When you are planning the long-term goals for your email marketing campaign, consider the frequency of your messaging and prepare an editorial calendar.

Editorial calendars, when planned correctly, allow you to get an overall view of the year and will provide enough insight to make changes and adjustments to your planned sends. You also have the ability to lay out your testing plan, approval dates and deadlines for content.

Let’s discuss a hypothetical email newsletter that is scheduled to be sent on the Third Wednesday of each month. As straight forward as it seems, when it’s laid out on a calendar, you may find that you need to make small adjustments to your send days. For example, the third Wednesday in November is the day before Thanksgiving. This is not the best day to send an email newsletter. On one of the busiest travel days of the year, you can assume that at a good portion of your subscribers will be traveling and your email may end up buried in the inbox.

By planning your editorial calendar in advance you can see early on that the November send should move to the second Wednesday in November. Content due dates, testing and approvals can all be adjusted accordingly to remove the potential for the fire drill that may have occurred without proper preparation.

Source: EmailMarketingVoodoo