Email marketing calendar template

Timing is everything—especially when it comes to online marketing content like emails. When you send your emails can be just as important as the actual email content itself—send an email out too soon and you run the risk of scaring away a potential customer or sharing a company announcement before it’s ready. Send it too late, and you might miss an opportunity.

That’s why your email marketing strategy needs to include an organized schedule. With an email marketing calendar, you can plan your emails in advance. For larger organizations where many teams send emails, you need something to make sure that all emails, company-wide, are scheduled in the same way. That’s where an email marketing calendar template comes in.

What is an email marketing calendar template?

An email marketing calendar template is a reusable calendar where you organize and schedule upcoming marketing emails. Many companies have dedicated email marketing teams who use a calendar, but they’re not the only ones who send out marketing emails. Social media, content marketing, and product teams can also all create their own email marketing campaigns. You want to be sure that no matter who deploys emails, they have a calendar that shows what they’re sending and when. This helps you spot potential red flags and coordinate sends across the company, so emails don’t go out too soon or too far apart.

A template ensures that your email marketing calendar is planned the same way, no matter which team uses it. Plus, if you have a template that’s easy to share across departments, anyone can easily view upcoming email campaigns. This helps to coordinate topics, themes, deliverables, and launches to ensure you’re not sending a bunch of emails at once from different teams and potentially spamming your customers. 

For example, let’s say you’re an eCommerce company and you’re planning promotional emails for a Black Friday sale. You can use one email marketing calendar template to coordinate all Black Friday emails across teams to make sure that each email is timed right and your messaging is consistent.

Do you need an email marketing calendar template?

Do you send emails? If so, you need an email marketing calendar template. Almost every digital marketing program these days uses email marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy, which is why it’s so important to have a cohesive plan for when you’re going to send emails. In general, the template should show everyone in the company how to build their own email marketing calendars. 

Standardized calendars are really useful when you have many different people and teams sending emails at once, all of which may have the same target audience. Even if you alter the type of content you’re sending to different lists, without a calendar to reference, you run the risk of sending duplicate emails and spamming your customers—and no one wants to receive three emails from the same company about the same topic. An email marketing calendar template encourages every team who sends out emails to build their own calendar, so you can quickly and easily know who’s sending what, and when.

Once you build your template, use it to:

• Standardize and streamline an email scheduling workflow: Build out your template as a step-by-step guide, so team members know exactly how they should be building their email marketing calendars.

• Share with other team members: Share the template with everyone responsible for sending emails to ensure you don’t overlap on themes or topics, which can feel like spamming to your audience.

• Structure a specific type of email campaign: Outline how specific types of campaigns should be scheduled, such as creating a product-specific email marketing calendar template for new product launches. 

The benefits of a digital email marketing calendar template

Depending on the software you use to build your template, it can be a flexible and adaptable tool. For example: 

In a dynamic tool—like project management software—your email marketing calendar template can…

• Organize your email content management schedule, so you never miss a campaign.

• Give stakeholders a bird’s-eye view of your current email marketing calendar.

• Store crucial metrics to determine your email’s success, such as open and click-through rates (CTR).

In a static tool—like Excel or Google Sheets—your email marketing calendar template can’t…

• Use automations or easily connect with other teams. 

• Update stakeholders in real-time about important metrics like conversions or unsubscribe rates.

What to include in your email marketing calendar template

Alongside other marketing templates—such as a content calendar template or social media marketing template—your email marketing calendar template is another marketing tool in your kit. A successful email marketing calendar doesn’t need to be complex, but it does need to work for your team. Here are some basic details to include: 

• Campaign: This is especially important if you want to connect specific campaigns back to larger marketing efforts.

• Assignee: Show who’s responsible for each email, campaign, or tasks right on the calendar.

• Important dates: Here, you can include due dates for tasks (for example, when the written content for the email is due) and the date you’ll send out each email. 

• Email list: If you have segmented email lists, show which one is receiving the email blast.

• Content: If you want, you can include all the content here for your emails, including the subject lines, body copy, and landing pages. Or to keep the email calendar a bit cleaner, you can link out to content docs.

• A/B testing: Review email performance by tracking A/B tests in your calendar.

• Metrics: Keep tabs on delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and any other analytics important for your email reporting metrics. 

• Goals: List the specific marketing goal, business initiative, or content marketing strategy that each email contributes to. 

Integrations and apps to use with your template

Take advantage of the full breadth of Asana with innovative features and app integrations for your projects.

Integrated features

• Calendar View. Calendar View is a project view where you can see all upcoming and past work in a calendar format. Clearly track what’s getting done and what deadlines are coming up. Give your stakeholders insight into every task’s individual due date, as well as the larger cadence of scheduled project work. Then, click into a task to view more information like the associated custom fields, dependencies, subtasks, and more.

• Timeline View. Timeline View is a Gantt-style project view that displays all of your tasks in a horizontal bar chart. Not only can you see each task’s start and end date, but you can also see dependencies between tasks. With Timeline View, you can easily track how the pieces of your plan fit together. Plus, when you can see all of your work in one place, it’s easy to identify and address dependency conflicts before they start, so you can hit all of your goals on schedule. 

• Goals. Goals in Asana directly connect to the work you’re doing to hit them, making it easy for team members to see what they’re working towards. More often than not, our goals live separate from the work that goes into achieving them. By connecting your team and company goals to the work that supports them, team members have real-time insight and clarity into how their work directly contributes to your team—and company—success. As a result, team members can make better decisions. If necessary, they can identify the projects that support the company’s strategy and prioritize work that delivers measurable results.

• List View. List View is a grid-style view that makes it easy to see all of your project’s information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all of your tasks at once so you can not only see task titles and due dates, but also view any relevant custom fields like Priority, Status, or more. Unlock effortless collaboration by giving your entire team visibility into who’s doing what by when.

Recommended apps

• Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

• Salesforce. Remove bottlenecks by enabling sales, customer success, and service teams to communicate directly with their support teams in Asana. Share attachments and create actionable, trackable tasks for pre-sales needs. With Service Cloud, connect your implementation and service teams with supporting teams in Asana to deliver amazing customer experiences.

• Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox. 

• Outlook. As action items come in via email, like reviewing work from your agency or a request for design assets from a partner, you can now create tasks for them in Asana right from Outlook. You can then assign the new task to yourself or a teammate, set a due date, and add it to a project so it’s connected to other relevant work. 

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