Email Marketing Planning Calendar for 2023

Keep track of your year-round emails in one place. This email marketing planning template will provide any team member with all the details they need about any email, from subject lines and email designs to tracking metrics.

Find the 2023 Holiday Calendar that can inspire your next campaign.

In this free planning calendar, you’ll find:

• List of all holidays, celebrations, and events in 2023
• Quarterly Email Performance Tracking
• Email Planning Calendar and Metric Reporting

How to successfully plan your email marketing campaigns for 2023?

Planning ahead for your email marketing campaigns allows you to control the outcome of each campaign, optimize your efforts, and ensure that you don’t miss any engagement or conversion opportunities with your audience.

It’s also a bulletproof way to manage and minimize your stress levels. No one wants to start the new year feeling unprepared and overwhelmed!

In this short post, we will walk you through the main steps to successfully plan your email marketing campaigns for 2023.

1. Define your goals based on your target audience

Each project you work on or plan should have a specific goal. The email campaigns you decide to send should also each have a specific goal you want to achieve. Your blog newsletters for example are sent to promote your articles and increase traffic on the blog. Your promotional emails have the goal of recommending certain products/services and boosting sales.

Your transactional emails are sent with the purpose of enhancing the customers’ experience with your brand and maintaining factual communication with them regarding their purchases.

For the first step of your email marketing strategy planning, you should take the time to think about what types of emails you want/need to send in 2023 and why.

a. Match your company’s business and marketing objectives

A good rule is to refer to the company’s business objectives, then your marketing objectives from which you will be able to clearly define your email marketing objectives. Every structure and activity held within the company should be coherent and serve the same purpose.

While brainstorming your email marketing goals, try answering the following questions:

• Is there a new product launch planned for 2023?
• Do you have a specific product you need to push this year?
• Do you have a blog or certain website you need to highlight?
• Is the marketing team planning to launch any sales this year?
• Ìs your company participating in or organizing any events, conferences, or webinars?

You can already start specifying 1 goal per question.

👉 It’s crucial to collaborate with other departments in the company (especially the product team), who should share their vision and planning of new features and products for the upcoming year.

b. Take your audience into consideration

Another rule is to always keep in mind the type of audience you are planning the campaign for. Small organizations will usually have only one large email list. However, bigger organizations can have multiple lists, segmented by the type of use, their location, gender, engagement levels, etc.

Here’s an example of what your brainstorming session should result in:

2. Define your success metrics

We’ve all heard of SMART goals: your objectives must be specific, relevant, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

If you want to determine whether or not your email campaigns have been successful, you must first choose the metrics you’ll be evaluating and specify a measurable goal to reach after a specific amount of time, post-send.

We’ll take one of the email campaign examples we have listed in section 1:

There are many resources that can help guide you in setting your measurable objectives.

👉 Look at your industry’s average open and click-through rates and check your previous campaigns’ metrics.

3. Draft your email campaign ideas with roughly specified send dates

Now comes the fun part! Now that you gave a vision of what types of emails you need to send, you can move on to preparing a rough draft of how many / which emails you want to send out per campaign and when.

You are basically breaking down each campaign into mini emails.

We recommend following the backward planning method: let’s say you have a product launch scheduled for the 17th of August 2023. Start off with a product announcement email on that date and plan the email campaigns you’ll send leading up to that date. And of course, you can enrich your campaign with post-announcement emails.

Let’s continue with our example:

You can then continue putting together your email calendar following this logic. Some email campaigns will be easier to predict/plan than others:

👉 Don’t forget to track what emails your competition sent out last year!

🗓 If you want to spice your email plan for 2023 and add a little fun, check out our full list of 2023 Holidays and events. You’ll find it in Sheet 3 of our Email marketing planning calendar 2023.

🗓 In Sheet 4 to Sheet 15, you’ll find a detailed calendar of each month in 2023. This will allow you to visualize your planned campaigns easily.

🗓 On Sheet 1, you can add more details for each campaign / month, by filling the following columns:

• Campaign Name
• Team/Person Responsible
• Email Send Date
• Email Send Time
• Email Type
• Email Description
• Email Subject Line
• Email Preview Text
• Emailing List Name
• Progress

4. Validate your email marketing calendar with your manage

Once you finish your email marketing calendar for 2023, it’s important to run it through your team and get it validated by your manager! Collect feedback and then iterate your planning.
Once you’re sure that you have the final version of your 2023 email planning calendar, it’s time to move on to the next and final step!

👉 Despite your best planning efforts, unexpected circumstances will definitely come up and you would have to add a new campaign last-minute or get rid of an already-planned campaign. Don’t worry about it, and remember to be flexible!

5. Start producing your email designs and copywriting

Now that you have validated your email marketing planning calendar, you need to start mass-producing your emails. It might sound like a huge task. The key is to work smarter, not harder!

You can create the most commonly used content blocks in your emails that you and your team can simply reuse for any email, regardless of the campaign type. For example, you can create and save the email headers and footers, two types of email master blocks, a blog article block, etc.

The goal is to enumerate and create all the main blocks that you use the most in your emails, or what we call an email design system!

We have already written a detailed post on how to set up your company’s email design system. This method will help you optimize your productivity and your time.

But more exciting than that: did you know that Chamaileon’s email editor was specifically built for teams? This means that we have put together a list of features that are meant to make your life easier:

• You can create, save, and reuse as many email blocks as needed.
• You can set up your company’s branding guidelines (logo, colors, fonts, links) in your company’s workspace. This way, you are sure to always have your brand’s resources at hand.
• You can organize your company’s virtual workspace by folder: this way, you create a fold for every campaign and keep your email designs organized.
• You can invite your team members to your company’s workspace, and restrict their access to certain folders, and limit their permissions to only view or edit emails. Editors can also be restricted to design edits or text edits only.

Bonus step. Keep track of your performance!

Congratulations 🎉 You have completed your Email marketing planning for 2023! That took a lot of effort, but it will all pay off when you see how successful your email campaigns are, and how much impact they have had on your business!
To be able to showcase your email’s performance and their tangible impact on business goals, it’s crucial to keep track of the performance of each one. Remember those measurable metrics we established in Step 2? It’s now time to look back at them and compare them with the actual results.

🗓 In Sheet 1 of our Email marketing planning calendar 2023, you can keep track of each email’s performance and compare it with your target metrics.