You don’t have to search too deeply on the internet to discover literally thousands or even millions of debates on the source of climate change. Whether it is generated by humanity’s polluting activities on this planet, sunspots, chemtrails, or little green munchkins in UFOs engaged in stealthy environmental terraforming, you can be sure that there will be several major natural events in 2014 which will galvanize the attention of the world. Now is the time to prepare your email marketing campaigns to have them on standby so that you can launch them quickly as these events hit!

The Elvis Memorial issue is still trading on eBay at premium prices

When I was publishing and placing on the newsstands over a hundred million magazines back in the Eighties and Nineties, we had an entire team dedicated to doing nothing other than researching and compiling content for special magazines intended to be rushed to the press when a particular “likely event” was to occur. These events would have been not only natural disasters but also the passing of elderly or ill celebrities and personalities. We were actually quite successful at determining who was going to expire and although it may seem macabre to the extreme, we did manage to sell upwards of half a million copies of some of these special issues. I have to admit that we missed forecasting Elvis’ last peanut butter and banana fried sandwich but we worked around the clock for three days straight when it did occur and got a memorial issue to press that is still being traded on eBay at premium prices.

Having prepared campaigns can help raise funds for victims quickly

Exactly the same concept can be applied to your email marketing, as having prepared campaigns ready to go at the push of a button can not only impress your customers but actually make a true difference in how your brand is able to respond to the situation, and where appropriate, raise funds to support the victims of the event. While you certainly don’t want to engage in fundraising over the death of a head of state, you can make a considerable impact in being ready to launch a major campaign to raise money from your email subscribers for the victims of the next major earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, flood, or other natural disaster.

Hundreds of thousands Great Lakes residents celebrated Christmas in the freezing dark

Just before Christmas the lucky people of the northeastern seaboard were strolling around in shirtsleeves while just a couple of hundred miles to the east of their balmy weather millions of people were being buried in two inches of solid ice, bringing entire cities to a standstill and cutting electrical service to hundreds of thousands for three days or more, right through Christmas day! The thought of turkeys rotting in non-functioning freezers while all these people celebrate Christmas by candlelight eating out of cans while shivering in frigid houses is certainly galvanizing and if you’d had an email campaign ready to drive support to these folks, your customers would appreciate your gesture.

If you have a generic hurricane campaign you can tweak for Gulf Coast or Philippines

It goes without saying that you don’t have a crystal ball and are able to divine when and how any natural disaster is going to befall the world, so you should craft that content in a way that it can be readily customized to fit the situation. If you have a generic hurricane campaign, it should be an easy task to drop in the specifics of the actual event and hit that send button. This way you can apply exactly the same content to a Saffir-Simpson Force Five Hurricane/Typhoon whether it hits the U.S. Gulf Coast or the Philippines with just a bit of tweaking.

The unfortunate truth is that the frequency and severity of natural events is accelerating so as long as you are crafting your response campaigns in advance with a firm focus on helping the victims it will never be seen as capitalizing on their misfortunes but stepping up to the plate quickly and effectively!