Prep work: Email marketing calendar and checklist template for 2024

Despite all the new and emerging channels, email is still the best way to reach your customers and leads. According to a 2023 Square report, 60% of consumers listed email as their preferred method to hear from businesses that they frequent. 

This is good news. Email is relatively inexpensive, easy to automate, and trackable. 

It can, however, mean that your business winds up sending a lot of emails. This isn’t always a problem — if your audience has consented to receive a high volume of emails and continues showing signs of engagement, there’s no reason to lighten the load. But too many emails can lead to declines in audience engagement, which sends negative signals to email service providers and can ultimately lead to declining email deliverability. 

Planning out your campaigns in an email marketing calendar is key to maintaining control and striking a balance that keeps your brand top of mind without overwhelming them. Adding a pre-send checklist to the mix can help ensure no details are missed to maintain your domain reputation and keep your team on track. 

Download our email marketing calendar template

To help you out, Ortto’s head of email deliverability and head of content have collaborated to create an email marketing calendar and checklist template for 2024. You can download it below, and go to File > Make a copy to start editing. Read on for best practices and tips for customization. 

Email marketing calendar - 2024 planner template

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What’s included?

The intention with this template is for you to track regular sends (like newsletters or brand/product news and updates), as well as major campaigns (like major launches or initiatives).

Lifecycle campaigns and transactional emails are generally always-on journeys that cannot be mapped on a calendar given audience members enter and exit at different times. They should be reviewed regularly for accuracy and relevancy, but not included in your marketing calendar.

We’ve also included an annual checklist to help you get your house in order before you start, and have linked to some helpful resources and templates throughout the document. Plus, we’ve provided a year-at-a-glance tab and monthly calendars for marketers who want a more visual map of their sends. 

Below, we'll walk through each section to help you start planning your year of emails. 

Email marketing annual checklist 

There are a number of deliverability and content items that should be reviewed on an annual basis at a minimum. We’ve outlined these in the annual checklist tab of the planner so you can work through them and hide the tab when completed. 

The first two sections are designed to help you meet best practices and set a strong foundation for your email deliverability in the year to come. If you’re new to email deliverability, start with our 101 piece or read our ebook. It’s increasingly important for every email marketer to understand the principles of deliverability, and get a grasp on the requirements set by major mail providers like Google and Yahoo. 

The next section is audiences — this is important both for your email deliverability (ensuring that all audience members have consented to receive emails from you) and to ensure the right people receive the right messages. Start by reviewing your existing audience segments to ensure the filters are still relevant and functional and the naming conventions you’ve used are clear. Then check that preference centers are up to date and subscription forms accurately reflect what each audience can expect to receive from you. 

Next up is content. It’s a good idea to check your brand book settings, email templates, transactional emails, and other always-on journeys at least once annually. This will help ensure you catch any changes to your branding, language, pricing, or terms and conditions. Plus it’s a good chance to catch any unnecessary or missing email templates or transactional emails. 

Finally reporting. If you already have reporting in place, use this as a chance to review and improve. If not, we’ve linked to some dashboard templates that will help get you up and running fast. 

At a minimum, you will want to review the following 24-48 hours after your email has been sent to your entire audience (this may be:

• Opens

• Clicks

• Bounces

• Unsubscribes

• Complaints 

When comparing emails against one another, remember to keep the audience size in mind. An email sent to a small and highly targeted audience will generally generate a higher open and click-through rate than one sent to a large audience. 

Email marketing campaign planner 

The next section is about planning out your email marketing campaigns. Planning every email for an entire calendar year is unnecessary, but getting ahead of the next month or quarter can save you headaches down the road and help you identify any lulls in communications or busy periods. 

The planner includes general information on the campaign name, goal, audience, owner, and subject line as well as checklist items to ensure every email you send has been reviewed from a content perspective and to meet deliverability standards. We’ve also included a section to capture your campaign report link along with information on tests and key learnings. 

Getting into the habit of reviewing every campaign after it is sent, especially those that include an A/B test or other experimentation, will help you to continuously learn from and improve your email marketing campaigns. 

Year at a glance and monthly calendars

We’ve included a year at a glance so you can color cells on the days with a planned email, or create a key including planned emails, holidays, and other important dates. 

We’ve also included a tab for each month of the year. To autofill campaign names, go to the date and use the command ='📫 Campaign planner'!CELLNUMBER. 

The monthly view calendars include federal holidays in the US, bank holidays in the UK, and public holidays in Australia. Unless you have a specific promotion around a holiday, it is generally best to avoid sending marketing campaigns on these days to avoid email traffic and increase the chance of a high open rate.  

There are, of course, numerous other holidays and celebrations throughout the year. We have not included these on the calendar because you want to avoid jumping on the bandwagon or creating an offer around an irrelevant holiday. Instead, think about which days your business wants to celebrate, and why, then deliberately add them into your marketing plans. 

Email marketing calendar final word

Spending a little time now to get your house in order and plan your sends will go a long way to helping you achieve your email marketing goals for 2024. Our template is designed to be customized – you can skip the yearly or monthly view altogether, or add to the annual checklist or steps in the planner. To get started with an editable version, go to File > Make a copy.