I’ve been around a lot of email marketing campaigns across several industries. Whether you’re looking at non-profits, think tanks, e-commerce, major consumer brands, networking groups, or blogs, there’s one thing that ties the best of the best together, and it’s purpose.

Every great email marketing plan — and notice it’s a plan or a campaign, versus a single email — has these common variables. They each have a common purpose behind their campaigns. They each invoke emotion, and that emotion is typically carried in part through the design. There’s consistency in deliverability and there’s a variety of the types of campaigns shared over time.

These factors are what creates the difference between mediocre campaigns and the best email newsletters. It always boils down to purpose. If you know what you’re walking through those doors for every morning — if you have a mission — it becomes a lot easier to walk out of them winning every day.

The best email newsletters are all unified in their mission statement. They understand that email is so different from any other content or messaging platform. Email is the spear that drives the arrow. For there to be a point, you need to know what your purpose is. This comes back to organizational awareness. You might know what product or service you’re selling, but unless you know why you matter (or what matters to you), you don’t really have a purpose.

You may be looking back and thinking this would have been easier to get right at the start of your business rather than maybe going back to the drawing board. I disagree. Once you create various different types of emails and are in the ebb and flow of your business, you sometimes come out with a much better idea of what direction you’re going in and what matters to you now. From there, it’s always easy to shift and redesign.

9 Rules for Going Back to the Drawing Board

World leading marketing analysts McKinsey & Co. developed a fantastic guideline for redesigning with purpose. According to the expert analysts that are drivers to growth and opportunity in some of the world’s most lucrative business, there are nine concrete steps to making this happen:

1. Focus on long term goals
2. Study the landscape
3. Think about the blueprint
4. Think beyond structures
5. Bring on the right people
6. Guide people to think differently
7. Set a benchmark for analytics
8. Leaders should be talking to each other, always.
9. Things won’t always go your way, so manage those risks.

Their guideline also shows that companies who follow six or more rules have a 73% improvement rate versus companies who followed just one or two rules. The latter had a 12% improvement rate. Those who followed all nine rules secured a jump in an improvement of a staggering 86%.

Your Mission Statement, Should You Choose To Accept It

To shake up your own company’s mission statement, get your team in a room and ask them to write down their answers to these questions:

1. What do they think your business does every day?
2. What would they say is your mission statement in a sentence or two?
3. What would they like to see the company doing in this regard?

You don’t want to give people more than 15 minutes to write their answers down. You want their answers to be real and not packaged for what might sound best. The same can also be done if you run an online business or content-based platform.