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)

Sending emails on regular basis

Now, since I have been conducting workshops all over India on "Good practices of Email Marketing", I do come across a lot of questions related to the same. The best I thought to address them is by writing about them :-). So, here is my first post on "Easy tips to make sure you stick to your schedule!".

The question is what is the correct frequency of sending emails? Most of the times this question is simply answered by saying "don't send too frequently or too in-frequently". But the way I look at it is the frequency of the email campaign should be aligned with your business and more importantly should address the basic concept of consistency. In other words,  not sending on a regular basis is the same as sending too frequently or infrequently. Think of email marketing as a beginning of a new relationship. The more you see the person, the more will there be bonding build and more there will be trust. Now imagine that in a new relationship, you show up thrice in the first week and then just not show up at all for 3 months, what happens? Did you not just dig grave for yourself? This is exactly what happens to your recipients too in an email marketing campaign. 

I had a friend of mine who was working with a magazine and she was just sharing her working style with me. She had a calendar that was shared between all editors and writers keeping a track of all the things they are doing months or weeks ahead of time. I think this is just such a classy idea for email marketing too. Create a calendar, it need not be absolutely accurate but can simply be a guesstimate of your campaigns so that you know how much time you'll need to get specific emails together.

One more very weird and funny thing that organizations do which either causes delay or irregularity in sending emails is by not giving the creation of the email to the same person everytime. This almost like rolling out a different product each time. Simply appoint one person who own the calendar and make him accountable forthe design as well as delivery. Let the person be a shepherd from start to finish. To my surprise, this came as one of the primary reasons why there is irregularities in emails being sent out.

As a manager, I have always been taught to break up a big task into small manageable sub-tasks. Similarly, why do we try doing that with our newsletters. What does a newsletter include - new features, industry news, good news, tips, etc. Once you have a good idea on what you need to include, templatize it. Then all you will need to do is drop in the appropriate section-focused text or images every single time. The key to this exercise is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather come up with a system that helps you easily stick with a schedule.

As a business owner or even a email marketer, you don't want to compromise with your routine and would like to stick to it all the time, even during the busiest parts of the year. By putting these measures into place, you'll know well ahead of time how much time you'll need to dedicate to every single newsletter, and exactly what's needed both text and art-wise to keep your campaigns on schedule.