear?”

The email was about how you need to stand out. And if you do, you can’t be a needle in a haystack where all the needles are identical. What you want instead is to make sure that what you offer is a juicy and attractive thing. Like a pear. Hence why you want to be a juicy pear in the stack of needles. Because you'll stand out, and people will be able to spot you very easily.

The word ‘pear' here came to Kennedy’s mind when he used the word ‘juicy’ in his email. And that’s how the subject line came about – it’s not too obvious, and it doesn’t really make sense, which is exactly why it worked so well! Also, it’s not a simple question – it’s an obscure question that makes people curious about its meaning. And it’s that sort of absurdity that makes a subject line interesting and gets the email open. Amazing stuff, right? 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Write Emails Like A Boss – Even If You Think You’re A Crap Writer. 

What should I talk about in my emails? Email marketing content ideas you’ll use.

Writing email every day vs batch writing in one go.

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