Ever thought about the huge investment and resources that it takes to execute effective email marketing?
To make sure that all the money and hard work begets you the best email marketing metrics, it is of utmost importance to spare some time and create an email marketing calendar.
Once you have an email marketing calendar on hand, it will keep you focused and enhance your efficiency. It will help to keep everyone in your marketing team on the same page and maintain a record of all the activities carried out to run each email campaign. The biggest advantage of having a calendar ready is that it will instil a sense of responsibility in everyone and avoid procrastination or the last-moment hustle.
Let’s explore in detail why an email marketing calendar is such an indispensable facet for your campaign suite.
1. Proper distribution of responsibilities and resources
A successful email marketing strategy is all about the right teamwork and individual efforts put together. Having an email marketing calendar keeps you updated regarding the upcoming email campaigns and makes it easy to plan the activities well in advance. It enables proper distribution of responsibilities and resource allocation so that you can clearly identify the total budget utilized in each campaign.
For example: If you have a calendar with you, you can allow sufficient time for the completion of every step involved in creating a well-designed email campaign – be it the conceptualization or design – and nail it to perfection.
Of course, your calendar cannot be a budget spreadsheet, but it can surely provide a bird’s eye view of the investment throughout the year.
2. Determination of topics and aim of your campaign
Email calendar allows you to collect the content topics, design ideas and strategize your newsletters consistently throughout the year. If you have any events coming up, the calendar would be a valuable document for you. In addition to all these aspects, formulating the objective of your campaigns is an integral part of every email marketing strategy. Your calendar can serve as a document that establishes the purpose of every email campaign and the target audience it would be sent to.
You can record the segmentation parameters and keep a track of how the recipients are responding to the respective campaigns.
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3. Setting of deadlines
If you have a calendar in place, you can prepare the campaigns well in advance and avoid the last-minute rush that may lead to email marketing bloopers and critical send-o-phobia or sending irrelevant content that does not make sense just for the heck of meeting the ‘email target’. (grins)
The long and time-consuming approval process is a common challenge among the email campaign managers. A calendar helps to overcome this challenge to a certain extent by setting deadlines and expectations about the next campaigns.
4. Keep track of the email metrics
You can maintain a list of the emails sent, the email marketing metrics and the response rate in the calendar. It will help you understand the audience behavior and create better emails according to the results. According to the information of active and inactive subscribers, you can prune your email list to enhance the email list hygiene.
5. Repurpose the past successful emails
With an email marketing calendar in place, you can utilize the previously sent high-performing emails and repurpose them with minor changes as per the latest trends. You can employ the latest email design best practices and resend modified version of the previously sent email.
For example: If you have sent a plain text holiday email campaign with a brilliant copy, you can send it again with a GIF that matches the holiday mood. That’s a smart way to send meaningful emails and keep in touch with your subscribers.
Pro Tip: Besides your email marketing calendar, work on your content marketing strategy and social media strategy too along with their calendar planning. This will help you offer a consistent experience throughout the digital channels.
6. Prepare for the next year and Future
At the end of the year, you can analyze the results through this calendar and get detailed insights into what’s working and what’s not. It allows you to clearly gauge the peak time for sending the emails based on the performance. The calendar throws light on minute details like which products or services are more popular among your prospects and customers. This helps you to formulate a better strategy year after year.
Wrapping Up
Treat your calendar like dynamic paperwork and be prepared to make changes according to the advancements you make in your business, the contemporary trends and latest changes in the niche.
Are you using an email marketing calendar for your business? We would love to know how useful it has been for you to drive better-performing campaigns.
