Are you in a rut with your email calendar planning? Not sure how to add an extra spark to your calendar? Get inspiration from MailCharts to get ahead of next month’s calendar. Use the MailCharts Industry section to get an idea of what’s happening across the industry or build a list of brands based on your competitors.
Below, we’ll walk through top tips for calendar planning and how to incorporate MailCharts into prepping your monthly calendar sends.
1. Reuse your tried and true content when possible
When starting your calendar planning, build on your tried and true email sends. For example, if you have a product roundup of popular shirts and shorts during the summer months that performs well, consider creating a template to reuse month-to-month and feature new or seasonal products. No need to reinvent the wheel every month!
2. Research holidays related to your brand
You can find national holidays here. If you’ve got a brand with a specific theme, consider looking up additional, fun holidays. For example, Best Friend Day may be the perfect holiday to market your refer-a-friend program. Say you’re an apparel company and you have a line of clothes that feature cats on them. Why not market yourself on International Cat Day in August? There are tons of fun holidays to feature. For more of these quirky holidays, HubSpot has a list for you to check out!
3. View historical industry metrics from the prior year
This is where MailCharts is unmatched in terms of email data. Say we’re planning our calendar for apparel for August 2020. We’ll pull reports from August 2019 to see what terms were trending for brands in the MailCharts Index. In this case, we pulled the popular terms by brands from August 2019 for Apparel
In addition to popular terms, cadence throughout the month and promotional rates are a great metric for reference, too! Take, for example, Apparel’s August 2019 calendar. In this MailCharts report, we’re able to see sending behavior in a calendar view as well as the promotional rate throughout the month. In 2019, the promotional rate started to increase towards the end of the month due to Labor Day being the first weekend of September. 
4. While you’re at it, view MoM data, too!
If you’re not a seasonal brand, MoM is also extremely helpful in building your next month’s calendar. Similar to YoY, you can take a look at what your industry was sending recently and the popular send times and promotional rate/type of promotion. For example, our promotions report shows the average promotional rate for a category and the percentage of brands using percent off vs. dollars off:
Also, you can see significant terms’ trends for recent periods similar to what we recommended in tip #3. This report also allows you to view the emails using those significant terms unique to the category. Significant terms are those unique to the industry that are trending:
Need more subject line inspo? We aggregate a few of them and you’re able to search by length, too! By clicking ‘See More’ in our reports, you can get a full list of email examples and subject lines to inspire your next month’s calendar. 
MailCharts reports are full of information that can help guide your planning for next month and beyond. In addition to the reports featured above, we’ve also added several new reporting features such as benchmark reports to compare brands against industries or brands in our index. Sign up for a MailCharts account today to get access to more great reports and content!
Editorial image by tigerlily713 from Pixabay
