Consistency and well-timed emails can take your email marketing to the next level.
Pre-planning your email sequence, newsletters, sale triggering emails, and other powerful emails within your marketing arsenal can ensure that your subscribers take the right actions.
This leads us to the crucial question: how to ensure this consistent and strategically organized email marketing strategy? The answer lies in the email marketing calendar.
An email marketing calendar will provide you with an overview of your email marketing plans, pre-plan email content, and remind you and your team of your email marketing strategy.
With all the email ideas lying there in front of you, you can dedicate yourself to personalizing the emails and getting them ready for your subscribers before the due date.
Without further ado, we present to you an email marketing calendar template as well as some useful tips for keeping your emails organized and scheduled.
Email Marketing Calendar Template Structure
With the help of the following email template, you can craft an email marketing calendar for planning and working in advance on your email campaigns.
Email campaign setup information
First of all you will need to fill that information about your email marketing campaigns in your email plan:
- Email date sent.
- Email campaign name, for example, Weekly newsletter.
- Team member, which responsible for that email campaign.
- Status: scheduled, sent, draft.
- Type of email: newsletter, promotional, partnership, feedback, announcement.
- Subject lines of your primary email and follow-ups.
- Subscribers group or segment to whom was emailed.
Email campaigns performance tracking
After you done and sent your email campaign, you have to fill information about email campaign performance in your email calendar. Here are indicators, which you should focus on:
- Amount of emails sent with this email campaign (included follow-ups).
- Email campaign deliverability rate.
- Email campaign open rate (recommended to separate follow-up emails from primary email).
- Unique clicks (%).
- Unsubscribe rate of your campaign.
A/B testing results
- Open rate results of your first email.
- Unique clicks (%).
- Open rate results of your follow-up email.
- Unique clicks (%) of your follow-up email.
- A/B testing insights and result description,
You can add results of 2nd, 3rd and more follow-ups you sent.
Email Campaign Sequence Example
Here is one of email campaign sequence examples, which you have to include to your email marketing calendar:
- Email 1 (for event invitations) – 3 months before the event – Save the date email.
- Email 2 – 2 weeks before the event, sale, or other – Announce the sale or share event details.
- Email 3 – 1 week before the event, sale, or other – Follow-up with a reminder or send a “last chance to register for the event” email.
- Email 4 – 1 day before the sale, or other – Send the last chance reminder
- Email 5 – At the time of the event, sale, or other – Remind that the event/sale is happening right now
- Email 6 – 1 day before the event or sale ends – Send the last chance reminder
Basing your email calendar on this template will ensure that you timely inform the subscriber of any sale or event, remind them of it without being overwhelming, and evoke that sense of urgency that will trigger their shopping desires.
You can adjust the template to the type of email. However, this template can be your foundation for adding that consistency to your email marketing.
Considering that the average worker spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails, timing your brand emails and finding the balance in their frequency is the key to winning over new customers.
Email Marketing Calendar Tips for Achieve Successful Results
To maximize the potential of the email marketing calendar, you should know how to make the most of it. These tips aim to give you guidance and crucial advice for keeping your email campaigns organized.
1. Do your research to know subscribers preferences
Before you start writing down your email plans in the calendar, find out your subscribers’ preferences. If you haven’t already sent out a survey on the desired email frequency, now is the time to do it. Here’s a simple survey invitation email from UpWork to give you a sense of how you can do it:
You are an important part of our community, and we want to support your success in every way we can.
Research is a given for effective email marketing campaigns. You want to plan your emails and create your calendar based on data, not assumptions.
Diana Adjadj, Digital marketer
Based on the result, you can plan your email without a worry that you’ll bore your subscribers. Segment the subscriber list based on their expressed frequency and enlist in your calendar when you need to send emails to which group. For example, add in the calendar: send educational email to group 1. Don’t hesitate to write down all the details.
2. Know your email marketing goals & KPIs
Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.
Tony Robbins
What do you want to achieve with a specific email outreach?
Do you want to inform the subscribers of an event to boost their interest or build up the sale anticipation?
Knowing what you want to achieve will help you assess how you should adapt the email marketing calendar template to that goal.
Different campaigns with different goals demand different email frequency. If the goal is unknown, you won’t be able to properly time your email sequence.
3. Use an email scheduling tool
The beauty of an email marketing calendar is that you know in advance what type of content you need to send at what time. Thus, you are opening the doors to embracing an email scheduling tool.
The moment you finalize an email, you can schedule it and unburden your mind. The calendar can help you keep track of all scheduled emails. Therefore, as soon as you personalize the basic email, you can schedule it and move on.
In Sender tool, after you have done create email design, you just need to click on “Schedule to send” button:
After click you will see a calendar, where you can select the date and timing to schedule your email campaign:
4. Start early planning to identify seasonal events
It’s never too early to start planning. The sooner you put your email calendar in motion, the better. Adding seasonal events and already known brand events and sales (for example, Black Friday sale), you can start sending the announcement emails and reminders timely. For example:
5. Schedule informative emails to keep the conversation going
Aside from holiday-themed emails, special events emails, and promotional emails, plan and schedule informative emails. You should keep the conversation alive, even when there is no precise reason.
The calendar will help you notice the gaps in your emailing schedule. Fill the void with informative, educational, or entertaining emails.
Here’s how Framebridge, a company that sells art frames and other related accessories, does it:
Sending informative, educational, how-to, or tutorial emails related to your products can boost your customers’ interest in your brand. You can also use your calendar to review upcoming sales and tie your informative emails to that event. For example, if you have a sale on hiking shoes coming up, you can send an email on the health benefits of hiking before the sale.
Final Thoughts: Streamline and Organize Your Email Marketing with Calendar
With the help of an email marketing calendar, you can streamline and organize your marketing campaigns. What’s more, you’ll be able to focus more on creating engaging content as you won’t have to stress about planning. Make the most out of this email marketing calendar template, apply these tips, and put in motion let the new and improved marketing emails.
Content contributor
Nicole Garrison is a content strategist, writer, and contributor at several term paper writing service platforms, one of them – Writingjudge. She is a dedicated and experienced author who pays particular attention to quality research. Nicole consistently attends different courses, seminars, and conferences that keep her knowledge up to date. In her free time, Nicole is a passionate runner and traveler.
