Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed with your email marketing strategy? Are you ready to get ahead on your deliverables? By creating and maintaining an email marketing calendar, you can:
- ensure consistency with your merchandising plans,
- establish a holistic marketing approach across various streams,
- hold yourself accountable,
- and maintain organization.
What is an email marketing calendar?
An email marketing campaign calendar shows the campaign, their associated dates, and the topics of the campaign that you plan to send to your subscribers each month. It can be created visually in a calendar format or can be created in a list view on Google Sheets or Excel. We recommend calling out the following elements for each campaign:
- Date
- Send time
- Campaign topic or type of campaign
Remember, this calendar is meant to provide clarity into the amount of emails, timing of campaigns, and what content will be included.
Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of having an email marketing campaign calendar.
Consistency with merchandising plans
Ideally, your company has merchandising plans and goals laid out in a document of its own. If not, start there. It helps to have established promotional periods, holiday callouts, and other important dates for your company to refer back to. These are the first dates that you want added to your email marketing calendar.
When looking at upcoming promotional periods, you want to define how many emails and potential send times would make the most sense. The length of a promotional period should guide your decision here.
What holidays make sense for your company to push content? Be careful here, and remember to keep the content consistent with your brand. If you are a brand that sells only men’s athletic wear, it would likely not make much sense to send out a campaign for “International Women’s Day”. Take your time and make sure that your campaign’s content is relatable to the holiday and its messaging.
Multi-channel content across marketing streams
After establishing email campaigns based around timely content like promotional periods and holidays, dive deeper into your other marketing channels. Look at the upcoming content for blogs and social media. How can you utilize similar themes and topics into an email campaign? Maybe your social media is planning to push one collection for an entire month. Add an additional layer and create campaigns pushing the same collection. We are not recommending that you copy and paste your social media account, but rather, use that content as a guide into what your campaigns can feature. This develops consistency for your company in its email marketing strategy plans and allows the opportunity to drive more revenue.
Accountability
By creating an email marketing campaign calendar, you are able to set due dates and goals for when you want to push out emails. This will establish accountability for your email team and help create a realistic timeline on developing email campaigns. It will also help your team get ahead on content and the copy that is needed. Once you have set deadlines, and established a timeline for meeting those deadlines, you can optimize your email marketing process and procedures. It will make the approval process easier as well. The goal here is to set yourself and your team up for success.
Organization
Now that you have established an efficient email marketing process based on your newly set deadlines for emails within your email marketing campaign calendar, you are able to open yourself and your team up to implementing other email marketing efforts. The organization that your email marketing calendar provides allows you and your team to put in place time for flows and automations, additional segmentations, and furthering your email marketing strategy.
Bottom Line
This organization is beneficial for the team that works on your emails, but is also designed to be easily digestible for Directors and other marketing teams. Anyone who looks at the email marketing calendar document will be able to see what campaigns are being created, when they will be sent to subscribers, what topic or type of content it will push, and if it is associated with a promotional period or a holiday. From there, your team is able to hold each other accountable to deadlines. Be sure to always look back at how your emails can push content that supports other marketing streams and the merchandising plans.
Looking for a way to partner with an agency to further your company’s email marketing strategy? Drop us a message below or have a conversation with our Sales team about how we can best help to achieve the results you expect on your email marketing goals and objectives.
