Email Marketing Calendar: Brief Strategic Guide + Templates

Email Marketing calendar or planner is essential for thriving email marketing. You have learned about different types of email marketing campaigns and are now buckling up to send them out. But have you set up a solid plan on when to send what email campaign throughout the year? A proper email marketing campaign plan! That is exactly why you must create an email marketing content calendar for and run your email marketing according to it.

Get aware of some email marketing ROI (return on investment) improvement rates! Around 52.8% of marketing experts observed a twofold increase in the ROI rates for their e-mail marketing campaigns in 2023. Another 5.7% resulted in a fourfold higher ROI rate than in 2022. You definitely need a proper email marketing planner to mark such ROI boosting.

In this blog, I will discuss the email marketing campaign calendar. You’ll learn how to create it along with taking ideas from the examples of some email marketing calendar templates.

Table of Contents

• What is an Email Marketing Calendar?
• How to Create an Email Marketing Calendar
• Tips to Create an Email Marketing Campaign Calendar
• Email Marketing Calendar Template Examples
• Wrap Up

What is an Email Marketing Calendar?

In essence, an email marketing calendar is an outlined plan that lists all the email campaigns a business requires to send to its audience over a given period. It is also known as email marketing campaign/content calendar. It includes information about the target audience, content type, campaign schedule, and important dates for each email campaign. Simply put, an email marketing campaign calendar is basically a schedule or plan for email marketing that specifies when digital marketing communications should be sent. 

What are some of the email marketing calendar benefits? Let’s see:

• An email marketing campaign calendar helps to ensure sending the right email campaign at the right time.
• With an email marketing campaign calendar, you will stay on track and organized.
• It helps regularly track email marketing performance metrics.
• It helps in detecting gaps in your email marketing strategy.

How to Create an Email Marketing Calendar

Here are the steps on how to create an email marketing calendar. Learn and follow each step attentively. 

Set your email campaign goals

Before creating an email marketing campaign calendar, set up the goals first. Make up your mind about the email campaigns you want to send out to your subscribers. Properly define your goals: 

• What do you want to achieve with your email marketing campaigns? 
• What is the main aim? Is it to boost sales, generate leads, or build brand awareness and credibility? 

Once you are aware of your email campaign goals, you can start to plan your email marketing campaign or content calendar. 

Use the right tool or software to make a calendar template

Using a plan-making tool or software, you can create your email marketing campaign calendar. For instance, you can simply make plans and schedules using Google Sheets or any calendar tool and create a marketing calendar template. You can also go for different software programs that offer ready templates for planners or calendars. The easiest and most accessible option is Google Sheets. Apart from that, some popular options could be Microsoft Excel and any email marketing platform offering email marketing campaign calendars or schedules. 

MailBluster is very handy in scheduling email campaigns. Make an effective email marketing calendar suitable for your business type and schedule the email campaigns accordingly in MailBluster.

💡Learn: How to schedule a campaign in MailBluster?

Include events and occasions in the email marketing calendar

You have to utilize the notable days and dates to drive sales and boost conversion. Note each important date on which you plan to send email campaigns, such as special/occasional days, holidays, product launches, and sales. Also include events that are relevant to your industry or target audience.

Keep a metrics section in your email marketing plan calendar

Keep a section for email campaign performance metrics in the calendar. For example, in the email campaign calendar, create a section about email deliverability and include related subsections for metrics like inactive subscribers, open/click rates, etc. Though it’s optional, you can avoid it if you want, but doing so will help you assess all the email campaign performance and outputs.

Make it accessible to your team but not in public

Your email marketing content calendar should be accessible to your team so they can see or go through it whenever they find it necessary. However, it shouldn’t be made public. Otherwise, your email marketing agenda might get leaked to others, especially your competitors. You wouldn’t want to risk it, would you? Hence, make the email content calendar accessible only to your team.

Tips to Create an Email Marketing Campaign Calendar

Here, get some more tips for creating an effective email marketing campaign calendar. Take notes!

• Keep it simple. Don’t make it complicated. Better to start with the basics and add more detail as needed.

• Integrate the calendar with other marketing tools. Your email marketing campaign calendar should be integrated with your other marketing tools, such as your email marketing tools like MailBluster, also CRM, and social media accounts if needed.

• Use a neat and consistent format to organize the calendar. Make the format in an easy-to-follow manner and nice to the eyes. Thus, it will be easier for you and your team to understand and use the calendar properly.

• Keep the calendar flexible. You and your teammates may want to make certain changes to the plan. Make it flexible so any essential changes can be done easily.

• Add necessary sections in the planner. Like, keep a section for email subject lines and another that shows the results of A/B tests.

• Finally, review and update the calendar or planner regularly. Your email marketing campaign calendar should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that it is still relevant and effective. Why? To ensure that your email marketing content calendar remains relevant and effective, reviewing and updating it on a frequent basis is a must. 

Email Marketing Calendar Template Examples

Looking for email marketing calendar ecommerce, B2C, B2B, retail businesses? 

Let’s get some vivid ideas by seeing a few effective examples of email marketing strategic planning calendar templates! No matter what business you belong to, these examples can be inspirational for you and will aid you in creating an email content calendar as per your business type.

Email content calendar template Google Sheets

Check out this email marketing calendar template Google Sheets. I crafted this detailed email content calendar template, Google Sheets, so you can take essential ideas while crafting one for yourself. This is a very detailed email marketing content calendar; as you can see, it contains all the necessary sections for a successful email campaign run. It’s an annual email marketing content calendar, and I have selected the March 2025 one to display here as an example. 

Key takeaways

• Add sheets according to months from January to December and a year overview.
• Keep two main sections: Email content calendar for email campaigns and Deliverability checklist for deliverability and related performance metrics.
• Include notable days/dates. Like in this example, the International Women’s Day email campaign is included in the plan for targeting that very day. Plus, campaign date, goal, target group, subject line, etc., and other email content related sections are added.

Simple plan for email marketing calendar template

This is a simple email marketing strategic calendar template from SlideTeam that you can take as an example. If you just want to plan for a simple, only email content-focused calendar, then follow this one.

Key takeaways

Add sections for:

• Date sent: Write the email campaign sending date. 
• Content topic: What’s the campaign about? Write your content’s core topic.
• Email title: Make a good email title or heading and write it in this section.
• Subject line: Craft a catchy email subject line for your email campaign and keep it in this section.
• Content: Write the actual focus points of your content. For example, in this email content calendar template, the core topic was Fitness, but it will focus on “fitness tips to be healthy,” so this section is to clarify the main focus.
• Images: Images in emails are important. You can keep all the required images links that you will use in the email content in this section.

Weekly email marketing calendar template

This email marketing calendar template example is from Someka. Want to plan your email marketing campaign calendar weekly? In that case, this weekly strategic plan template can be the best email marketing campaign calendar for you. 

Key takeaways

• In this email marketing strategic planning calendar template, the sections are added according to the weekdays from Monday to Sunday.
• Write the campaigns you plan on sending on that day according to the campaign’s date. For example, this template mentions Friday email sendings and plans according to the due date.

Wrap Up

Email marketing calendar appears to be a great medium that assists in dealing with email marketing for business properly and with ease of mind. This blog has covered the essential details on what and how you can create an email marketing campaign calendar or planner, along with some email marketing calendar template examples that you can use as per your needs and choice. Take all the ideas and implement them while creating one. Use an effective email marketing content calendar and schedule accordingly in MailBluster to send them at the right time.