As an email marketer, you know that there are many types of emails that you’ve to send. An email marketing calendar is a tool that helps you in organizing such emails. 

Think about it, with one single email, you’ve to remember many details. You should know who’s sending that email, when will they send it, and what is their goal. You can’t go to all email marketers in your team and personally assign tasks to them and ask for updates. Just imagining this is making you anxious right now. 

Therefore, to reduce your burden and anxieties, you use an email calendar. In these calendars, you can include all the details related to your email campaigns. Just like an actual calendar, add the campaigns and activities on a monthly or yearly basis. 

Now, you may ask, “How would an email calendar help my business” You know that you can add your monthly stats in your calendars too. When you add these stats to your calendar, you can make a comparison. Therefore, by observing the performances of different months, you’ll know what works. This is how you’ll understand which subject line made your customer click on your email. 

This article explains what an email marketing calendar is and how you create one. We have also mentioned some best practices you need to follow. 

What is an EmailAn email (or electronic mail) is a method of exchanging communications through the internet. It is one of the most used features on the web and the number one mean... Marketing Calendar? 

A marketing calendar is a schedule that has all the activities and campaigns planned in it. You make a calendar for a quarter of a year or for the whole year. As you decide on activities for different months and seasons, you make adjustments in the calendar. 

Let’s say you’ve set a layout for your calendar. You have added all the important details to it. But, maybe during summer, you can’t do an event that you had planned. You’d have to update the calendar with this untimely change. Therefore, you must make adjustments to the calendar. 

In these calendars, you schedule different types of posts, social media campaigns, promotional activities, company events, and more. 

An email marketing calendar is a marketing calendar that has all the information about your email campaigns. This calendar informs everyone on what emails are to be sent, who is sending these emails and who’ll receive them. 

Through the email calendars, the whole marketing team can remember and know the activities planned for the months and the year. Therefore, marketers make these calendars depending on the brand and its identity. 

To have a general idea, you can include the following things on your email calendar. 

• Month
• Time of sending email
• Owner/Supervisor of the email
• Subject Line
• Email Description
• Email List and Status 
• Goals of the email

In addition, you also include key metrics in your calendar. You are thinking, “Why?”. Well, this is because these metrics help you in improving your overall performance. And eventually, it helps out your customers too. 

Your email marketing calendar doesn’t have to look too simple. There are many design templates you can use. These templates have different colours and features that make it easy for you to have a useful calendar. 

How to Create Email Marketing Calendar

To create an email calendar, you can use different tools and software. To make your own email marketing calendar, follow the steps that are mentioned below. 

• Decide on emails: The emails you include on your calendar are different. Some emails are sent to all the subscribers and some are sent to selected people. Emails also depend on your business. If you’re a B2B business, then you’d include email surveys or content promotion. A B2C business would have newsletters or product launches. 

• Select email owners: Email owners are those people who are in charge of sending the emails to subscribers. There are many emails that your company sends out on a daily basis. You can’t put this responsibility on one person’s shoulder. Distribute the tasks among the email marketing team. This way you can also increase the effectiveness of the emails.  

• Know your goals: As with any other marketing system, here too you’ll succeed if you follow the SMART goals.

• Decide the day and time: Before you make your calendar, you should know that the weekend is not a good time to send an email. People open more emails on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. So, try to send emails on these days. Therefore, you can set the time between 10 AM to 6 PM. 

• Target the audience: Segmentation is essential for your calendar. It’ll help in dividing the emails into the focused target groups. You can divide these groups by their age, location, interests, and gender. 

• Update the email status: Lastly, you’ve to update the email status in your calendar. Mention what emails are already sent and which ones haven’t. You can simply write “Sent”, “Planned”, or “Scheduled” under your email status. Therefore, labelling the status will help to clear the confusion and will let you keep track of the emails. 

6 Best Tools To Create An Email Marketing Calendar 

Here are the best tools to make your company’s email calendar. 

• MailsenPai: MailsenPai is a marketing tool for businesses. This platform offers many services including search engine optimization, social media marketing, editing emails and newsletters, and more. Therefore, through their services, you can make an effective email marketing calendar for your brand. You can do a demo of the platform or get a professional plan for just €289.90/month. 

• Jotform: Jotform is another tool that you can use to build your email calendar. The platform offers different templates and designs that you can use for your calendar. It is essentially a form building tool that is used with many other platforms. Jotform’s free platform can be used by 5 people at a time. The paid plans include bronze, silver, and gold plans which cost $29, $39, and $99. 

• Trello: Trello is a famous content management tool. Trello provides you with multiple boards that you can add to your calendars. You can also add lists and cards to your calendar by using Trello. The paid plan of Trello starts from $5/user/month. 

• Google Sheets: You can use the spreadsheet in Google sheets to make your email calendar. This platform is easy to use. You can share the calendar with other teammates. Even though Google Sheets is free to use, you can take the $6/user/month Google Workplace plan for your business.

• Monday.com: Monday.com is a management tool that allows you to track your email campaigns. Through this tool, you can create boards on your email. You can also prioritize your tasks and can check the progress of your campaign through its real-time analytics dashboard. You can use the free trial for 14 days, and the basic plan of Monday.com costs $10/month. 

Tips and Best Practices 

Using the below-mentioned tips, you can create an efficient email marketing calendar for your brand. Therefore, if you keep using these best practices, you’ll notice a significant difference in your email campaigns. 

• Select a few emails: Not all emails should be included in your calendar. There are certain emails that you send. However, some are sent automatically by the email management tool that you use. In such a situation, you should change the settings in your tool. You should remove unnecessary emails that your subscribers don’t need to read. 

• Be regular: Being regular with your email calendar is extremely important. This way, your subscribers know when they’ll get a newsletter or a blog post in their inbox. Being regular here doesn’t mean that you’ve to send out emails every day. Schedule your emails on particular weekdays and a set time period. For example, you can be consistent in sending your newsletters on Tuesday evening at 5.30 PM. 

• Check your performance: Do include the key metrics of your email campaign in your email calendar. Include the number of emails that were sent in a month. Next, write down the bounce rate, open rate, and click-through rate. There are many more metrics you can include. The reason you add them is to let the team know which email campaign worked and which one didn’t. 

• Add A/B testing results: A/B test, also known as the split test, is used to compare the impact of two variants. In simple terms, you do the A/B testing to find out which element worked best for your subscribers. This way, you’ll know what subject lines were effective and what type of content helped your users. A/B testing also helps you in improving your performance. 

In Conclusion

An email marketing calendar is a tool that helps an email marketer in organizing all the company emails. There are many emails that they write including, promotional emails, welcome emails, thank you emails, event emails, and so on. 

Maintaining a record of these email campaigns is important for a business. Therefore, not only do you use an email calendar to record such campaigns, but it also helps in scheduling emails. 

It’s simple to create an email calendar. You can use many online tools to make your calendar. Add a template of your choice and begin. Add whatever first comes to your mind. Later on, you can structure the calendar in a proper format. 

Once the format is ready, you can start adding the details. Write the email description for every month. Include the name of the email marketer who’s in charge of it. Then, write down your goals for the email campaign. Like this, you can add all the details. 

Once an email is sent, you can make changes in the status of the email. After some time, you can add the metrics of that particular email. Therefore, checking the performance and keeping track of metrics will help your company in future email campaigns. 

Therefore, remember the tips and best practices you’ll need to have a detailed and well-organized email calendar.