Email Marketing SOP Updates for 2026

0:00I'm going to try to do my best to explain this email marketing upgrade and the reason I'm saying that is because it's kind of hard, it's visual. A lot of these things are visual, but bear with me, all right. One of the Titus SOPs, Standard Operating Procedure, one of the Titus systems that I have is our email marketing system. I recently sent an email, I recently sent a newsletter to the list to the new personal brand list that showcased my entire SOP for email marketing and it's still complicated. I think I'm going to spend 20 minutes sort of showing how it works and then walking through the process of actually creating an email very quickly, but I still think there were some missing pieces, at least in my explanation, like I had started off the email with, you know,

1:00we had earned $600,000 last year, all organic, using all organic marketing and a large portion of that was attributed to email marketing and that is true. I wouldn't say if it wasn't true. Now, I think, and rightfully so, it's like, okay, sure, but how is that even possible? Like, what's going on there? And I think there was a lot of missing pieces about, like, how are you even getting these emails and how often are you sending and all of these other things, which granted I understand, I'm going to follow up and clarify it more and more because I didn't really go through the entire SOP. I really only went through the creation process and the reason I did that is because one of my tasks in January of 2026 is to improve this SOP. Why? Well,

2:01this SOP has four steps and technically I'm just going to call it three steps. We have ideation, writing, and creation. So, coming up with the ideas to send, of emails to send, writing those emails in text, and then putting those emails into some sort of design template, scheduling them in clavio to get sent out. All right? So, the reason why I need to update this is because of all of 2025, there was only two people in this process. Staff, my wife, she, my wife, she would write the emails. She would come up with the ideas, write the emails, put them in a sauna, already scheduled, and all I had to do, which is me, I had to create the emails within clavio, schedule them, et cetera. All right? And this worked well because we had, we basically said,

3:03okay, we're going to send about four emails a week. Here are the topics that, you know, she understands the topics, I understand the templates. So, I said, okay, so for example, I'll go through this in context. For our emails, we have four different types, four different templates. We have a promo email, which is our sales email. This email is dedicated to one action, which is getting people to a single sales page for a single product. That's what we call a promo email. We don't call it a sale email because we're not running a sale, and we may not even make a sale. It's a promotion. Then we have our article emails and our video emails. These are basically kind of like promo emails, but for content. So obviously for an article email, that is, that the goal of that email is to get people to read an article on our website,

4:08a longer form article. A video email is getting people to click to go to YouTube to watch our long form videos. Now, why are we sending people to that? Well, on both our articles and our YouTube videos, there are promos there. There are, there are, we promote our products there. So, for us, they're kind of promo emails. Also, at the bottom of those emails, we include a promotional image for one of our products that relates to whatever, whatever article or video we're sending. So those emails are super helpful, right? We're giving out free information with a, with a soft pitch at the bottom, a PS and a soft pitch. Then we have our newsletter emails. Our newsletter emails contain the content. So we are again trying to be helpful. We're giving out

5:11information, but instead of somebody going to our website or to our YouTube channel, we simply include that information in the email itself. And of course, at the bottom of that email, there is a promo ad for one of our products, soft pitching. So all four types of emails promote our products in more ways than one. The promo email is the most direct. So we have days on which these emails are sent. For example, we only send one promo email a week for each audience. We have two audiences, hot tub owners and pool owners. Hot tub or pool owners get their promo emails on Thursdays. Hot tub owners get their promo emails on Fridays. And then basically Saturdays and Sundays are for videos. We have, and then kind of like sprinkling articles and newsletters throughout, depending on if we have new articles or if we

6:11have newsletter ideas or if we have new videos, like those are kind of sprinkled throughout, but they have their specific days. I don't recall them off the top of my head, but that's how it works. Now, I decided that I didn't need to be a part of this process anymore. And part of the goal of 2026 is to scale, so create more emails, but not become the bottleneck. I don't want to be the bottleneck. I want to be more higher level in the idea, in the ideation process. I'm very good at coming up with ideas, very good at design. I need to stay in my lane. But I got so detailed and good at crafting these emails that I could craft an email, meaning take the content and do a plug-in play into Clavio in about five minutes per email, like so, so fast. To the point where I was like, okay, I don't even really have to do that.

