How to Create Your Email Content Calendar in Six Simple Steps

Tips to Maximize the ROI of Your Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience and get their attention. It’s a highly cost-effective way of advertising, too, and sending regular emails can help to build trust and credibility. Email marketing can be automated easily, making it highly efficient and allowing you to get on with working on your business rather than in it.

As with content marketing, the key to maximizing ROI from email marketing is to make sure you do it ─ and therefore you need an email content calendar.

What is an email marketing campaign calendar?

An email marketing campaign calendar is a tool that helps you plan and execute your email marketing campaign. It includes a way to organize your content, send out campaigns, manage subscribers, and track results.

An email campaign schedule helps with strategic planning for the future and with execution for the present. The calendar can help you to plan which emails will be sent at what time of the day or week, which days are best for sending out campaigns, etc.

Tips to organize your email campaign schedule

Organization is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign, and email marketing is no exception. Here are four tips to get you started:

1. Make your schedule predictable

It’s important that your email schedule is predictable for two reasons:

1. It will help to streamline the development and maintenance of your email campaign calendar ─ this makes it easier for your marketing team

2. It satisfies your audience ─ they know what to expect and when

This predictability also enhances the perception of your brand as being reliable and authentic.

2. Test to find your ideal email cadence

Cadence. The rhythm of your email marketing campaign. By learning when to send your emails to your segmented email list, you will squeeze the most juice out of them ─ because the right time is when your audience is most likely to open, read, and respond.

3. See what leading brands are doing

When we want to improve at something, there are several options open to us. These include trial and error, education, training, hiring external expertise, and learning from others. By examining popular and profitable email marketing campaigns from leading brands, you can learn what they did and why it worked ─ and use this information to inspire and enhance your own email marketing.

4. Build an email campaign calendar

There are many elements to go through when building an email campaign calendar, and you must not shortcut any of them:

• Give your campaign a name

• Decide on your campaign goals

• Decide who will be responsible for the campaign

• Describe the target audience and segment your list accordingly

• The type of email you will send at each step (e.g., newsletter, promotional, etc.)

• Describe the theme/topic of each email

• Write titles

• Write content briefs

• Decide on send dates

• Write content

• Send

Create your email campaign calendar in 6 simple steps

Let’s dive a little deeper into how to develop your email calendar, simplifying to these six steps:

1. Align your business goals with your email campaign strategy

Your email campaign strategy should prioritize the business goals that are important to your company. This will help to set realistic goals for your campaign, get the necessary resources in place, and plan your content calendar to send out relevant information to increase engagements and conversions.

2. Start with seasonal, brand-related, and newsletter content

Starting with seasonal content is going to help fill out your calendar with relevant and engaging content. For example, if you’re planning for Christmas, you can send out emails about holiday shopping during December.

You should also create brand-related content. This will help your audience identify with your brand, improve brand recognition, and build trust and loyalty.

Newsletters are another terrific way to connect with your audience. You can use these to keep your audience connected to your blog content; share news of successes, reviews, and testimonials; and provide news of updates to your products and services.

3. Define your email marketing campaign structure

The structure of your email campaign is the framework that the campaign is built upon, and includes:

• Objectives of the campaign

• Which part of your audience you are targeting (see segmentation in the next step)

• How often you will send emails

• The style of email you will be sending ─ including the length, number of emails in the campaign, and the frequency they will be sent

• Best day and time to send

It is critical to design your campaign structure around your audience ─ you’ll need to know what content is relevant to them and will engage them, and their email tolerance (how often they will be happy to accept emails for you).

4. Segment your audience to target effectively 

A targeted approach will help to build your reputation, retain your audience, and maximize your conversions. You’ll need to segment your email list to ensure that the right content is sent to the right audience ─ there is no point in sending emails about care in old age to 20-somethings, for example.

5. Use automated and broadcast emails

To build a successful email campaign, you must have a healthy mix of automated emails and broadcast emails. Automated emails are great for sending out daily or weekly updates on your campaign. In the meantime, broadcast emails are great for sending out promotional information and reaching out during specific campaigns.

6. Keep consistency to avoid losing your audience’s interest

Finally, keep your emails consistent. As well as sending consistently to keep your audience interested, you should format your email communications so that their appearance is consistent and aligned with your brand.

Your audience should see the same font, format, color schemes, styles of headers and footers, etc. throughout your email campaigns. You can use an email service like MailChimp and Aweber to help you do all of this, as well as segment audiences, manage emails marketing campaigns, email automation, and more.

Follow these simple steps to create your email content calendar, and you won’t fail. If you’re still not sure how to start, download our Email Content Calendar template and use it to plan your email campaigns.

Take your email marketing campaigns to a new level

Are your current email campaigns failing to produce results? Are you new to email marketing and wish to be successful from day one?

This is where we excel at BlabberJax. We deliver years of experience and expertise for our clients to leverage across their digital marketing, content marketing, social media posting, and email marketing campaigns.

For a free, live demonstration, contact BlabberJax today.

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