Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Effective Email Marketing Calendar With Klaviyo.

Email campaigns offer numerous benefits for scaling eCommerce brands, including raising brand awareness, increasing traffic, driving revenue, announcing news, and collecting customer feedback.

From our experience, maintaining a consistent calendar is crucial for keeping your email newsletter cadence on track. Creating an email campaign calendar involves careful planning, organization, and adherence to key systems. We highly recommend setting one up and do so for all of our clients.

An email marketing calendar offers a variety of benefits. Here are some common ones we see:

• Keeps eCommerce marketing teams organized.

• Facilitates better ideation and collaboration.

• Improves workflow and saves time.

• Enhances feedback loops with key stakeholders.

• Avoid overlap and miscommunications.

• Allows teams to stay adaptable and pivot faster.

We recommend starting with a standardized template. The easiest way to get started is to build one in Excel or Google Sheets. Here are the columns we suggest using:

• Approved: Tracks whether the entire team has approved the email for sending.

• Send Date: Records the date the email is scheduled to be sent.

• Send Day: Indicates the day of the week the email will be sent.

• Revenue: Optional column for tracking revenue if you use the calendar for reporting.

• Target Audience: Specifies the audience or segment intended for the email.

• Angle / Theme: Defines the theme or angle of the email (e.g., product launch, FAQ).

• Goal: Outlines the goal of the email (e.g., increase sales, drive traffic).

• Products: Lists any products that will be featured in the email.

• Discount Code: Indicates if a discount code is included and whether it is live.

• Notes: Provides space for any additional miscellaneous information.

For more advanced marketing teams, we recommend integrating this process into your task management software. At FlowCandy, we use ClickUp, but tools like Asana, Trello, and Monday.com are also effective.

By incorporating the process into a task management system, you can standardize each campaign with an SOP or checklist. This helps ensure that the team follows a consistent process for every campaign, reducing the likelihood of mistakes.

Some teams plan a year in advance, but even planning 30-90 days ahead puts you ahead of many marketing teams. We often find that teams get stuck here due to difficulty coming up with campaign ideas. We have several tips for quickly generating campaign ideas. Here are some insights we’ve learned along the way.

Use Common Campaign Angles

To get started, focus on determining the types of campaign themes and angles you want to use over the next few months. From our experience, there are over 12 different types of campaigns you can send. You can scroll through our playbook above for more details, but here’s a quick overview of the types, which we refer to as angles:

• Content Campaigns

• Promotional Campaigns

• Product Launch Campaigns

• Back in Stock Campaigns

• FAQ Campaigns

• Replenishment Campaigns

• Gift Card Campaigns

• Product or Collection Focused Campaigns

• Social Proof Campaigns

• Survey Campaigns

• Winback Campaigns

• Warmup Campaigns

Add In Holidays & Special Promos

Another pro tip is to plan campaigns around major holidays relevant to your brand. While you don’t need to create a campaign for every holiday, focusing on key ones can be highly effective. Holidays are excellent opportunities for special promotions that can drive substantial revenue.

We’ve found that during major promotion periods (e.g., Black Friday, 4th of July, Valentine’s Day), email newsletters and campaigns often generate significant revenue. For additional inspiration, Stripo offers a comprehensive email marketing calendar.

Product Launches & Important Announcements

One way to quickly map out a campaign calendar is to review your product road map and identify the products you plan to launch throughout the year.

These product launches can serve as promotional campaigns, allowing you to allocate 1-5 emails for each product launch.

For example, if you plan to launch 5 new products this year, you could theoretically add 5-25 emails to your calendar.

Using Competition For Inspiration

Another way to find inspiration for your campaign calendar is to analyze your competition. Tools like Milled.com or MailCharts.com let you monitor your competitors' emails.

For example, with Milled, you can review what specific competitors were doing in July 2024. If you own a supplement company and are planning your campaign calendar for July 2024, you can check Milled.com to see what Bulletproof did last July for ideas.

Brands often encounter roadblocks with campaign calendar planning, particularly around segmentation. Common issues include determining which segments to target, which to exclude, and how to build these segments. Here’s how to address these challenges:

Start With Foundational Segmentation

We normally tell our clients to start with foundational segmentation with their campaign calendar.

What are the foundational email marketing segments?

• 30 Day Engaged = This is a segment I can use to send to subscribers who have opened and clicked in the last 30 days.

