With the arrival of 2015, Carnival approaching and your marketing goals already set, the timing could not be more conducive to put into practice other action that will support your strategy throughout the year. We are talking about a calendar to schedule your email marketing campaigns without leaving a blank space to any significant date for your company and your customers.

Without proper planning and organization, you have no control and you can end up losing opportunities to progress and to achieve your goals throughout the year. To help you put your actions in order, we prepare five steps you can follow to create your email marketing calendar for 2015.

1. Write a review of the past year

The best way to start your schedule is by evaluating the strategy you applied to email marketing campaigns in 2014, especially those who have worked and brought satisfactory results. This is easy to achieve if you followed its progress over the past year, reviewing and comparing reports, open rates, clicks and conversions.

Additionally, consider what content had greater impact, which days and times generated more interactions and make an analysis of the whole thing to evaluate your performance. If you outlined goals for 2014, ask yourself if they were hit. If so, list which led to its success. If not, list what may not have worked as well.

2. Set goals to achieve during 2015

Before creating the calendar you need to establish a guide to follow. Do you want to win more customers? Do you want to increase sales? Do you want to expand your contact list?

Last week, we showed the importance of setting goals and deadlines to meet them throughout the year. There you will find five goals to start developing your email marketing planning for 2015. With this well-defined, it’s easier to measure the results of actions and to identify more precisely the way to go forward in the coming months. Remember to consider realistic goals and strive to achieve them.

3. Set the sequence to send emails

To optimize your planning, think of the frequency to send the email marketing campaigns during the year. If you tested the most effective days and hours in 2014 it's time to apply them in 2015. After all, you want to be remembered by your contacts list, but you don’t want to bother them or stop into the trash, much less add by unsubscribes.

If you are still not sure about best days, hours and how often you should send campaigns do some testing to find the right model for your business and your customers. The most important is to keep the relationship with your contact base. They will thank you for that.

4. Prepare a selection of important dates

Since you're already preparing your schedule for the year, why not increase it with dates that can be attached to a special campaign? There are several opportunities such as birthdays, holidays, news, release of new products or services, vacations or any other event that you consider special or relevant to your customers.

You can set the frequency taking this into account to give proper spacing between an email and others. With selected dates, think about deadlines to prepare the content and to check the calendar for each message, considering the time you will need for it to be ready, to be tested and subsequently to be sent.

5. Start preparing the content for campaigns

Before finishing the schedule, start to leave the content ready with some anticipation. We’re not speaking about text or images, but about the topics that will be covered throughout the year. Create a schedule with likely topics and dates for the publication of each one.

Not sure where to start? Start with the most obvious and accurate. Write content for holidays and special events. Set the sending in advance so that the campaign will be more effective. For example, you should offer Easter chocolates at least one month before the holiday for your clients.

If you still don’t have it, create a file with ideas of topics that can be worked on 2015. This will help you to fill the gaps in your calendar, besides providing content for the present and to be reused in the future.

By completing these five steps, your email marketing planning for 2015 is going to happen and bring even more effective results. Enjoy the year to evaluate your progress through the analysis of reports and, if required, apply changes. The calendar serves as the basis for your planning, but it can be changed whenever necessary.

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