Email Marketing Calendar 2023/24: the new MailUp template to plan your strategy

A +15% increase in average open rates for 2022/23 compared to 2020, and an unsubscribe rate that has dropped from 0.7% (still a good result) to 0.08%: these have been the results of our strategy since adopting a new approach based on an Email Marketing Calendar with strategic dates and events for our business.

Today, we have decided to make this winning approach available to everyone, clients and non-clients alike. The new MailUp Email Marketing Calendar 2023/2024 is now online, offering 12 months (from September 2023 to August 2024) of dates and events to leverage, email campaign ideas with high conversion potential that you can draw inspiration from and adapt to your business, along with corresponding email subjects, emojis, target audiences, and message types.

The Email Marketing Calendar is a free template available in two versions:

• The Email Marketing Calendar for B2C and E-commerce
• The Email Marketing Calendar for B2B

You can download it directly here: you will find a pre-filled and ready-to-use Excel file that you can adapt to your business and target audience. It can serve as a foundation for planning your campaigns from September 2023 to August 2024, taking advantage of these summer months.

• Key dates and celebrations in the Italian cultural context that can be adapted and enriched with holidays and specific occasions for your industry.
• Email campaign ideas, including the number of sends associated with each campaign (send sequences, recall emails for non-openers and non-clickers, etc.).
• Email subject inspirations.
• Target audience for each send.
• Message types for each send (newsletters and DEMs).

In the dedicated Excel sheet for the B2C and E-commerce sector, you will find campaign ideas more suitable for those who constantly interact with consumers. It includes strategic dates and events for sales and commercial purposes, with sends to be planned even on weekdays like weekends or Fridays. These days, unlike in the B2B sector, can be more suitable for encouraging recipients to complete a purchase.

As you will see, the tone of voice for the email subjects proposed in this version is more “pop,” less formal, and mainly focused on stimulating curiosity, a sense of urgency, and creating anticipation in the recipient. The use of emojis is also more prominent compared to the B2B sector.

Regarding message types, you will find more commercial and promotional emails, commonly known as DEMs.

Lastly, in terms of timing & pressure, you will notice that the B2C sector tends to have many more campaigns and sends in its planning compared to B2B. With summer and winter sales, holidays like Easter and Christmas, and commercial occasions like Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween, there are undoubtedly more and diverse dates to stimulate consumer purchases.

If this is your sector, download your free Email Marketing Calendar now!

In the Excel sheet dedicated to the B2B sector, you will find email campaigns more suitable for those who provide products and services to help other businesses grow. In this case, the recipients are the companies themselves, which require a more formal tone of voice and types of email subjects, with reduced use of emojis and words focused on the work sphere (goals, quarters, results, industry trends, performance, etc.).

This doesn’t mean that holidays and commercial occasions like Black Friday, Christmas, Cyber Monday, and Halloween disappear. You will find all of these and many other events. However, they should be intelligently and moderately utilized to propose promotional campaigns and newsletters that align with the interests of an entire business, rather than just a consumer.

In terms of dates and sending timings, the calendar mainly includes weekdays from Monday to Thursday, which are more suitable for intercepting and stimulating email opens in the case of the B2B sector.

Compared to the B2C sector, you will find campaign ideas here inspired by industry events that every company can have in its calendar, educational content such as webinars and market trend surveys, performance reports, and newsletters to help recipients (companies) achieve end-of-quarter and end-of-trimester KPIs.

If this is your sector, download your free Email Marketing Calendar now!

To turn this calendar into your next Email Marketing strategy for 2023/2024, here are the steps to follow:

1. Rely on a professional Email Marketing platform, which will already make half of the work ready for you. Even better if the platform allows you to send unlimited emails, like MailUp. You will have countless campaigns to send and countless contacts to reach.
2. Define your objectives. Associate the results you expect to achieve with your Email Marketing activities. Objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. For example, one of the objectives could be to increase sales by 10% or increase Black Friday email campaign conversions by 5% year over year.
3. Identify your KPIs. Determine the metrics you will use to measure the achievement of your objectives. KPIs for an Email Marketing plan could include open and click rates, conversions, the number of new subscribers and unsubscribers.
4. Create your targets. With MailUp’s segmentation tools, you can create specific mailing lists to send different campaigns depending on the type and target (newsletters, emails for existing customers, transactional emails, etc.). Select recipient groups or apply filters during sending to choose accurate and targeted recipients.
5. Create your email templates. This part may seem difficult and time-consuming, considering the number of emails to send throughout the year. However, by using a platform like MailUp, you have up to 200 ready-to-use and free templates suitable for any campaign and industry. Additionally, seasonal templates for Black Friday, Christmas, summer, Valentine’s Day, and other major occasions of the year are also available.
6. Set up automated sends. MailUp’s Marketing Automation allows you to automate the sending of recall emails to recipients who haven’t interacted with your campaign. You can also build automatic email sequences (drip campaigns) and set the trigger for sending and the waiting time between emails.
7. Analyze your performance. Using MailUp’s analysis and reporting tools, monitor the results of your campaigns and see if you have achieved the KPIs you set at the beginning. Whether for individual sends or the entire campaign, you will find all the information you need to understand how to improve your plan in the future in the Statistics area of MailUp.

Download the ready-to-use Excel template of the calendar to prepare your Email Marketing strategy. Take advantage of the summer months to finalize the details and then get started!

If you are not yet a MailUp customer, before using your calendar, it is essential to have a professional Email Marketing tool that allows you to send all the emails planned in your calendar without any limits on the number of sends or contacts to reach. MailUp can take care of this for you, offering you the opportunity to try its platform for free for 15 days before making a decision to purchase.

What are you waiting for? Start trying MailUp and experiment