Key takeaways
- An email marketing calendar prevents missed opportunities by organising outreach around past learnings, goals and key dates.
- Start by reviewing past campaigns to identify gaps and avoid repeating mistakes.
- Set realistic, measurable goals (opens, conversions, list growth) to guide calendar strategy.
- Populate the calendar with brand-specific key dates (holidays and industry events) to capture timely opportunities.
- Use the calendar to manage and adjust sending frequency with historic monthly/weekly/daily data.
- Build content from the calendar blueprint so campaigns align with timing and goals.
Introduction
There’s no worse feeling than the regret that comes with missing out on a golden opportunity thanks to a disjointed or disorganized approach. While this definitely rings true for plenty of other facets of your business process, it takes on a whole new meaning when the discussion turns toward email marketing. In a world where ever message and viewer counts, you simply can’t afford to let potential conversions slip through the cracks and fall into the hands of other brands within your industry. With this in mind, let’s dig into how an email marketing calendar can help you kick this inefficiency to the curb and just what goes into a successful take on this tool. This way, you’ll always have an eye on important events and upcoming opportunities – something that’s sure to set you apart from your competition in the inbox.
Understand Where You Started
Before you dive headfirst into the future with reckless abandon, Nikki Ilchert of the Inman news agency suggests spending a little time reflecting on the past and gleaning any potential lessons from previous inbox outreach operations. By looking back at prior campaigns and initiatives, you can gain a better understanding of just where your brand comes up short in terms of marketed messages and missed opportunities with your inbox consumers. It might not be the most pleasant experience in the world, but at least you can write off the threat of making the same mistakes twice with a calendar built with these shortcomings in mind.
Set Your Goals
Once you’re done sifting through the past and figuring out where your brand comes from in terms of email marketing success and failures, it’s time to look toward to the future and where you want to see your brand head in the coming months. After all, that’s what this calendar is made for, right? The best way to go about this is setting realistic goals and benchmarks along the way. Whether you’re factoring in open and conversion rates, or just looking to boost raw contact list numbers over the coming year, you now have the basis to accurately measure and impose attainable goals now that you’ve given the past its due and adjusted your current outlook accordingly.
Identify Key Dates
Of course, no calendar is complete without taking the time to highlight key dates related to your brand’s products and services. Armando Roggio of Practical Ecommerce points to this activity as the next step in the process. Naturally the big holidays – like Christmas, Easter, etc. – are a great place to start, but chances are there’s plenty more dates your brand can’t afford to let fly under the radar.
For instance, if you’re in the business of selling sporting goods, pinpointing the Super Bowl or the Olympics as active dates is a good call when it comes to more specific opportunities. It’s probably going to take a little time finding each and every date worthy of building email content around, but with this guide in hand, you’ll never be left wondering what’s on the agenda in terms of inbox outreach.
The Frequency Dilemma
As for the days and weeks that aren’t necessarily noteworthy on their own, having an email marketing calendar can help you hit the appropriate frequency levels. Instead of working on guesswork and supposition, you’ll have a firm understanding of just how often you’re reaching out to consumers during the average week. From here, trimming down or giving the numbers a little boost is a decision your brand can make with confidence. The best part? As your audience shifts or trends change, you’ll have historic data covering monthly, weekly, and even daily activity backing up your adjustments in response to the inevitable ebbs and flow of consumer demographics.
Develop Your Content!
After all that, there’s only one thing left to do – develop your content based around the blueprint laid out by your email marketing calendar. You’ll find that seeing beyond the imminent and having a strong plan in place does wonders not only for your peace of mind, but also for your brand’s ability to make the most out of fleeting windows of opportunity.
Whether you’re gearing up for a major holiday push, or simply capitalizing on an industry specific event, with this tool now on your side, there’s nothing stopping your organization from taking control of the inbox in a big way. Considering that this channel doesn’t show any signs of losing its top spot in terms of digital marketing prowess, that’s a hard proposition to make for any brand that’s serious about its online presence.
FAQ
Begin by reviewing past campaigns to learn where your messaging fell short. Next set realistic goals and benchmarks (for example opens, conversions or list growth). Identify key dates relevant to your products or services, decide on an appropriate sending frequency using historic activity, then develop content that maps to the calendar’s timing and goals.
Set realistic, measurable goals that reflect what you want to improve. Examples include open rates, conversion rates and raw contact-list growth. Use these benchmarks to measure progress as you execute the calendar.
Include major holidays (Christmas, Easter) and brand- or industry-specific events that create timely opportunities (e.g., sporting goods sellers might highlight the Super Bowl or the Olympics). Take time to find every date worth building email content around so you’re never unsure what’s coming up.
Use the calendar to track how often you currently reach consumers (weekly, monthly, daily). That historic data lets you trim or increase frequency with confidence as audience trends shift, rather than relying on guesswork.
Reflecting on prior outreach reveals where your brand missed opportunities or underperformed. Capture those lessons to avoid repeating mistakes and to adjust future timing, messaging and frequency when building the calendar.
Once the calendar outlines timing, dates and goals, create email content that aligns with that blueprint, whether for major holiday pushes or industry events, so your campaigns capitalise on planned windows of opportunity.
Without a calendar you risk missing timely opportunities, repeating past mistakes, inconsistent frequency and letting potential conversions fall to competitors. This is regret from disjointed or disorganised outreach.
