Is your email strategy is a week-to-week collection of offers, interspersed with some content? Or a soup of weekly content with little correlation? You’ll probably find that your open rate is massively variable or just really low (Eloqua has some great details on average industry open rates). More importantly you won’t be able to respond, because figuring out what your users are actually responding to is difficult.
There’s plenty of articles about creating interesting and meaningful content, not to mention how and why it helps, but creating links and themes between your email content is just as important.
For my email campaigns I create monthly themes (for about 3 months), and then chalk out weekly content ideas. I try to get each idea to sojourn into the next, and have some linkage to past content (for reinforcement). Ideally speaking they’ll have some connection to real world activities that we’re conducting. This sounds tedious but doesn’t actually take very long.
If you’ve got decent email software (and aren’t sending everything by bcc), you’ll quickly be able to get an idea as to what content is working and what isn’t. Trends will be easier to spot because you’ll have more than one reference point for a topic.
If you’ve got fancy Hubspot-esque software that does user-profile building, then creating theme’s is going to be even more advantageous. As your theme’s will help you create more realistic pictures about your visitors than just a single “I-read-this-article” reference point would.
Of course if you know what your users interests are, selling to them becomes easier – but you didn’t need me to tell you that did you? What strategies are you using when planning out your content?