An email strategy template is a single page that says who you email, why, how often, and who owns each programme. Without one, a company of 60 people ends up with five people sending whatever feels urgent that week, and nobody can say which emails produce booked calls. This article gives you a fill-in planning document you can complete in an afternoon, then shows how to turn each line of it into lists, tags and workflows on the levelpartner.ai platform so the plan runs itself instead of living in a shared drive.
What the template contains
The page has seven columns. Keep it to one page. If it spills onto a second, you have too many programmes for the size of your team.
- Audience: a group of contacts you can define with a rule, such as "enquired in the last 90 days, no meeting booked".
- Goal for that audience: one action you want them to take, such as booking a review call or renewing.
- Programme: the email series or broadcast that serves the goal.
- Cadence: how often that audience hears from you.
- Owner: one named person, not a department.
- Measure: the number you will check, such as meetings booked from the programme.
- Review date: when the owner looks at the measure and decides to keep, change or stop.
The audience column matters most. A strategy built on "our list" fails because your list contains prospects, clients, past clients and suppliers who want different things. Split them before you write a single email.
Here is how three rows of the template might be filled in for a hypothetical firm. Row one: audience is new enquiries with no meeting booked. Goal is a discovery call. Programme is a five-email follow-up over 14 days. Cadence is every three days. Owner is the sales lead. Measure is calls booked per 100 enquiries. Review date is the first Monday of each month. Row two: audience is clients whose engagement ends within 60 days. Goal is a renewal conversation. Programme is a three-email check-in. Owner is the account director. Row three: audience is past clients inactive for a year. Goal is a reply. Programme is a quarterly short note with one useful idea.
Before you start
You need four things in place before the template is worth filling in.
- Contacts imported into Contacts with at least a status field you trust, such as lead, client or past client.
- A sending domain authenticated in Settings, so your programmes reach the inbox.
- Agreement from the sales and delivery leads on who owns which audience.
- A rough idea of your sales cycle length, since it sets the cadence for prospect programmes.
If your contact data is messy, fix the status field first. Every row in the template depends on being able to select an audience with a rule.
How to build the template into the platform
Each row of the page becomes a saved audience, a workflow and a report. Work one row at a time.
- Write the seven columns for each row before opening the platform.
- In Contacts, click + Add smart list for each audience.
- Add a tag for each programme so you can report on it.
- In Automation, create one workflow per programme.
- Use the Contact Tag trigger with the programme's tag.
- Add Send Email and Wait steps that match the cadence column.
- Add a Goal Event that matches the goal column.
- Add an Internal Notification to the owner after the goal.
- In Dashboard, add widgets for each programme's measure.
- Book the review date as a recurring calendar entry.
When every row is built, print the page and put the workflow name next to each row. Anyone joining the marketing team can then trace a line from the plan to the automation that runs it.
Why this matters for a company with stalled revenue
When growth stops, the usual response is more campaigns. More campaigns without a plan means more unsubscribes and the same number of meetings. The template forces a harder question: which audience has a clear next step that you are not currently asking them to take?
For most firms of 10 to 250 people, the answer is one of three groups. Enquiries that went quiet, clients approaching renewal, and past clients who would buy again if reminded. All three are cheaper to convert than new leads, and all three are usually ignored because nobody owns them.
The template replaces the weekly "what should we send" meeting. Once programmes are built, the owner spends roughly 30 minutes a week reading replies and checking the measure, plus an hour at each review date. For the planning side of the calendar, see how to lay out a marketing calendar for email.
Writing goals like "build awareness" or "stay top of mind". Neither can be measured, so neither can be reviewed. If the goal column does not describe an action a contact takes, rewrite it until it does.
When not to use it
If you have fewer than a few hundred contacts and one person doing sales, the full template is overhead. Write one row, the follow-up for new enquiries, and build that. Add rows as the list grows.
It is also the wrong tool for a one-off launch. A launch has its own plan with dates and assets. Use the product launch email template instead, and add a row to the strategy only if the launch creates a lasting audience.
For worked illustrations of plans in practice, the strategy examples for different firm types show how the rows change by industry. If you want to see how a single programme becomes a timed series, read how an email sequence is structured.
Troubleshooting
The audience list keeps growing with the wrong people
Your filter rule is too loose. Check which field it uses and whether that field is updated by a form, a person or a workflow. Rules that rely on a manual field drift as soon as someone forgets to update it.
Contacts receive emails from two programmes at once
Two audiences overlap. Decide which programme takes priority, then add a condition to the second workflow that skips contacts carrying the first programme's tag.
The measure never moves
Either the programme is not reaching the inbox or the goal is wrong. Check delivery and open data in Reporting first. If delivery is fine, the emails are asking for something the audience does not want yet.
Nobody turns up to the review
The owner column names a team instead of a person. Change it to one name and make the review a calendar appointment, not an agenda item in another meeting.
Frequently asked questions
How many rows should an email strategy template have?
Three to six for most firms with 10 to 250 staff. Fewer than three usually means an important audience is ignored. More than six and the owners cannot review them properly each month.
Should sales and marketing share one template?
Yes. Prospect follow-up and client programmes reach the same people at different stages. One page stops two teams emailing the same contact in the same week.
How often should the template change?
Review each row on its own date and rewrite the whole page once a year. Change a row when its measure stalls for two reviews in a row.
Can the platform write the emails for each programme?
The AI content tools can draft them from your brief. Someone who knows the audience should still edit every email before the workflow goes live.