Setting up an effective plan for your marketing schedule may seem like a daunting task, but we’re here to show you how simple it can be! Below we’ve laid out a step-by-step guide on how to set up your marketing calendar for 2018.

Tools you’ll need:
• A blank spreadsheet (we recommend Google Sheets, but any editable simple spreadsheet program will do)
• 2018 Calendar
• Product analytics (we’ve found it to be most effective to promote your top-selling products/brand – this will drive your customers to actually open the email and visit your site)

Step One:
Open up your spreadsheet program and format a blank sheet to look something like this (shown in Google Sheets):

You ideally want to be sending out a promotion at least once a week so you’ll need 4-5 rows for each month. If you alternate colors for each month it’s very easy to differentiate between them and keep them organized. Also, be sure to reference your 2018 calendar and input any upcoming holidays!

There are varying recommendations for what day of the week to send out promotions, but we’ve found any day Tuesday-Thursday to be most effective, especially for weekend sales events.

Step Two:
Review your order analytics and see which products/brand are the most popular. It’s also helpful to review which pages on your site are visited the most – this indicates where your customers are ending up and will help you determine which pages to promote in your marketing calendar.

Step Three:
Start filling in the blank spaces! Since we don’t know your product like you do, we can’t tell you which discounts or products to promote specifically but we can give you a general idea of what we’d do if we were you:

Our clients have found combining discounted promotions with non-sale ones to be the most effective. Your audience will grow weary of seeing almost exactly the same promotion rolling out week after week so changing it up with varying messaging/sales is a good way to keep them engaged with your brand.

And just like that, you’re done! Three simple steps later and you have a month of fabulous promotions planned out and ready to hand over to your graphics team. If you don’t have one of those you are in luck because we’ve got a great one! Get in touch with us today if you’d like help with your 2018 marketing calendar.