With the numerous campaigns and tasks happening simultaneously in a business, it’s easy for team members to lose track of activities in different departments and be unaware of ongoing activities that affect them. An eCommerce marketing calendar can solve this problem by keeping everyone organised and on the same page.
What is a marketing calendar?
An eCommerce marketing calendar combines all the different moving parts of your marketing strategy and organises them into one document. Typically created using a spreadsheet, marketing calendars outline your business’s marketing activities anywhere from a quarterly to yearly basis. It provides a clear overview of upcoming holiday campaigns, crucial eCommerce dates, and ongoing projects, helping you track what’s coming up, what’s in progress, and what tasks need attention. While you can create separate calendars for different marketing channels or campaigns, I recommend integrating everything into one comprehensive marketing calendar. This holistic approach makes it easier to see how all your marketing efforts interconnect, boosting your overall marketing success.
Why should you use a marketing calendar?
From product launches and merchandising to inventory management and warehouse arrivals, there’s so many different moving parts that need to come together to create a successful marketing campaign. This complexity can easily lead to confusion and delays, especially when setbacks in one area cause a ripple effect throughout the business.
A marketing calendar helps keep your team organised, and organisation is key to running a successful business. By creating a marketing calendar, you ensure that everyone knows about ongoing activities and campaigns, allowing team members to prioritise their tasks and meet deadlines efficiently. This reduces the need to constantly ask for updates and reduces the risk of tasks being overlooked. It’s also a really helpful asset to be able to send to any external agencies you work with to provide them with essential business information.
Marketing peaks
Throughout the year, you’ll have a number of natural sales peaks. These often coincide with cultural holidays like Christmas, eCommerce days like Black Friday, and industry specific peaks, like the summer season for garden furniture brands. These natural peaks might account for two or three significant sales peaks annually. Relying solely on these peaks means you’ll have longer periods of sales dips a year, affecting your CPA, cash flow, and ability to order inventory in preparation for your peaks.
To create a more consistent revenue stream, aim to have at least four peaks a year. If your business doesn’t naturally experience four peaks, you can create artificial peaks through sales events or product launches. These might coincide with annual events like a summer sale or a spring clearance. With four peaks a year, you can aim for at least one peak per quarter, supporting steady business growth, and enhancing your financial stability.
For example, a skincare brand might have two natural peaks – one around Christmas and another around Mother’s Day. To create additional peaks, they could introduce a summer sale in August and a new product launch in May, covering all four quarters. This strategy not only boosts revenue but also keeps customer engagement high throughout the year.
How to make a marketing calendar
Ideally, a marketing calendar should cover the entire upcoming year. However, since it’s challenging to predict every detail so far in advance, you can create an annual calendar with a brief outline of key dates and develop more detailed plans within the calendar on a quarterly basis. There are numerous tools available for creating marketing calendars, but Google Sheets stands out as one of the best options. It’s user-friendly, easily shareable throughout your business, and allows multiple people to be set as admins responsible for updating the calendar (I recommend having one admin per department).
Your marketing calendar will be divided into two sections: dates along the top and activities down the left side.
Dates
First, add dates to your calendar over the first few rows. Allow a row each for the dates of the month, the days of the week, the calendar weeks, and the quarters. Once you’ve entered the dates, highlight every Saturday and Sunday column. Since most businesses don’t operate over the weekend, it’s best to avoid scheduling product or campaign launches during these days to ensure somebody is available if any issues arise. You could also use conditional formatting to highlight the column for today’s date in green and all previous dates in grey.
To make the full calendar easier to see, you can then collapse the columns into mont
Activities
The first left side column in your calendar is where you’re going to list your different activities, including product launches, cultural holidays, and channel activities. Let’s break down each of these activity groups:
Important days
First, start by identifying and filling in the important cultural and eCommerce days for the year. These days will vary based on your industry, product, and brand image. Common cultural holidays relevant to eCommerce often include Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Christmas. However, you might also consider days like International Women’s Day, Earth Day, and Halloween. Next, add a row for significant eCommerce days such as Amazon Prime Day, paydays, and Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
It’s important to tailor these days to your business needs, but how do you determine what days are relevant to you? Some days will be obvious – for example, if you run a chocolate gift business, you would prioritise Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Christmas. To uncover other important days, analyse your historical data, explore Google Trends for popular days, and research which days your competitors highlight.
Offers and promotions
The next step is to plan when you are going to run offers and promotions. Many businesses run multiple offers and promotions at once. Make space for this on your calendar by allocating a row for your primary offer, another row for your secondary offer, then additional rows if you run more than two offers at once. Your primary offer may be an evergreen offer running year-round, while your secondary offer may just run for specific parts of the year, often coinciding with important dates for your business.
Product launches
The next activity your marketing calendar should cover is product launches. For some brands, this might just be one launch a year of a new product or product variation. However, for other brands, this can be a major part of the marketing strategy with more frequent launches. For example, fashion brands tend to have a higher rate of product launches with some brands launching new products on a weekly basis. Clearly outline each product launch in your calendar to keep track of these key events.
Warehouse arrivals
Warehouse teams and marketing teams are often seen as managing totally different aspects of the business without intertwining. However, having clear communication between the two is crucial when it comes to planning your marketing campaigns. Your marketing team needs to be aware of when products are due to arrive at the warehouse and if there are any delays as this has a knock on effect to marketing. Therefore, it’s useful to include a row in your marketing calendar to track delivery ETAs, delays, and arrivals, keeping everyone informed and up to date.
Creative production
Once you have the warehouse and product or campaign launch dates in your calendar, you can then plan what creative production needs to be done and when this will happen. This includes scheduling photoshoots and organising any preparation needed for the shoots. Be flexible with these timelines, as delays in warehouse deliveries or launch date changes will require adjustments to the creative schedule.
Merchandising
Merchandising plays a crucial role in marketing, even if your business doesn’t have a dedicated merchandiser. In reality, you are likely already implementing merchandising strategies in your current marketing efforts. Merchandising is a cross-functional activity that impacts and is influenced by other aspects of your business like product launches and promotions. By planning your merchandising strategies alongside other marketing activities in your calendar, you can boost your campaign effectiveness. For example, when scheduling a new product launch, you could plan cross-merchandising upsells and cross-sells to enhance your campaign’s impact.
Learn more about how to use merchandising for your business here.
Website changes
Your website should reflect your marketing activities. Ensure your homepage and site-wide USP banner align with your current marketing activity to promote any offers, product launches, and important dates. Use a row in your calendar to plan your website updates, specifying what needs to change, when, and what promotional message should be used.
Channels
Some businesses use separate marketing calendars for different channels. But in my opinion, that just makes your life more complicated. Make things simpler by including all your tasks for all your channels in one main marketing calendar. Clearly specify what message each channel will communicate and whether the channel will be promoting a specific offer or product. For example, if you have a secondary offer of 10% off for loyal customers, you might run a 7-day campaign via SMS and email but not on social media or search channels.
Ready to take control of your business with a marketing calendar? Get in touch and I’ll help you meet your goals.