You might be planning your email marketing calendar wrong!

A survey reveals that organized marketers were nearly 7x or more likely to report success than others. 

So, a strategic email marketing calendar is all you need if you’re aiming for success in your email campaign. 

An efficient email marketing calendar can improve engagement and better nurture prospective buyers at the correct time to get the conversion. 

Moreover, an email calendar is the best way to organize your strategic content ideas and time schedules to deliver a personalized experience. 

Stay tuned to the blog to discover the art of building a successful email marketing calendar with 5 best practices to improve results.

What is an email marketing calendar? 

An email marketing calendar is a tool to keep your campaign strategic planning and ideas organized. It helps businesses create, manage, and schedule email marketing campaigns.

And while creating the calendar, a time frame is defined for each campaign or email, i.e., weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Building an email marketing calendar allows you to timely deliver essential emails to your subscribers to drive better results.

There should be someone in the company to update the email calendar regularly so that your marketing team can know about upcoming events and better coordinate.

It helps you keep everything clean and overcome deadline issues to meet your client’s expectations within a set time.

How to plan your email marketing calendar in 6 simple steps

The simplest way to create an email calendar is using Google Sheets or Excel Spreadsheet when you initiate a plan for making the calendar, see the example below:

Let’s dive into building an organized email marketing calendar step-by-step.

Step 1: Check if your goals are SMART. 

You must know the goals you need from your email marketing campaign to fulfill, be it product awareness or outreach campaigns. These goals help you determine the purpose of sending any email in the first place. 

You should inhibit the act of being SMART when defining goals. Ensure it shouldn’t be complicated to figure out while sending these emails. What SMART stands for 

• Specific – What exactly are you aiming to accomplish with the campaign? 
• Measurable – How will you determine your success? 
• Achievable – Is it possible to achieve it in the real world? 
• Realistic – Does it contribute to your company’s revenue growth? 
• Timely – By when do you want to accomplish this? 

Answering the above will enable you to set an email campaign goal easily.

After defining the clear goal, you can add it to your calendar so that all your team members can know it well and be focused while crafting the campaign content or at the time of success analysis.

Here’s what the goal section looks like for the SaaS company email marketing calendar: 

Step 2: Understanding your audience 

Effective email marketing starts with understanding your audience, so leverage customer data and analytics to gain insights into their needs and preferences. 

Segment your subscriber base based on demographics, preferences, and behaviors to create targeted, personalized email content that resonates with your recipients.  

The email calendar you have designed aims to target your ideal customers whom you want to encourage with your email marketing strategies to get their hands on your products and services. 

You will not want to send industry-specific emails to product-oriented audiences. 

A public-oriented audience email demands information like a weekly newsletter, welcome emails, new product launch, promotional email, and seasonal campaigns.

On the other hand, an industry-oriented email audience looks for blog promotion, surveys, free trials, etc. Therefore, craft an email after finding out who your audience is.

An email marketing calendar lets you organize the ideal campaign and the potential subscribers’ list in one place, ensuring you reach the right audience with the right content resource at the right time to win the engagement.

Step 3: Mapping out key dates, events, and times at the first place 

Consider leveraging special occasions to run promotions or share exclusive content. 

You can avoid deadline issues for any email if you add a date and time for the emails to be sent out. 

So, discover some of the ideal dates for your email marketing campaign and plan your campaign on the calendar. 

Moreover, leveraging festive occasions like Christmas or Halloween and essential events like Cyber Monday or Pride Month for campaigns are effective tactics to enhance the chances of driving business. 

Now coming to dates, the best time to send emails is notably 10 AM, 8 PM, 2 PM, and 6 AM. While 8 PM is the best time for sending emails as the viewers have their bedtime, 2 PM is when most subscribers are at work.  

Now the best days in a week to send out an email are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, where you can use Wednesday as the second day if you send an email twice a week.  

However, the impact of these dates, occasions, events, and seasons may vary from business to business with varying audience personas. 

So, you must experiment with these dates and times to ensure that they meet your expectations.  

The best part is that when you are sorted with dates and occasions for your campaigns, it will be easy for your teams to understand when to start the work on certain emails to complete them before the deadline.   

Step 4: Content planning and creation 

What if the big campaign day has arrived, and you’re still struggling with your CTAs, graphics, and headline? 

Isn’t that sound scary? 

