In 2024, every brand has utilized email marketing and understood its importance. Especially in the past couple of years. With the COVID-19 outbreak, the largest chunk of revenue was due to online sales, according to BBC:
Marketers finally realized how not utilizing email marketing is like leaving money on the table, as email marketing allows brands to boost sales. Just look at eCommerce sales in the past couple of years. eCommerce stores grew exponentially, as they already knew how to utilize email marketing and online sales.
However, there’s a place and time for everything. Apart from careful design and compelling copy, some days of the month are better for email marketing and generating revenue than others.
But what are those days? Why is there a pattern? The only way to know the answers to these questions is to create an email marketing calendar that makes sense for you and your brand.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents:
- Email Marketing Calendar: Definition
- Goal Setting and Knowing Your Audience
- Defining Dates and Actions
- Subject Lines, Content, and Filling the Gaps
- Always A/B Test and Evaluate
Email Marketing Calendar: Definition
Creating an email calendar allows marketers to plan appropriately. This type of planning can help brands send email marketing campaigns with a timely and relevant message.
To be able to create a spot-on email newsletter, you’ll need to pair your experts and resources correctly.
For example, let’s say you need to generate more leads and further grow your email list. This action would include pairing the proper content creator, who knows how to create lead-gen content, with your landing page builder, an expert designer with the brand’s colors, and a seasoned marketer with the proper data and analytics, that will lead to picking out the right email automation for your brand.
To top it all off, you need a seasoned email marketer that will understand the day out of your email marketing calendar needed for this specific lead-generation action.
Goal Setting and Knowing Your Audience
Creating an email marketing calendar that will send newsletters on irrelevant days -or times- won’t get you any closer to your goal.
Know Your Goals
There are many clever goal-setting strategies, and more than most will work for your brand, but you need to keep one key principle in mind. Your goals need to be SMART:
Specific
You need specific actions to reach a goal that will make sense for your email marketing campaign.
The goal could be anything, but the steps that get you to this goal need to be very clear and precise.
Specific goals will allow you to choose marketing tools and eliminate guesswork. Not doing so will increase your email marketing budget, which is not ideal, especially if we’re talking about email marketing for a small business.
An email marketing calendar needs to outline those goals, and allow marketers to understand the timeframe and the reason behind needing and using said tools.
Let’s assume your goal for 2024 is a better open rate for your email marketing campaigns. This leaves little to the imagination, as you’ll need:
- An email marketing platform with advanced reporting capabilities
- Segmentation and personalization tools that go beyond the “Hello {First Name}” basis
- A clever subject line tester, ideally powered by AI
These tools are non-negotiable if you want to understand your audience and create a tailor-made campaign that will engage in a full inbox.
Measurable
Your goals will also need to be measurable. If they can’t be pinpointed by a metric that belongs in your email marketing calendar, you may not need them in there anyway. Take the below example. This is what your email open rate is and how to calculate it:
Include the metrics you’d like to track in your email marketing calendar, and make sure they’re not vanity metrics. Also, don’t include metrics that won’t make sense for your email marketing campaign. A cart abandonment campaign, for example, needs a high click-through rate, as opposed to a simple “Thank You” email.
Attainable
Attainable goals can inspire your team to pursue them. You should aim high, but understand that setting smaller, attainable goals in a shorter time frame will help your team reach the big goal easily and quickly.
Realistic
The same goes if they’re not realistic. Your product or service may need more exposure and awareness at this stage, or your team might be too small to reach the sales goal you had in mind. Don’t aim too high, and understand there might be some hiccups down the line.
Time-Bound
Finally, time-bound goals are your friend. This doesn’t mean you need the pressure of a strict deadline. What you need to understand is the difference between the “when” and the “one day”. If there is no way you can present the “when” and the “how” on your email marketing calendar, maybe your goals need to be adjusted to reflect your email marketing’s current state.
Know Your Audience
It’s 2024, and personalization and micro-segmentation tactics are everywhere. These tactics start from knowing your audience.
To create an accurate depiction of what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll need to divide your subscribers into segments that make sense for each of your email marketing campaigns.
To do so, you’ll need to take some data into account:
Your first step here is to create your buyer personas. They will be the depiction of your ideal audience. Pinpoint all of the characteristics that make them who they are, and understand how your product can better their lives.
Advanced personalization and segmentation capabilities are among the most sought-after features of email marketing platforms. Especially when it comes to small business email marketing, where marketers look for an all-in-one tool that can do all the core work for them.
Invest in a platform with these capabilities, as well as reporting and analytics tools. These will give you great insight into what your audience wants, and what they’re after in relation to your product or service.
You can study your data to understand the correlation between your audience and each persona you’ve created. And this is where segmentation begins.
By grouping your subscribers into teams with common interests, ages, occupations, locations, and so on, you’re minimizing the chance of creating irrelevant email content, or even irrelevant campaigns as a whole.
Segmenting your email list will result in creating a data-driven email campaign that is relevant to your audience and your goals.
Not to mention that this can boost engagement in numerous ways. A tailor-made message needs to be a part of your marketing methods.
Advanced reporting and analytics tools can give you the following data:
- What the best day and time to send an email to each segment is
- Whether your recipients will love interactive or video content
- If you’re utilizing holiday email marketing correctly
- The holiday that converts best
If you’re just starting, or aren’t sure what the best way to utilize your segments is, you can always look at how your competitors use email marketing and what their campaigns entail. This will give you some much-needed insights into what your audience needs and what they’re looking to resolve by using a product in your niche.
