Clients who are adding potentially dozens of automated email messages to their marketing program often ask, "How am I going to come up with all that extra content when I still need to move multiple broadcast messages out the door?" Good news! It's not as daunting a process if you follow a content strategy built around this five-step framework: 1. Consider what kind of relationship you have with your customer and/or where you want it to go. Is your intended recipient a lower-value frequent buyer or an infrequent shopper who racks up sizable orders? Is she a first-time site visitor who just signed up for your emails but hasn't bought yet? These different customer types require different kinds of content. Customize a standard cart-abandonment email for your different customer sets as your data dictate. Customers with a high lifetime value might receive a loyalty-points incentive or 2-for-1 offer, while a first-time buyer might receive a 10%-off offer. 2. Your email should reflect the customer's stage in the purchase process. Did your customers spend time on a specific product page without buying? Your browse-abandonment email might link to a helpful calculator, buying-tip video or helpful reviews that can move them to the next purchase stage. A cart-abandonment remarketing message might focus instead on product benefits, star ratings, alternative items -- and, potentially, an incentive or creative packaging of related products. 3. Understand how tablets and smartphones change the reading and conversion dynamic. Optimizing emails for a multiscreen world should already be a focus, but mobile-device screens can create additional challenges for your automated messages. Order and transactional messages with blocks of copy in a tiny font might not show so well on a small screen. Cross-sell offer buttons that work fine with a mouse could be a disaster with fingers. Many triggered emails incorporate multiple dynamic content blocks into their messages based on data from third-party services such as recommendation and product-review software. You might have little control over how copy and images are presented from these feeds, making mobile optimization less than ideal. Finally, some of your transactional and service-oriented messages might link to login pages, shopping carts or forms. Have you optimized these pages for mobile devices? 4. Review your existing content assets to see which you can customize for automated messages. You probably have much of the content you'll need to populate your new set of automated messages. Consider these sources: