How to Plan an Email Marketing Calendar For Your 2022 Campaigns

As efficient as Digital Marketing strategies are, nothing will work the way you expect if you don’t plan the actions to be put into practice. This way, you can create better and more relevant content for your audience.

That said, it’s essential to understand how to plan your email marketing calendar and how to explore this strategy to the maximum. 

You need to be able to define the most important dates and create a schedule of publications and submissions. 

Studies like Pew Research show that 92% of users on the Internet have and use email, and 61% of them check their inboxes daily.

With the creation of an email marketing calendar, the tendency is that it will enhance the work of your entire team. When this happens, more users are impacted by your messages. 

That’s why we’ll cover the following topics in this article:

What is an email marketing calendar?

If you want to know how to become a digital marketer to differentiate yourself from your main competitors in the market, you need to understand what an email marketing calendar means.

This calendar is the most effective way to organize your production strategy and ensure that all of your content is spread to the blog readers. 

After all, even if most consumers — 72% according to MarketingSherpa’s study — prefer to communicate with companies through email, it doesn’t mean they accept to receive any content in their inboxes.

Creating an editorial calendar for your strategy helps you by increasing the accuracy of your messages.

Nowadays, any professional in the market can use email marketing as a strategy to get closer to their buyer personas. With organization and planning, you can differentiate yourself.

When you have a logical order to send those emails, you’re able to establish direct communication without noise. This helps you to be as efficient as possible with your contacts.

How to do this? By creating a business email marketing calendar, defining the best dates to explore, and the most suitable content for each one of them. 

You can send messages daily, weekly, or monthly, to maintain consistency of contact with your public and to achieve your primary goals.

What are the main benefits of this strategy?

How about knowing what are the benefits of creating an email marketing calendar for your Digital Marketing strategy? 

We’ve listed the main advantages of organizing and setting up a planning and content schedule. 

Check it out!

Higher quality of the contents produced

When you adopt a calendar to organize yourself, the tendency is for you to have more time to create relevant and quality content. 

When sending your contacts a message, you need to make sure that it is a relevant one. This way, you create a bond with them based on the high-quality of your content. 

More precision to impact the user

With time and planning, it’s also possible to impact your public with greater accuracy, using email as a platform to approach the consumer. 

You can do that by learning the routine and habits of your contact list. The opening rate of the emails is better by the morning or in the afternoon? There is a day of the week when they are more likely to open the emails?

Gathering this type of information that is available in most email marketing tools will help you to reach the right public, at the right time, on the right day.

Better performance of your team

The benefits, however, are not limited to the relationship with your contacts. The email marketing calendar also impacts your team’s productivity. 

After all, responsibilities are divided correctly. With planning, you can ensure everyone is aware of their tasks and objectives, enhancing each one of your messages.

Definition of deadlines to be met

Haste makes waste, right? That goes for email marketing too.

The schedule helps your team plan the contents with enough time —avoiding delays. 

This way, you increase the chances of creating high-quality messages. The schedule makes it easier to organize and control your strategy.

Better use of your contents

Your email marketing plan’s organization also serves to make better use of your old publications. 

It’s not because you’ve already sent a specific content that it becomes useless. The calendar allows you to see, for example, new dates to reuse old messages with a different subscriber.

Fewer surprises with emergencies

Emergencies happen, and sometimes they are out of your control. Since you cannot prevent them from happening, you must do everything to reduce as much as possible the impact of a more severe problem. 

With an email marketing calendar, you have the security and plan to suffer less from potential surprises.

How to plan an email marketing calendar for your campaigns?

With so many benefits, you better start planning your email marketing calendar, right? 

No problem: we’ve created a small guide for you to follow to build your schedule and strengthen the impact of your communication campaigns. 

Don’t waste more time!

1. Know your audience

Before you set up your email marketing calendar, it’s essential to know your audience, which you should do by creating a buyer persona. 

In other words, a semi-fictional profile that represents your ideal customer. 

How to impact the user with relevant content if you don’t know what their wishes, demands, and difficulties are? 

Besides being an important factor in creating your calendar, the persona ensures that the contents you thought for your schedule are under the interests of the public.

Thus, you can also know what is the best frequency to send messages, its formats, the most efficient materials, and how to increase the accuracy of your strategy.

2. Define the objectives to be achieved

To set up a calendar, you also need to think about what goals to accomplish with this strategy.

Your goal will directly influence the type of content you’ll share and the frequency of the submissions. In short, it serves to guide your schedule. 

Also, you may have different lists of subscribers to receive your messages, which implies the creation of segmented goals.

3. Make a note of all the commemorative dates

With the two previous items solved, it’s time to create your email marketing calendar. 

How? 

From the commemorative dates, such as Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and other holidays. 

Take advantage of your blank calendar and start marking these dates, indicating that you’ll need exclusive content for these moments.

According to your goals and the profile of who you want to impact, you must pay attention to other dates. If you work with e-commerce, for example, don’t leave Black Friday out of your planning. 

The more segmented your content is, the higher the chances of impacting consumers.

4. Determine the frequency of submission

According to a survey conducted by Convince & Convert, 35% of marketing professionals send emails between 3 and 5 times a week. 

That doesn’t mean you need to follow this recommendation, but it’s a sign of a path to follow. The most important thing, however, is to set an ideal frequency for your persona.

Also, you need to find a formula to produce high-quality content. After all, what’s the point of sending five emails a week if two of them are not so in-depth, for example? 

This will only contribute to the dissatisfaction of the user, damaging the reputation of your company.

5. Produce in advance

Why create an email marketing calendar if you will not make the most of its benefits? To avoid this, organize the whole schedule with your team. 

Divide the roles and responsibilities, set deadlines, and always work at least a week in advance on your production. 

That way, you have enough time to reduce errors and make necessary adjustments.

6. Monitor your results

You can level up your strategy by using another Digital Marketing benefit: the possibility of changes and improvements. 

To do so, you need to monitor the performance of your email marketing strategy.

By closely monitoring your results, you can more easily identify, for example, the need to increase or decrease the frequency of your emails. 

You can continuously improve your actions.

A fundamental action for those who want to differentiate themselves from their main competitors is to create an email marketing calendar. This way, you can fully exploit the potential of this communication channel. 

With organization and planning, you can achieve your goals with greater accuracy and better investment of your resources.

If you’re trying to make your daily routine more organized, our Marketing Calendars for 2022 can be helpful! In our free kit, you’ll find the best templates to work with!