Defining Dates and Actions
When you study your audience, you’ll see that some dates work better than others. But what does that mean for your business?
Defining External Dates
Figuring out the best ways to lead your users down the funnel and achieve better customer retention by managing your data is one thing. Knowing when your audience expects an email organically is a whole different issue.
Determining the dates that would help you achieve your goals can happen by researching your audience. But it can also happen by aligning your email marketing calendar with an actual calendar.
Let’s assume that you’re targeting a segment that is in New York during early summer. It only makes sense to launch a Fourth of July email marketing campaign, especially if you’re selling decorations.
If you’re targeting a segment that is located in Australia, you can customize your offers with an email tool that allows you to use dynamic content and promote swimsuit offers during Christmas.
Defining Internal Dates
Apart from the actual calendars, you need to keep another calendar in mind: your brand’s internal calendar, which is clearly defined in your marketing plan.
Email marketing is the most affordable and lucrative way to create an open dialogue between you and your customers.
With a ROI like that, using only social media posts, surveys, and giveaways, is a little like leaving money on the table. Email marketing is the only way that’s not influenced by an algorithm, or other external parameters.
In 2024, you should invest time and resources into creating an email marketing calendar that utilizes all the beneficial dates. Whenever your brand is about to release something, mark your email marketing calendar, and use email automation according to segment.
Just make sure your emails are timely, relevant, and personalized. This will help you create marketing messages that make sense to each opener, and eventually help you achieve the goals you’ve set.
When creating your email marketing calendar, a consistent email schedule would be vital for your subscribers, and your email marketing efforts as a whole. Don’t send five emails with updates one month and ten emails the next. This inconsistency will exhaust your subscribers, and opt-outs won’t exactly aid your efforts.
All in all, aligning your email marketing calendar with your internal calendar, and dates when consumers purchase organically, will give your email marketing efforts that extra advantage. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, a new exciting partnership, or smaller events like local bank holidays can do wonders for your brand.
Defining the Emails
Some emails are integral to your email marketing calendar, while others are just a part of a streamlined, automated process.
For example, automated emails could be:
- Thank-you emails
- Cart abandonment emails
- Win-back campaigns
Your email calendar is supposed to streamline and organize your email marketing actions, while promoting your marketing strategy as a whole. This is why automated emails like the examples above are not the ones you want to mark your calendar with.
There are emails that simply need to be marked in your email marketing calendar, as they get bonus points in engagement, score better conversion, and help you eventually reach your goals and eCommerce KPIs.
Instead of including a “Thank you for subscribing” email in your email marketing calendar, opt for an announcement, a gift guide, or your brand new social media or blog post.
Subject Lines, Content, and Filling the Gaps
Creating an email marketing calendar without knowing what type of content promotes your goals and results in better open and click-through rates won’t work in the long run.
Defining the types of campaigns should be a given by now. The first thing to consider here is your subject line.
What works best for your campaign? A catchy subject line or a little FOMO would work for an offer or a new product, but they wouldn’t do anything if you were to promote a blog post or a new collaboration.
A great subject line that has been tried and tested should be a part of any email marketing calendar. It allows marketing teams to know and understand what worked first-hand. This will give your team the opportunity to replicate the formula with the proper tools for your next email campaign.
After that, it’s time to design your first email. Your content, creatives, visuals, and of course, your body copy need to be aligned with the target audience of each email marketing campaign. Use precise language, actionable verbs that will show your prospects what to do next, and personalization tools to appeal to each segment. Finally, showcase the reasons why your audience should consider your offer.
After that, showcase the methodology and the content that won in your email marketing calendar. That way, you’ll be able to follow through with an already successful recipe.
Word of warning: Repeating a successful recipe is the way to go when it comes to your email marketing campaigns and your calendar in general. However, this doesn’t mean that your audience will be willing to receive the same content over and over again. Try to dilute the methodology and create new content each time.
Fill in the gaps in your email marketing calendar with various topics, such as social media updates worth sharing over your email marketing campaigns, and quizzes to boost engagement and get valuable feedback.
Always A/B Test and Evaluate
Sometimes, your audience won’t love your content. And that’s something to be expected. By A/B testing and evaluating regularly, you will manage to create a framework that is constantly updated.
You’ll also understand what your audience loves, what they like less, and the adjustments you need to make to appeal to your audience and create a better experience for them.
If, for example, you create an email spotting your YouTube channel trailer, and you send it to a segment that doesn’t do well with videos, make sure to record it in your email marketing calendar. That way, your team will know that this email content is not exactly ideal.
Regular evaluation of your email marketing calendar should be as much of a staple as A/B testing is, and your email marketing calendar should showcase this process in a clear and concise manner. That way, all of the members of your team will be on the same page.
The Takeaway
Creating an email marketing calendar is not an easy task, as there are plenty of things one should keep in mind.
However, it can vouch for three things that are extremely important:
- Better content quality, as it’s under constant evaluation
- Better marketing reach, as the message is bound to be timely and relevant
- Better performance, as your marketing team’s responsibilities are divided, mapped out, and there is transparency when it comes to timeframes, objectives, and results of each project
Having an email marketing calendar is like having a shirt with pockets: they can be more helpful than you could ever imagine.