• 60 Day Engaged = This is a segment I can use to send to subscribers who have opened and clicked in the last 60 days.

• 90 Day Engaged = This is a segment I can use to send to subscribers who have opened and clicked in the last 90 days.

• All Customers = This is a segment that tracks anyone who has placed an order over all time.

• New Subscribers = Anyone who has joined in the last 30 days.

Depending on your segmentation strategy, we recommend starting with a mix of the following segments.

Engaged segmentation targets only subscribers who are actively opening and clicking on your emails, helping to protect your domain reputation.

However, there are times when reaching out to those who haven’t opened your emails in the last 30-90 days can be beneficial. In these cases, we suggest focusing on new subscribers or previous customers.

Advanced Segmentation

More advanced brands can incorporate sophisticated segmentation techniques. At FlowCandy, advanced segmentation often involves segments based on the customer journey, specific lifecycle stages, or more granular details such as location or traffic source. Here are a few examples of common advanced segments we build:

• Product Specific Customers = Customers who bought X product.

• One Time Customers = Customers who have only placed order once.

• Repeat Customers = Customers who have placed order twice.

• VIPs = Customers who have placed orders more than 3 times.

• Churned Customers = Customers who have not bought in the past 90+ days.

• Active Subs = Customers who are on an active paying subscription.

• Lapsed Subscribers = Customers who canceled their subscription and are no longer active.

There are many other examples of advanced segmentation we've implemented for clients. It all depends on your business’s unique customer journey and creating segments tailored to that.

Using “Define with AI” in Klaviyo To Build Segmentation

Marketing teams can sometimes get stuck with segmentation due to confusion over how to build it. The various “ANDs” and “ORs,” triggers, and filters can be overwhelming, even for experienced Klaviyo users.

One way to simplify this is to use Klaviyo's “Define with AI” feature. This tool allows you to prompt Klaviyo to build segments for you. While you’ll still need to review the logic, it’s a quick and effective way to generate segments. Here’s more info on Segments AI inside Klaviyo.

Even with a planned calendar, built segments, and everything in place, marketing teams often struggle to deploy campaigns. This usually stems from a lack of structured systems. To keep your campaigns on track, we recommend implementing three key systems: a new campaign checklist, a weekly tactical call, and a simple reporting document.

New Campaign Checklist

Once you start deploying campaigns, it's essential to create a standard operating procedure (SOP) or checklist for the team to follow. This helps keep the team organized, ensures quality control, and minimizes the risk of major mistakes that could affect your brand’s image or customer experience.

Here’s the new campaign checklist we use at FlowCandy for all our clients. We manage it with ClickUp, but you can use any task management tool. The workflow includes developing the strategy, wireframing the campaign, writing the copy, designing assets, coding the email templates, performing quality control checks, building segmentation, and finally deploying the campaign.

Weekly Tactical Call

Here’s an example marketing agenda that we’ve found is really effective at keeping marketing teams aligned.

Do you and your marketing team have a weekly tactical call where you review your marketing goals, marketing calendar, certain KPIs and plan out the week ahead? We’ve found adding this ensures that everyone is aligned and stays on track.

Reporting

Accurate reporting is crucial for keeping your campaigns on track and ensuring they contribute to your store’s revenue growth. Marketing teams often face challenges in this area. Here are some insights and pro tips we've learned:

Start with Klaviyo Dashboards. They’re free and included with Klaviyo, and they eliminate the need to build reports each week—a common struggle for many brands. Additionally, using Klaviyo Dashboards reduces the risk of human error and incorrect data entry, as it automates reporting and minimizes manual input.

Sometimes brands need to use manual reports, especially for key leadership stakeholders who may not have access to Klaviyo. We recommend keeping these reports simple so that key leaders who are not familiar with the channel can quickly understand the situation. Here are some important metrics worth tracking:

• Total channel revenue

• SMS revenue

• Email revenue

• Flow revenue

• Campaign revenue

• New email subscribers added

• New sms subscribers added

• Unsubscribes

• Open rates

• CTRs

If you need to get more advanced with your reporting, consider using a value chain report. This type of report tracks secondary metrics related to your customer journey and lifetime value (LTV) and assigns certain team members ownership of a KPI. Note that this is suitable for advanced stores and is the next step after mastering basic KPIs like open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and revenue.