7:16There's only four different types of templates. If I just create a simple SOP, I could hand this off to someone else in my company, someone else in my team, to draft up these emails. And then all I have to do is sort of review them. And I'm trying to get to a spot where I don't even have to review them. They should just be right. Now, in November of 2025, I asked my brother, who works for the company, his name is Chris. I asked him, hey, do you want to do these emails? He said sure. Great. It's very easy. I mean, basically, within an hour on one day, he can schedule all the emails for the week. And honestly, if he wanted to do more than that, that's great. He could do more than that, because we're pretty ahead. So, once I started having him do it, that's when some issues arise, like a rose, I should say,

8:20they, the process wasn't as tight as I thought. Not still very, very tight, but I was making decisions in the creation process that he, he was making also, but just a little off. And so, normally, when this happens, I kind of revisit the SOP. Now, this is great, because I'm not the one doing any of the work. So, I get to look at it from one level above and say, okay, how do I make this process easier for both parties? So, for every, for every cog in the machine, how do I grease these wheels? So, I'm going to go through a few things that I'm going to fix. And I'm going to do that this week, and then I'm going to, I'll be sending out another email, which you've already got by now. If you're listening to this episode and you're subscribed to

9:20my newsletter, you'll already know what this is. But, this is what I'm going to do. The first thing, I'm going to pull it up here, hold on a second. All right, I'm going to, if you, if you think about a template, we have four different templates, and I'm going to try to outline this as best as I can. So, every email starts with a header. It is just a simple box that has our logo in it. If you click that logo, it takes you to our homepage. That's in every single email that lets you know the emails from us. Pretty standard. Underneath that, we have a banner. Now, not all emails require banners, mostly just promo emails, but we have a space for that. You can choose to add it or not. All right, then underneath that, if we're talking about a promo email, we have a promo image,

10:25is a square image that we create with Canva. If you were talking about a video or an article or a newsletter, we call it a hero image, and it's a little shorter. It's about the size. It's about 16 by nine in the ratio. So, 1920 by 1080. So, it's like the size of a thumbnail for YouTube. That's a hero image that is, again, for the other three types of emails. The promo email is a little bit taller. It's square. So, it's a little bit taller because there's more information that needs to be added to that image. Underneath that, we have the body copy. Now, this is where it gets tricky. Every single, I'm trying to make these as uniform as humanly possible. So, I'm trying to minimize decision making. In fact, as I'm saying it right now,

11:28I don't think we should add banners. I think banners just add a layer of complexity of decision making that no one needs to, and they barely do anything. So, I'm actually going to write that down right now because as I'm saying it, there's no need for banners. No banners. So, what I just did there in real time was reduce complexity. I just said right now, the only emails that require banners are promo emails. Well, okay, but then what goes in the banner? What's the text in the banner? And who's the one coming up with that text? And how important is it? It's not. It's not important. We're just going to mix it. We don't need it. It's stupid. It's visually just uninteresting. So, there you go. One last thing to do. This is about all making it easier. So,

12:31let's start over. Hatter, promo image. Now, if I could make all the images the same size that'd be great, but I do think the promo email needs to be a little bit bigger than the rest of them because it requires a button and it requires text, which the other three don't have. All right, so that's one difference. I'm okay with that. Then you have your body copy. Now, in the promo email, the article email, and the video email, there is a button. We have a little intro paragraph, and then we include a button. And that button takes you to the thing we want you to do. So, in the promo email, it takes you to the product page, video, it takes you to YouTube, article takes you to our website. We don't have a button for the newsletter. And so, I think that's okay. That's similar to the promo email having a different image height

13:32is that the newsletter does not require a button. Okay, fine with that. Then you have a PS statement, which is always a soft pitch for our product. Staff is the one choosing which product to promote. It's either our book or our app for the most part. And in 2026, it'll also include our course. And then there's another promo ad if it's a article, video, or a newsletter. Because instead of the promo being at the top, we put it at the bottom because it's a softer pitch, but in a promo email because of the top because it's a harder pitch. Now, underneath that, we have what's called a signature. But I'm actually going to change that to footer because it makes more sense. Now, here is something I did. It was a design choice I made.

