An email calendar is essential if you email your list regularly or once you start a newsletter. Especially if your goal is to have your newsletter provide you a revenue stream. Or promote your own or affiliate products via the newsletter.
At first, you may be able to come up with ideas to write the emails spontaneously, but as your list grows, things can get more complicated.
That’s why you should plan an email calendar.
Here are some of the benefits an email calendar provides.
- Consistency — Planning your emails ensures that your audience hears from you regularly, which helps maintain brand presence and builds trust.
- Strategic Planning — Rather than sending emails on a whim, a calendar allows you to be intentional with your messaging, aligning your emails with broader marketing goals.
- Time Management — Instead of scrambling to create content at the last minute, a calendar helps streamline the process, saving you time and reducing stress and overwhelm.
- Serves Your Audience Better — Serving your audience increases engagement, leads to more clicks, builds trust, and higher conversions and ROI.
Now, let’s look at the steps to plan an email calendar.
Step 1. Determine Your Revenue Goal
Often, it is difficult to determine success if you don’t have clear goals.
With an email calendar, the first step is determining your revenue goal.
Understanding your revenue goals starts by calculating your monthly expenses. This calculation gives you a specific dollar amount you will need to earn to cover your costs. This is the minimum amount you will need to earn.
(And regardless of whether you have a newsletter yet, following this exercise will help you with your copywriting business.)
Here is a simple way to calculate your monthly expenses.
- Calculate Both Fixed and Variable Expenses
For simplicity, there are two different types of business expenses you need to calculate.
- Fixed Expenses
Fixed expenses are business expenses that remain the same each month.
This can include office rent, any software you pay for monthly like a scheduling calendar, social media software, email software, video storage, website hosting, or any software that helps you with writing, like Grammarly. Plus, any other expenses that recur each month, like cell phone and internet fees.
Make a list of all of your fixed business expenses.
These expenses remain the same and recur monthly or annually, so put them on this list with the cost.
Also, make sure you pay yourself a salary. As the owner of your business, you should earn a salary for your work.
- Variable Expenses
These are business expenses that change each month.
These are expenses like the cost of goods sold, travel expenses, marketing and advertising expenses, office supplies, etc.
Ideally, use a spreadsheet to calculate the fixed and variable costs for the month. Add both together to get the total expenses for the month.
For this example, say your fixed expenses are $1,500 plus your $5,000 salary a month. This equals $6,500 in fixed costs.
Now, add the variable costs to give you the total expenses. For this example, we’ll say the variable expenses total $1,000.
So $6,500 + $1,000 = $7,500. The total monthly expenses are $7,500.
This may seem like a lot of expenses, but remember, $5,000 of that is your salary.
- Add a Profit Margin
Once you have your total monthly expenses, add a profit margin.
It can be 20% or 30% (or any number you want) over your expenses.
For example, here is the formula: Expenses x Profit Margin: $7,500 x 1.3 (30% profit margin) = $9,750.
$9,750 is the revenue goal for the month.
Once you have your revenue goal, now you can calculate how much you need to earn each week and each day.
To calculate the weekly goal, divide the revenue goal by the number of weeks in the month.
The weekly goal would be $9,750 / 4 (weeks) = $2,437.50.
This is the amount of revenue needed to reach the monthly goal.
For the daily goal, divide the revenue goal by the number of days in the month.
The daily goal would be $9,750 / 30 (days) = $325
Knowing these numbers will help you stay on track to reach your monthly goal.
If you are just starting, these numbers may seem like a lot, but remember, you can adjust your salary and the profit margin.
Step 2. Decide on the Products You Are Going to Promote
Once you know your revenue goal, decide what products you will promote.
Maybe you will promote your own course one week, an affiliate course the next, a special report leading to a webinar, and finally a workshop.
Choose products so you can reach your revenue goal.
For this step, I created a simple worksheet to help me forecast how many I need to sell of each product to reach my revenue goal.
This stage is not an exact science. Instead, the purpose is to estimate how many of each product you need to sell to reach your revenue goal.
Step 3. Choose the Assets to Promote Each Product
Once you know which products you are promoting, you need to decide what assets you will need to promote each product.
Some assets may be reports, promotional email campaigns, newsletter articles, landing pages, sales pages, webinars, etc.
If you are promoting affiliate products, the product owner should provide most of the assets. You might tweak the emails provided or write your own emails for the product.
If you are promoting your own products, then you will need to create the assets.
For this stage, I use a Word document that lists each week of the month. I write down the product’s name, how many emails I am sending, and what assets I will use to promote the product.
This worksheet helps me organize the products and the promotions. Also, it makes planning the calendar much easier.
Step 4. Plan the Calendar
When planning the calendar, I get very specific on what I need to reach the revenue goal.
I try to cover all the expenses by the 10th of the month.
I do not achieve this goal every month, but I try to reach it.
If all of the expenses are covered by the 10th, then the rest of the revenue earned throughout the month is profit.
I use the Word document from Step 3 to start placing the products I am promoting on specific calendar dates.
For instance, Week 1 might promote a course with a newsletter and three promotional emails, looking like this:
- Tuesday: the newsletter.
- Wednesday: promo email #1.
- Thursday: promo email #2.
- Sunday night: promo email #3.
I put each of these on their specific dates on the calendar.
I do this for each week of the month.
For the email calendar, over the years, I have used planners, paper calendars, whiteboard calendars in my office with Post-it® notes, a Google spreadsheet, and a Google Calendar. Today, I use Asana for the email calendar.
Each method worked. It just depends on your personal preference. More important than what you use for your email calendar is to start planning it.
Step 5. Track Results
I track a lot of metrics for email, including open rates, clicks, and revenue. For this article, we will focus on the revenue.
Remember, we set a monthly revenue goal, but also calculated a weekly, and a daily goal.
I do the same for actual revenue.
I track revenue daily, weekly, monthly, and annually.
Tracking revenue each day, for the week, and month-to-date lets me compare the revenue goal to the actual revenue.
This allows me to make adjustments to the calendar to reach the goals.
Step 6. Adjust the Calendar Based on Results
Comparing the revenue goals to actual revenue lets me adjust to ensure I hit my goal.
If actual revenue is underperforming revenue goals, I can adjust the calendar.
Maybe I send more emails, or change a product being promoted. Or I may add another affiliate product to promote, or I can sell a dedicated email for an open day with no emails scheduled. Maybe, I promote a proven product with predictable results to reach the goals.
I often use the last week of the month to test new things. Sometimes, breakthroughs happen during this week. I think of this week as a wild card week for promoting products.
Advocating for your promotional partners is also critical. If I promise someone I will promote them, then I lock those dates on the calendar.
The key is to be creative to reach your goals and to have fun.
You Must Advocate for Your Subscribers
Finally, you must advocate for the subscribers on your list.
Only promote products that will benefit your subscribers. Also, if you promote an affiliate offer, ensure the affiliate sells a high-quality product, values your subscribers, and offers good customer support.
Finally, by planning your email calendar and tracking your results, you can reach your revenue goals and have more fun and free time.
Plus, you will enhance your skills and confidence as a business owner and a copywriter.
