How to create a email campaign calendar

Based on feedback from the first blog post, I am covering up this topic. Ya, I am sure each one of you think that it is very simple to do this but trust me when I say that if email marketing does not work out for you, one of the few primary reasons for failure could be email calendar.


I go back to my MBA days where in Marketing I had a very interesting chapter called Integrated Marketing Communication - Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is defined as customer centric, data driven method of communicating with the customers. IMC is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, functions and sources within a company into a seamless program that maximizes the impact on consumers and other end users at a minimal cost.This management concept is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.(source)

Email Marketing is generally a part of the same and hence we need to make sure that all our communication channels like blogs, online newsrooms, social media, events, print media, promotions and sweepstakes, web pages, etc are at all times in sync. The purpose of the calendar is to bridge together content and themes for all of them.

In email marketing, if you aren’t planning a week or two ahead, you’re too late. If you really want to plan a successful campaign, and avoid “blasting”, you need to give your self some time to create content, creative, landing pages and most importantly the segmentation of the list. 

What I generally advice is in the first week of every month, plan the next month. When doing this, remember the following:

1) Make the calendar transparent - Make sure it is published where everyone can see it, understand it and live it.

2) Get the accountability in place - Identify who from the marketing team owns this calendar.

3) Planning - Streamline the people who will be involved in planning of dates, content, creative and finally sign-off

4) Measure, measure and measure - Effectiveness of the campaign has to be measured so that the next one can be tuned up. Identify the person for the same.

Now what exactly do you want to send in an email? This will generally have two broad level goals:

1) Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again e.g. schemes, promotions, etc

2) Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship e.g. newsletters, new feature promotion, downtime mailers, etc

Given that you would like to accomplish these goals month on month, identify the topics or themes each month into broad categories that can be broken down into sub-categories or if the company has many products or services, dedicate each month to a different product focus or service of your company and design a collage of content ideas centered around that product or service. 

Co-relate the topic to be sent out with the business. e.g. Schemes and Promotions are best announced mid-month closer to month end so that your target gets accomplished, if a very aggressive scheme then move it closer to the month-end, feature announcements are best announced in a clutter free week for maximum attention, etc.

One more thing that I generally advice is co-relate your communication to that of your competition's communication if you have the information. This is important especially in the goal is acquisition and that is where the timings matter.

Put the topic up on the calendar and withing the remaining three weeks, get the content, the creative and the list to be targeted in place. (Please note: List segmentation is one of the very important factor to determine the success and I will blog about it in this week)