14:35And it is causing us to duplicate our work. And that is in all of the hero images and the video images. Those images have a squiggly wavy line at the bottom, which makes it look like a wavy transition. It's again, hard to explain. But because that's at the bottom, those images cannot be added anywhere else because they're only going to work if they're above content. So in our promo images, our big, big, square images, our promo images that appear at the top have the wavy line at the bottom. In our footer promos or the promos that appear under all of the content, like in our video article and newsletter emails, the wavy line is at the top. And so you have to

15:39switch that. Somebody has to switch that because otherwise it looks stupid. And what I realized was, wait a minute, footer ads, which we call footer ads at the time and promo ads are the same thing. They're the same content. They can be used interchangeably. So if you're writing a promo email, you can include a promo image at the top. And if you're doing any of our other templates, you can include a promo image at the bottom. And that would have the same effect. The only difference is I have to remove the wavy line. No big deal. It's a stupid design choice. So I'm like, oh, let's get rid of it. Easy. Now, on top of that, I was like, when Chris was creating these promo images, he was doing all of it in Canva. And I taught him how to design

16:42and I gave him all these rules for designing. And in our SOP, there's this whole section on how to design a promo ad. And so when he would create the emails, I would be the one to review them. And I'm like, all right, I mean, they're okay. Like the designs that he made were okay. I mean, the reason we use Canvas so that like anyone on our team can just manipulate these images willy-neely instead of using something like, I don't know, Figma or Adobe Photoshop or something like that, right? Where you have to like go and find the original file and pull it up. Canva just makes it easy for teams. And honestly, it's quicker. I can make images very, very quick. But some of the images he would make, I was like, all right, you made some weird choices there. So then my solution to that was, oh, let me film him a video and teach him how to design

17:43promo ads in Canva. Let me teach him how to make these things. And I taught him. And he was like, okay, got it. Now he went in and did a few more. And I was like, and why I have that reaction is because of the not because he wasn't doing exactly what I told him to. I absolutely, he absolutely followed what I told him to do. But his choices are not designer choices. They're a guy just accomplish in the task, which is fine because he's not a designer. I am. So this became, again, I let all of these images slide. They looked, they're, they're fine, right? But, but confusing. And I know that I could do a better job. So I was talking with staff and I'm like, how do we, how do we do this? Because I don't want to have to design a new promo ad for every email we send out.

18:48And I don't think it's, I don't think it makes any sense for anybody just design new stuff all the time. I mean, we're basic. It's the same product. And we have just a handful of headlines. And then how do we know if headlines are working or if the messaging is working or if the imagery is working. And that's when we were like, well, then let's not do that. Let's just create a, a, a, let's just create our own ad set. And we just rotate through them. And it makes it easy to pick which ones to add. Now, and if you, and if you really need, if you let's say like, so in Canva at the same time, I also template it the way we design these. So it always start with you know, a nice background image, whatever that is, you know, a hero image. We have a headline, some, some small text, like a description, and a button. That was the whole thing.

19:48And so I thought that every design, anybody who came in designer or knock could just work within that, like work within that template. But like, not everyone's a copywriter, not everyone's a designer. Like, it's a special thing. And I think it requires a special, I think it requires a different department. And what I don't want is to be a cog in that machine. I think the machine would get clogged up if we were waiting for new creative all the time just to get an email scheduled. And then I thought to myself, well, do people, honestly, do people really care that they're seeing a series of six promo ads all the time? Like would they even know? Truthfully, would you even know? And you might say, yeah, I would know. Well, yeah, because we're all kind of, we're all marketers, if you're listening to the show. So we're paying attention to that kind of shit. And most people aren't. So for example, if I create six ads, six promo

20:56images, these square images that we add either at the top of a promo email or the bottom of any other email, if I created six of them or fucking eight or 10 or whatever, a collection. And I designed all of them in Canva. They all lived in one project file. And it's like, hey, here are our images. And if we ever wanted to create new ones, I can go in and create new ones. I'm probably going to do that once a year anyway, because I like designing. But we have a bunch. We have enough. And so all, so it's like, well, then how does the creator of the email pick out of the 12, which one to use? And I say, well, that's not up to the creator. Is it? It should be up to the writer. And so Steph will just have her pick. Here are the six or 12 ads that we have for this product, pick which one you want to use. It can be the same one over and over again. Who cares?

