How to Create an Email Marketing Calendar That Makes Sending a Breeze

Email marketing calendars are valuable tools for businesses that use email as part of their marketing strategies. Like work or social life calendars, they allow you to track what’s going on over the next few months.

While regular calendars are relatively easy to use, email marketing calendars are more nuanced and detailed. Learn more about how to create a calendar for email campaigns today, or contact an FXer for further assistance!

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What is an email marketing calendar?

Calendars benefit people in any field or industry, so harnessing their power for your email marketing campaigns is crucial.

Your email marketing calendar helps keep your campaigns organized. It can include various information, ranging from the emails you send to responsible parties for different campaigns.

An email marketing calendar is not a one-and-done endeavor — you need to update it consistently to match your changing needs so everyone on your team is up-to-date on expectations.

What to include in your calendar

Creating an email marketing calendar can be simple if you know what to include. You can use Google Sheets, Excel, or various other calendar-making tools and software for email campaigns.

An excellent calendar needs to include numerous facets of your email campaigns. Examples include everything from owners to goals, send times, and email types. While email marketing calendars can vary depending on your business and industry, many common items appear on all of them.

Follow the steps below to create your campaign calendar:

1. Decide who owns each campaign

Assign owners to each campaign to streamline the process. While you could try having one team member handling all your campaigns, they could get overwhelmed. Instead, you should have multiple staffers working on different campaigns to help ease the load.

For example, have one person dedicated to product launch emails and another to promotional.

2. Choose topics

What are you trying to promote with your email campaigns? Use a section of your calendar to describe the topics your emails will address. Examples include:

• Webinars
• Product or service launches
• Recently released website content
• Upcoming events or sales

Your team can look at what they need to work on now and what’s coming up in the following weeks to prepare themselves to adjust their workloads.

3. Add goals

Once you outline your email information and campaign leaders, you should set goals. One of the most popular goal-setting strategies is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals.

Let’s break down those components more:

• Specific: For this part of the goal, you narrow down what you want to accomplish. Your goal in an email marketing campaign might be to promote a new service with a well-written email.
• Measurable: The measurable part of your goal is how you know when you have achieved it. You might say, “I will see an X percent increase in customer inquiries.”
• Attainable: You must achieve your goal with your available resources. Can you get more purchases or product demonstrations? Your goal is attainable if you believe you can do it in the allotted time.
• Relevant: For relevancy, you need to consider if your goal is related to your overall growth and goals. Set a goal that makes sense instead of something that has little to do with your current situation.
• Time-bound: You need to set a specific timeline for completing these goals. You may choose the next three months because you need time to make the campaigns, launch the product, and follow up.

Adding your goals and objectives to your email marketing calendar helps your team members have an easy reference point for tracking progress.

4. Determine the right time for sending emails

Next, you’ll want to decide the right time for sending emails. You can segment this portion of your campaign into different sections.

For example, you might find that young females on the East Coast who have smartphones are most likely to open their emails on a Thursday around 9:00 a.m. However, older people of any gender who use a laptop for email might be more likely to read your message on a Monday night.

No matter what you decide, you should include it in your email marketing calendar, so everyone knows when to send their emails.

5. Update email campaign statuses

Your campaign status — where you are in the campaign process — should also be part of your calendar. Are you still in the planning stages, or did you send the emails off?

You can label your campaigns any way you want, but find a naming convention and stick to it for all email marketing. You can choose “sent” for campaigns that have gone out to inboxes, “scheduled” for ones you know when they will go out, and more.

6. Include metrics in your calendar

Now that you have the basics on your email marketing calendar, you can add performance metrics. This information can help your team understand how well their campaigns are doing.

You should consider metrics like:

• Open rate
• Conversions
• Click-through rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Device used
• Bounces
• Revenue earned
• Lead generation

You can choose the metrics that best suit your needs for your marketing calendar. It may be a few of these or all — no matter what, pick ones that will help your team understand your email marketing performance.

Manage your email campaigns with WebFX

If you don’t have the time or resources to manage your email campaigns, let our experts handle them for you. We provide copywriting, images, strategies, analysis, and more to help you grow your business.

Contact us online or call 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist today!