Email calendar

What an email calendar is

An email calendar is a sending plan: a dated list of every commercial email leaving your business over the next quarter, with the day it sends, the segment that receives it, what it is about, and the gap between it and the send before it. It also records how consent was obtained for each part of the list, and what the unsubscribe and identification lines say.

It is not a plan for what you publish. A content calendar covers everything going out across every channel; an editorial calendar covers the blog and who is writing which post. This one covers the inbox. If you publish across four channels and email is one of them, you want the content calendar and this sits inside it. If email is your only channel, this is the only calendar you need.

It is also not the writing. The calendar says a re-engagement email goes to the quiet part of the list on the second Tuesday in March. Somebody still has to write it.

Who this is for

A business that sends email without a plan, which usually shows up as two emails in one week and then nothing for two months. The list was built over years from several places, nobody is sure which addresses came from where, and every send goes to everyone because segmenting is a job nobody has had time to do.

The second case is a business that sends often enough but has started to hear about it: rising unsubscribes, a customer mentioning they get a lot from you, or a sequence that collided with a launch and sent one person three emails in a day.

You do not need this if you send one email a month to one list and nothing else. Keep the dates in your diary and put the money into the issues themselves. The calendar earns its price once there is more than one kind of email and more than one kind of reader.

What goes in it

• Frequency, decided honestly. Not how often you would like to send, but how often you can write something worth opening. A fortnightly email you keep beats a weekly one that becomes filler by week five.
• The gap between sends. A minimum number of days between any two emails reaching the same person, applied across everything: the newsletter, the automated sequences, the launches, the invoicing reminders if they carry an offer.
• The segments. Who gets what. Customers and prospects rarely want the same email. New subscribers already have the welcome sequence running and should be held out of the newsletter until it finishes.
• The consent record. Where each part of the list came from, what the person agreed to at the time, and what evidence exists. Addresses with no answer to that are dealt with separately and carefully.
• The standing lines. The identification block naming the business with a real mailing address and a working way to contact you, and the unsubscribe link, on every commercial email.

Three requirements of Canadian anti-spam law shape all of this, and the calendar is built inside them. Consent: you need permission before sending, whether given expressly or arising from an existing business relationship, and you need a record of it. Identification: every message says who is sending it, and on behalf of whom if that differs, with a mailing address and a way to reach you. Unsubscribe: a working mechanism in every message, honoured promptly, and easy enough that nobody has to reply to find it.

I will not write to a list whose members did not consent. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Where a question is genuinely a legal one, and questions about implied consent and its expiry often are, I will say so and tell you to ask one.

What you get

The calendar. One sheet covering thirteen weeks: every send with its date, its segment, its subject, and its type. Automated sequences are shown as bands across the weeks so you can see where they overlap a dated send.

The rules page. One page naming the minimum gap, the caps per segment, the standing identification and unsubscribe lines, and what happens to a subscriber who has not opened anything in six months.

The list note. A short document recording where each segment came from, which parts have a clean consent record, which do not, and what I suggest doing about the ones that do not.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Saskatoon equipment dealer has about four thousand addresses: buyers going back eleven years, a trade show list from two summers ago, a service-reminder list, and everyone who ever downloaded a specification sheet. Every email goes to all four thousand.

The calendar splits them into three segments and holds the trade show list aside entirely, because nobody can say what those people agreed to. Buyers get one email a month about running what they bought. Prospects get one a month about choosing. The service list gets dated reminders and nothing else, with ten days minimum between any two messages to one address. Two launch windows are marked out in spring and autumn, and the newsletter pauses in both rather than competing. The rules page says nobody receives more than three commercial emails in any thirty days. Thirteen weeks, three segments, one number tracked.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you send now, how the list was built, what platform it lives in, and what has gone wrong. No charge.
2. Access. Read access to your sending platform, or an export of the segments and the last year of sends, and whatever signup forms are live on your site.
3. The work. Four to six working days. Most of it is reading the list and its history rather than filling in dates.
4. The review. A call of about an hour to walk the calendar, argue about frequency, and mark the dates that are wrong.
5. Delivery. The final calendar, the rules page and the list note, in a format you can edit. Revised quarterly if you want that.

What it costs

An email calendar is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because a single list of six hundred addresses and a four-segment list with automated sequences running are different amounts of reading. The pricing page shows the four ways of working and how quoting runs where there is no published band. The number is agreed in writing before anything starts. Quarterly revisions are priced separately and are much smaller.

What happens next

A calendar shows you the dates and immediately raises the question of who writes what sits on them. Usually that is the regular issue and, twice a year, a launch sequence in the windows the calendar has cleared. Where the list note found a large quiet segment, the next job is a campaign to wake it or let it go. And where the sequences exist on paper but not in the platform, that is building and wiring them up. The calendar is complete work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.