Developing an editorial calendar for your marketing emails can improve their relevancy and reduce inbox overload. Acxiom Digital's director of marketing strategy explains.
Chances are that if you pick up an automotive magazine in July, you will find an article about convertibles. Teen-focused magazines have lots of articles about proms in May and June. Homemaker magazines feature Thanksgiving recipes in November.
Experience has taught magazine publishers and editors that consumers care about certain subjects at predictable times of the year. They codify this tendency in their editorial calendars, a 6- to 18-month running plan of what articles they will feature over time.
Email marketers can learn from this practice by developing an editorial calendar of their own to take advantage of naturally occurring periods of consumer interest. And, like publishers, email marketers can benefit by using this timing to make emails more relevant to consumers.
Editorial calendars help reduce churn
Most email marketers recognize the consequences of over-mailing their databases. Response rates dwindle. SPAM complaints and unsubscribes grow. The number of silent unsubscribes -- people who do not opt-out but do not open or click either -- grows. Editorial calendars help keep the members of an email database involved with timely content, thus reducing the risk of over-mailing.
Speaking of over-mailing; every marketer should have an understanding of how much email his or her database can accept before they feel over-mailed and begin to tune the emails out. The number of emails is not absolute. Each category, perhaps even each brand, has a number of emails that works for it. Moreover, different segments within a brand may have more or less interest in receiving emails. Ultimately, only testing can determine the right number of emails. However, email marketers should have a good estimate of how many emails they can send based on how often members of their databases think about the brand.
In addition to increasing relevance, editorial calendars help email marketers accommodate the needs of multiple stakeholders by making room for them. In looking ahead six or more months, the email marketer can identify times or opportunities for which he or she simply must send email, such as new product launches or major sales. These mandated emails form a sort of skeleton for the email calendar around which the email marketer can place the flesh of less urgent communications. In other words, a marketer can take the total number of emails to be sent over a year, subtract the number of must-send emails and use the rest to help meet communications objectives for other stakeholders.
Developing the calendar's skeleton
As noted above, the calendar should start with must-haves. In a previous article, we discussed integrating email with other marketing communications such as TV campaigns, direct mail and, of course, the website. Truly major communications efforts (new TV campaign, catalog drop, website redesign) merit supporting email launches as well.
Many companies develop general marketing calendars that serve to coordinate marketing communications and events across brands and/or channels. These general marketing calendars serve as a great start for email editorial calendars as the former tend to highlight important moments in the marketing year, which makes it even easier to time email launches. Email marketers with access to a general marketing calendar should look to it first as a basis for the email editorial calendar.
In addition to supporting other communications, the email calendar should include other major brand overtures of interest to consumers or customers. The marketer needs to ask, "What would a consumer or customer really consider to be news?" So planned events like a new logo probably do not make the cut, but events like a new customer support website almost certainly do.
For everything, there is a season
Beyond new product launches or other obvious events, what can the marketer do to flesh out the email editorial calendar? To answer that question, marketers need only pay attention to what their customers pay attention to.
Starting from the most general level, marketers should consider seasonality. Think of the convertibles in July and the Thanksgiving recipes in November mentioned above. In some cases, this seasonality has become ingrained in category and even consumer consciousness. No one needs to tell a retailer to crank up the promotion for a holiday; every travel marketer gears up for summer.
However, other more subtle forms of seasonality exist. September does not just mean back to school for retailers and a new TV season for the networks. It also marks a time when people resume their normal schedule, which makes it a good time to pitch a product or service as a fresh start. Similarly, consumers tend to go into a sort of hibernation in the latter half of January and February. Emails sent during that time can focus on the home and indoor activities.
As an exercise, an email marketer should look at an actual calendar and try to imagine what consumers do in each month that relates to the brand. The trick here is not to stretch too much; just because it rains a lot in April does not mean that auto manufacturers should send out an email about windshield wipers.
When not to email
Marketers must also recognize times when emails simply will not have much of an effect. On a tactical level, marketers need to test which day of week works best for particular brands. In deference to the surprising amount of ink spilled on the top of day-of-week, we will not discuss the topic further except to note that best day-of-week will generally change over time, so smart emailers test frequently.
Over the long term, say 12 months, email marketers should identify times when email will not work well for them and avoid sending at those times. Almost all retailers mail more heavily in December, so non-retailers should consider reducing frequency then to avoid getting lost in the traffic. Public holidays that form three- and four-day weekends similarly yield reduced response to email
Of course, each category or brand has its own set of no-go dates. However, just because most Americans leave their bicycles in the garage in the winter does not necessarily mean that bicycle manufacturers should cease between Christmas and spring. A few emails during down time can help keep the consumer involved.
B2B editorial calendars
Business-to-business email marketers can also take advantage of the editorial calendar approach. Businesses make seasonal decisions just as consumers do. For instance, most companies get very busy towards the end of their fiscal quarters, so email marketers should know not to use those time slots. Fortunately, many companies use either the calendar quarters or an industry-standard quarter systems (e.g., retailers' fiscal years often begin in February), which makes timing a little easier.
B2B consumers also tend to pay attention to major industry events such as trade shows. Even if the email marketer has no trade show-specific information to share, he or she can still take advantage of the heightened interest in the category with a well-timed email. Individual industries may have unique seasonal opportunities of which the email marketer should be aware.
Editorial calendars and segmentation
Before closing, we should address the issue of how a broad-based editorial calendar can work with segmentation strategies. The answer, of course, is an absolutely unequivocal "it depends." Remember, the editorial calendar exists to help drive relevance. Most segmentation strategies also exist to drive the relevance of the email. The marketer must ultimately decide for himself or herself when or if the relevance of the editorial calendar supersedes that of the segmentation strategy.
Of course, the two approaches need not exclude each other. Using dynamic content, a marketer can incorporate both calendar-based and segment-based content. In short, testing will reveal which approach or combination of approaches best helps the marketer meet his or her objectives.
In all, marketers should not regard email editorial calendars as set in stone. Clearly, opportunities arise that demand an email launch. However, by charting out email ahead of time, the marketer can ensure that he or she takes advantage of as many fertile periods for email as is possible while preventing inbox overload to the database.
Ben Rothfeld is director of marketing strategy for Acxiom Digital. Read full bio.
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