Creating an email marketing calendar
Planning out your email communication ahead of time will make your life a lot easier, and means you can be prepared for seasonality. Are there any major sporting fixtures, holidays or events that you are attending that you want to plan around? When do your customers start to think about buying for Valentine’s Day for example? Make sure you have your Valentine’s offers and emails planned well in advance so that your offer goes out to your list before they have already bought a Valentines present somewhere else.
Use a blank calendar or year-planner to map out when you need to start working on each campaign. First, decide if you are going to send emails out weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly. The less emails you send out in a year, the more organised you have to be about what messages go out when. If you’re sending weekly you have lots of opportunities to talk about different things; if you are only sending four times a year then you need to make sure each one counts. Assuming you’re going to send out one email a month, this might mean that you start planning your Christmas messages in September. This means that you can create any extra web pages or content in October, and then you can send out your Christmas offers email in November when people are just starting to think about what to buy for Christmas. Wouldn’t it be great to be that well organised?! There’s no reason you can’t be, and this is how all the high-street brands you buy from work. Do you think Boots start thinking about what they are going to send out to their email list for Christmas half way through November? No, and neither should you. I’m hereby promoting you to a proper marketing person, who’s going to start thinking like a proper marketing person thinks!
Start by filling in any obvious dates or events on your year-planner. Perhaps you’re doing a trade show and you want emails to go out the month before to promote the event, so work backwards. Mark down when the email needs to go out, how long you need to create the content (including new pages on your website for the email to link to) and this will tell you when you need to start planning the email. Are you going to introduce any new products or services in the next six months? Mark down when you need to start work on the emails.
Take some time to brainstorm so that you have something at least pencilled in for the next 6 emails (which will be six months if you are emailing monthly, or 3 months if you are emailing fortnightly). You can keep this flexible so that you can swap things out if something new or exciting happens, but you don’t want to be scrambling around for ideas each month. At Vegan Business Tribe we work a couple of months in advance with our content, but occasionally something exciting or time sensitive will happen so we keep the flexibility to work that in. Be disciplined, make it part of your routine and ensure you already know what’s going out in the next email before you send this one.
