This post was written by guest blogger, Danielle Theisen. Learn more about Danielle here.
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Whether you’re a small company or a large corporation, whether you have an entire marketing team or one person, organizing all your marketing communications is necessary to be as efficient as possible. Creating an effective email marketing editorial calendar will help you and your marketing team better understand what messages should be going to which segments of your email list. Below are 5 tips to help you to create an effective email marketing editorial calendar.
1. Find a tool that works for you.
Creating an effective email marketing editorial calendar starts with finding a tool that works best for you and your team. For some, creating an editorial calendar in a simple Excel spreadsheet works perfectly. Typically this kind of calendar is great for teams of 1-2 people, where you don’t have to worry about coworkers saving over someone else’s work. If you’re looking for a sample spreadsheet to get you started, HubSpot offers many templates that can easily be edited to fit your needs.
Other calendar tools that are great for midsize teams include Google Calendar, ToDoist and Trello, which allow multiple people to be working on the same project while tracking changes.
2. Start with the obvious.
Start filling up your calendar with the obvious email campaigns. Can you align an email campaign with an upcoming holiday? Does your company always have a semi-annual sale? Does your organization always mail out a quarterly newsletter that can be converted into digital content? Starting with these email campaigns will help to not only fill in the calendar, but ensure you have consistent messaging across all marketing channels.
3. Integrate other channels with your email marketing efforts.
Email marketing should not be an independent effort, but rather it should be integrated with other marketing channels to create a seamless experience for the visitor or customer. When creating your email marketing calendar, align your email content to complement your social media messages, on-site messaging, tradeshow and event schedule or in-store promotion. Align your calendar with other marketing channel calendars or create an overall marketing calendar to ensure messaging is streamlined.
4. Be specific.
An effective email marketing calendar should include information about the email campaign. What information you include can vary depending how big or small your marketing team or organization is. At minimum, try to include the following:
- The date the email will be sent
- The topic, focus, and/or subject line of the email
- The audience or list segment this message is going to
- Content to be included within the email. Are you sharing your latest blog post? An infographic? A discount?
5. Create start dates and deadlines for A/B testing.
Effective marketing includes plenty of A/B testing; however, it can be difficult to remember when you initiated or utilized a test, especially when looking at data after a campaign. I know I’ve looked at year over year data and found an anomaly in my data set due to an A/B test, but I can’t remember what was being tested or what the result of the test was.
Marking your calendar with start test dates or marking that a particular email campaign was an A/B test of a subject line or a test of the content in the email helps for further campaign planning. This also helps to ensure that A/B tests don’t get repeated in the future.
Creating an effective email marketing editorial calendar takes time, effort and should constantly be evolving. Finding a method and format that works for you and your team may take time, but staying organized will pay off in the long run.
Is there certain information you include when creating your email marketing editorial calendar? Let us know in the comments below! Are you looking for help boosting your email marketing efforts? Contact Milwaukee email marketing agency, Accelity Marketing.