So, avoid such last-minute hustle and save plenty of dollars by planning your content with an appropriate title for your email, like promoting an upcoming event or launching the latest product. 

Now determine your email topics and themes for upcoming events and campaign strategies and organize the data in your email calendar.  

The best outlines can be: 

• New commodity release 
• Forthcoming events or seminars 
• Weekly bulletins with different subjects  
• The latest update in an existing product 
• Upcoming discounts and sales offers
• Invitation for your newsletter referral program 

Ensure to include customizing your content for your target audience to personalize them. Moreover, include conversational topics for subscribers to know your services better. 

The best part of an email marketing calendar is that you can decide everything beforehand. That is, you can develop strategies for the events that will occur later in the upcoming seasons.  

This makes it easy for your marketing teams to acknowledge the workload. 

For example, in a B2C enterprise, it is good to send emails consistently during the holiday period of November and December rather than in March, so you can allow your team to work on these emails before the time so that the executives can divide the work accordingly. 

Step 5: Test your emails to finalize the best one 

To improve your campaign performance, you can perform A/B testing to determine the most impactful subject lines, CTAs, visuals, etc. 

Conducting split testing will lead to enhancing your marketing engagement as well as meeting revenue goals. 

Include the details like best subject lines and CTAs on your email marketing calendar once they are ready. 

Step 6: Track to measure your campaign performance   

Having all elements aligned in your email isn’t enough. 

To improve this, your team must know how well their planning is, so adding data on your campaign performance will give your team insights into improving their future campaigns. 

So, analyze key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates.  

Gain valuable insights from these analytics to understand what strategies are working and where improvements are to be made.

You can include the email campaign performance to provide more data on your campaign updates to your team with your email marketing calendar.

Moreover, you can add essential email metrics, including open rates, click-throughs, and conversion rates, to let all teams see the outcomes of their efforts. 

Once you are well-versed and prepared with all elements for your email campaign in your calendar, set it for autopilot! 

Automating your email campaigns results in 30% time savings. Plus, it boosts the productivity and efficiency of your marketing team. 

One way to do it is by integrating a powerful email automation tool into your email marketing calendar. 

But if you aim for overall success from lead generation, management, nurturing, and closing deals, go for CRM with an email marketing automation platform that streamlines workflows and enhances cross-channel marketing efforts.   

Also, synchronize your email calendar with other channels, such as social media platforms, to extend your reach, maximize brand visibility, boost engagement, and drive more conversions.  

5 Actionable practices to organize your email marketing calendar to drive great results 

You must ensure sending emails regularly to your segmented list, maintaining a constant pace of once a week, a month, or the most frequent time.  

Practice the following best practices for email marketing to build the most powerful email marketing calendar. 

1. Include a variety of email campaigns in your email marketing calendars 

Determine the right way to send emails to promote your product/services with the simple email schedule strategy given below for different content emails.

• Universal content emails 

When circulating universal content, you must send only one email on the day of publishing the content for the subscribers and look for feedback. 

• Product launch emails 

When you have a product launch, you must schedule your emails accordingly, like one email on the launch day, then after six days of launch, another email to all the subscribers that opened the previous email but did not click on it. 

Then again, nine days after the product release, send one email to users who looked at the previously delivered email but have yet to respond.  

Finally, send an email nine days after the last email sent in context to the first email delivered to all the users. 

You are not supposed to do it manually; feed the strategy in your calendar and automate the process by setting up email sequences.

• Webinar emails  

The strategy is different for webinar email campaigns, as you must send emails before the forum day, starting a week before the webinar, then four days, and subsequently one day before the event. 

You can also send reminder emails one hour before the webinar begins, and then after the successful completion of the event, you need to send one email the next day to all subscribers. 

Also, such a strategy will help you determine the number of emails you have sent for a particular event or campaign and maintain a list of them in your calendar. 

• Newsletter emails 

If you have a strategy outlined to send newsletter email campaigns, you can send it once a month or a week, depending on the amount of content you manage to develop.  

The best day to send newsletter emails is Wednesday, so send the email to subscribers on that day precisely. 

2. A/B test to finalize the most intriguing subject lines 

Email subject lines can be tough to handle as you need to determine the appropriate subject line to get clicks.

These subject lines will help you with customer engagement, so they must be crafted well and included in the email calendar. 

