Why You Need an Email Marketing Calendar Template 

Tracking your email campaigns in a marketing calendar is more than just tracking important dates, it gives you an insight into the cadence and interaction of your email campaigns. An Email Marketing Calendar allows you to plan and track your email campaigns to see which are winners and losers at a glance without having to dive through your email marketing platform to find what you’re looking for. 

Don’t get me wrong, email marketing platforms have some powerful reporting tools, but few are going to give you a birds-eye view of the data you need quickly to make game-time decisions in a moment’s notice. 

Consider the Email Marketing Calendar your CEO Dashboard for your Email Marketing Campaigns. 

What You Need in Your Email Marketing Calendar Template

Your email marketing calendar should give you only the most important data points about your campaigns. While it’s tempting to build a marketing calendar that is all-encompassing, remember, this is to give you actionable insight to make quick decisions from. 

Your email marketing calendar should contain at least 2 sections, and a third if applicable to your business model. Here they are with a brief overview of why you need each section and what data you’ll input. 

1. Planning
2. Results 
3. A/B Testing (optional)
   

How to Use This Email Marketing Calendar Template 

Planning 

The planning phase of your email marketing calendar may feel like busy work or even redundant in the beginning. After all, you pay good money for your ESP and it gives you a lot of details about the performance of your email marketing campaigns. 

However, the reporting in your email marketing platform often focuses on the results of a specific campaign and generally not the full overview of your email marketing campaign performance. The planning phase also holds those involved accountable for their work and performance. 

Your marketing calendar allows your team members to stay organized and on target with your marketing plan. It's not enough to just send emails and subject lines, your email marketing strategy needs you to know which campaings are working.

Marketing calendars allow you to have a birds-eye view over the marketing content, open rates, and keep track of the successful email marketing as well as the failures.

Your marketing strategy and team members will benefit greatly from a marketing calendar that is clear and concise.

So what is included in the email marketing calendar planning phase and how do you use it? 

Send Date: When will your email campaign be sent out? 

Send Time: At what time of the day will your email be sent? 

Status: How far along is the development of the email? This section should give you quick insight into the productivity of your team. Are you on time or are you falling behind? 

This section, and others, can be tied into your management tools like Asana or Monday easily. 

Email Type: What sort of email campaign are you sending to your audience? There should be a set pattern to how often you’re sending promotions, newsletters, special offers, etc. 

Send List: Many email service providers like ActiceCampain allow you to put your audience into lists to organize them into broad categories. The better you get at focusing your message to your audience, the better your success will be. 

Tags: In addition to the Send List, you can identify actions or trends of your audience with tags. These tags indicate that something has happened that you can identify and target. If you’re just starting out, these may be general like ‘Lead’ or ‘Engaged’. But the more you interact, the more specific you can get with your tagging. 

Suppression List: If you’re involved in affiliate marketing, send for other clients, or have been working with email marketing for any length of time, you’ll probably have a suppression list of bad or spam trap emails that you want to block from being sent to. Not only is this good practice, but can save you a lot of time from getting caught in spam traps or wasting time and money sending to email addresses that don't get opened or don’t really exist. 

Headline: The headline or subject line is the first thing your audience will see. Its only job is to get someone to open the email. Best to get a lot of eyes on it and get it right the first time. If you’re going to A/B test subject lines regularly, you may want to duplicate this column to list both headlines and add a column to indicate the winner. 

CTA: The Call to Action should be the primary call to action. The button or link that you really want someone to click on. You don’t have to list the text every time you put a link in. In fact, the more you put in, the less likely someone is to click. 

CTA Link: Where is the reader going to go when they click the CTA? Not only should you be able to see this quickly, but this can also be a quick link to see if someone is wrong or broken in the link. 

Content Document Link: It’s good practice to link your email content from a Google Doc or similar document. Not just for quick reference, but for historical purposes as well. These should be stored in a drive that is accessible to your copywriter, yourself, and any other parties that regularly edit or are involved in the email marketing process. 

Image Links: Any images you use should also be stored and linked similarly to the Content Doc. Keep this somewhere that you can access quickly and easily. 

Results Tracking 

There are a lot of great reports built into your email marketing platform, but to get all the data you need at a high level in one report, you’re going to need to pull results and put them into your email marketing calendar. 

This way you’ll have the data you need available quickly. There are ways to integrate your marketing platforms to dump the data you need into a spreadsheet, but we’ll cover that in a different post. It’s easy enough at the start to do them manually. 

Total Emails Sent: How many emails did you send out? Regardless of the results, what’s the raw number you sent? 

Total Emails Delivered: Sadly, some emails are not going to get to your target audience. People will give you bad emails, mistype, or block you/label you as spam because they don’t remember signing up for your list. In this column, list how many emails made it to the intended recipient. 

Total Emails Opened: Of those who received your email, how many actually opened? This is one of the most important metrics email marketers track. 

Total Clicks: This is the second most important metric tracked in email marketing. How many of times did a unique recipient click on the CTA from your email? 

The next 3 columns will automatically populate with the numbers you need. 

Deliverability: Of the emails you sent, this is the percentage that made it to the recipient. This is important because of this drops too low, you can get in trouble or suspended from your email marketing platform. Make sure to clean your list regularly and scrub out bad emails. There are a lot of services for this. We recommend Unbounce and ClearOut to help you make sure your email list is clean. 

Open Rate: Your open rate is measured by looking at how many opened your emails out of all the emails that were delivered to the recipients they were supposed to be delivered to. This will give you a good insight into the quality of your subject line. 

Clickthrough Rate: The number of people who clicked on your CTA of those that opened the email. Here you can get insight into the quality of your email content as well as the strength of your CTA. 

Action Taken Total: This may be a purchase or a lead generated, whatever the end result of your email is supposed to be, this is what you will measure here. This may take some more time to put together depending on what your CTA is, but having this number will give you a complete picture of your email marketing performance.

Download Your Email Marketing Calendar Template (Google Sheets or Excel)

Click on the link below to download your Email Marketing Calendar. You’ll have the option to save it as a Google Sheets or an Excel File. 

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