Editorial calendar for your email marketing

Category: Email Marketing

Make a good email marketing requires planification. Send the first thing that comes to mind is not a good practice. If we want to get results with each email campaign, it is necessary to design a strategy beforehand and give us time to mature what we want to achieve. An editorial calendar is a helpful tool to organize and ensure that we know what we have to do in every moment to achieve it.

There are several ways to create an editorial calendar but it is important to start by emphasizing that not only can include email campaigns: it serves for all content generated within the company. This includes articles on the blog as business notes, events and even anniversaries relevant to our business. In this way, everything goes in the same direction and internal cohesion needed is maintained in order to be consistent in our communication.

It's very easy to make an editorial calendar for your email marketing using Excel tables (or shared in Drive), your personal agenda (paper) or your email client calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook). Once you have chosen the tool you feel more comfortable with, you just have to start filling in the document with a date and a reference of what you are going to send, such as a title or a provisional description (when the moment comes you'll write the definitive).

The email campaign frequency that you normally maintain will define whether you should make weekly or monthly calendars. So you can accommodate email campaigns to bridges and holidays (care with national and regional holidays, especially on international campaigns). But we also recommend you to think about quarters or longer term to include annual campaigns or recurring dates such as summer holidays or Christmas, those where you make more specific actions.

Depending on your email campaigns' complexity and the people who are involved in them, the record on the calendar can be broken down to include more details. For example, surely you started thinkig Saint Valentine's campaign a few weeks ago and searched for a template with some romantic references, but perhaps you didn't select the content until a few days prior the sending and could not do it without someone validates it before. If you show those stages in the calendar, there would be different entries for the same campaign. 

An editorial calendar will be more practical, not only to control how long you spend on each sending or when you have to send something, also to know what each subscriber is receiving according his segmentation. Remember that not always have to send the same information to all your list, you can choose according to their interests and prior actions. Without realizing it, perhaps too often you send email campaigns to the same users and you're neglecting others. Statistics can help, among other things, to identify users who prefer another frequency.

Finally, the editorial calendar should reflect the day of the week during which the email campaign will be sent but can also include the time. As we saw, although there are some data that serve as reference, it is our audience who determines the best time to send our emails. If you include in the calendar not only the campaign information but also its statistical results, you will see which one has worked best and so you go slowly improving your results.

A calendar is a living tool that must be kept updated. Review it from time to time to confirm that is up-to-date if you want it to remain useful.

Do not miss anything from our blog and join our Telegram https://t.me/acrelianews

---

Related posts