It lets you understand everything you have sent to your subscribers, avoiding monotonous lines to encourage your customers. 

You can use the CoSchedule to determine an email subject line for your emails, as this tool creates unique subject lines for the users with its Email Subject Line Tester feature.  

3. Don’t forget to include links to graphics and videos 

When subscribers open your email, they should see the message that captures their attention. You must use your creativity and copywriting skills to develop distinct and striking content that will inspire readers to perform your desired action. 

You can include the following things in your content when you improvise any email content for the subscribers. 

• Content customization to encourage your subscriber to look into your services. 
• Implement more precise and practical words to your content. 
• Always include a call-to-action button in your email content. 
• Emphasize your products plus points. 

Thus, if you understand that you have included all the necessary points, you can add the email content to your email marketing calendar. 

The most important aspect of the email marketing calendar includes links to graphics, infographics, and videos designed for each email you create.  

It is important because your marketing team needs to understand to which email the images and videos belong. 

The images and videos should be linked to your email calendar so the campaign owner can easily access them.  

A particular column for email content will let you see what your audience is receiving and reduce the effort in making the feedback process and proofreading.  

4. Update the status of your campaigns 

You must check the status of your email marketing campaigns and update them on your email calendar, as it helps you, as a manager, to know beforehand what is up next, how far the team has come in their work, and the amount of work that is left to be done. 

You can divide your campaign strategies into three sections precisely. 

Latest: It is the newest campaign added to your email calendar, and the marketing team members have yet to look at it or start their work on the email content. 

In progress: The marketing team is working on the email’s content brief, graphics, and other related aspects. After completing the tasks, the team will send the email draft to the campaign owner for final approval. 

Complete: The email content, subject lines, graphics, and CTAs are approved and ready to send to the targeted list.

There can be your own status version, but ensure to keep all your team members in a loop regarding any strategy. Moreover, you must update your email campaign list regularly.

5. Segment your subscriber lists and maintain data hygiene  

Reviewing and segmenting your subscriber database to sort the most useful data regarding revenue generation is essential. Identify and remove inactive, false, and duplicate accounts to ensure relevancy in your list.

Also, email segmentation lets you find the most interested prospects for personalized targeting.

Warm up your email domain to improve deliverability. Also, you can have more control over your email reputation and improve deliverability with a dedicated IP address for your email marketing team.

4 Best tools to ease your email marketing campaign planning and execution

Now that you know the key elements of an organized email marketing calendar, speed up the process with the support of the right tool. We’ve handpicked the best one for you: 

1. Google Sheets to plan your calendar easily

Google Sheets are easy to operate and help you organize your email campaign schedule neatly. 

Sign up with Gmail and get started with your calendar building. 

The best features included its Built-in formulas and conditional formatting, shared with anyone, numerous add-ons, and better compatibility with its Chrome extension/app. 

Google Sheets are free; however, you have Google Workspace (formally G Suite) for business. 

Pricing->  

2. Salesmate to automate your email marketing campaigns

Salesmate is a powerful CRM and Marketing Automation platform specially designed to help marketing sales and CX teams. You can manage your data and get more insights with auto-profile enrichment. Generate leads automatically with Chat Journeys. 

Set drip campaigns and track them to optimize for better results. Along with emails, it offers other communication channels like calls and texts. 

Salesmate is a unified customer platform with the most powerful Automation Suite you must try.  

Pricing-> 

3. ClickUp to simplify your project management

ClickUp is a one-tool-fits-all services platform where you can get to know your team and work together on various projects in just a few simple clicks. 

You can simplify your workload and better manage your project with their productivity hub: Whiteboards, tasks, dashboards, chat, Docs, & more.

Pricing-> 

4. Asana to get reusable email marketing calendar template and manage projects

Asana is a top-ranked marketing calendar software designed to provide easy access to customers to demonstrate their tasks and initiate strategic marketing tasks. 

It lets you in Hasel free project management and presents integration with 100+ business apps.

Pricing-> 

Wrap up 

Email marketing calendar has become a part of every email marketing strategy as it keeps your email marketing efforts neat, smooth, and in advance.

Building an effective email calendar that includes all the relevant details will help you and your team be more productive, updated, and organized.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that with strategic email marketing calendar planning, you can reach your ideal prospects with the right message and at the right time.

Frequently asked questions