22:02I doubt anyone's going to email us back and say, Hey, I already saw that image. And it's like, okay, but did you read the rest of the email? The emails are all different. They all have different content. Even our promo emails are text based. And they have different content in them. It's not like we're creating like all image emails. They're mostly texts. And the reason we do mostly text is because it's much easier to control. And also it passes spam folders because it's text. And if it's too image heavy, it can get caught up in spam folders. So we just avoid it. And it and people not everyone sees images in their email. And so wouldn't it be nice to just have text and you can click a link. Great. So this is what we're going to do. We're going to make it easy to just have a set of ads or yeah, we're going to call them ads because that's what they are. Calling them promos is stupid. Calling them ads is correct. And then you pick one. The writer picks

23:06one. And then they can be uploaded to the card. So you don't have to decide or you can just search for it in Clavio because it's already going to be uploaded. And then you just stick it in there and use it and you're done. That's kind of it's kind of like it's easy. It just it just removes the friction. I love it. And then it's the thing is like I don't have to teach anybody anything. It's like here's here's the template, right? You're duplicating each time. You're plugging this content that we create into this template. You're you're just going in and choosing the images. You just pick them. They're already there. And you're done. You're done. There is no creating images. I love this. I love this. I wish. I wish. The one the one thing I can get the one thing that's

24:12causing a little bit of an issue is hero images and video images. They are all going to be different. They do have to look different. Do we just create a massive collection of images and leave it at that? Or do we just create one template and just show you how to do it? And I think because it's so easy, I've seen Chris do the hero images and I'm like, oh, this is fine. Like he's good at this. But the promo images that require text and buttons and all that stuff and like, you know, you're trying to make your product look the best, that one's a little tougher. Now when it comes to videos, that one's easy because I'm already at this point. I'm the one making the thumbnails. And so it's just a matter of just using the thumbnail. So that's easy enough.

25:13And honestly, ClayVio has like a video card that you can put in there that you can just import a or you can just like add a URL for a YouTube video. The problem is a lot of our videos are we like we create the email before the video gets published. And because of that, it doesn't pull in the image because it's not listed yet. So that's not going to work. But you can, I think, add your own custom image to a video piece, which makes sense, I think. Yes. And obviously with the video image, you can add a play button. So that's, yeah, that's worth it. Okay. I think I got it. And I'm going to spend, well, I don't know how long this is going to take me because I do have to like go and reformat all of the images. I do have to go and make decisions.

26:13I do have to go through ClayVio and delete every image in our library. And kind of start over again because one of the things I'm one of the yeah, one of the issues with the way that we do. So it's okay. I'm saying all this out loud. What we don't want to do is keep uploading the same promo images or the same ads. We don't want to keep uploading the ads each time to ClayVio because it just keeps creating duplicates in the system. This is not an issue in terms of like, you know, no one's going to notice this. Like it's, but it's just like creating clutter, like digital clutter within our ClayVio system. And then if we end up changing something slightly, but then somebody uses an image from our library and it's just like not good, then it's just not,

27:18this not going to work. But then also there is some issue with digital clutter in that, you know, if Chris, my brother, if he's designing an email and he goes into Canva to create the image and he doesn't name it right and he uploads it, then it like screws up the whole surge process. And so I guess the question is, is, do I? All right, that part I don't have figured out yet. That could just be a, a cleanup process. But all right, I'm not going to go too far down that rabbit hole. The big thing is the promo emails or the promo images. If I can get that sorted out, that's a huge leap forward. And if I can get staff to start just picking and choosing ads based

28:22on the name of the ad as opposed to the actual image itself, that's so much easier. Okay, love it. I'm going to work on it and report back at the end of the week via the newsletter. So again, if you are subscribed, you can go to jibbeneasy.com to subscribe. If you're subscribed, you will get an email about this already. And if you don't know, it's g-i-o-v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com. That's my website. Sign up for the newsletter and I'll see you there.