Create a visual roadmap for your content
Use the Klaviyo campaign calendar to streamline your campaign content creation and improve your overall marketing strategy. In the video below, you’ll learn 2 ways to visualize your campaigns and identify key tools that help you filter, sort, and analyze your campaigns.
Focus on the content you can control
When planning your calendar, start by looking at the full year to visualize the bigger picture. This approach helps you identify campaigns you can prepare for ahead of time and highlights potential overlaps, gaps, or opportunities for content.
Let's look at how Beantown Coffee plans its campaigns around key holidays within a specific month or quarter, while still allowing room for flexibility.
Identify key dates and customer behaviors
Beantown identifies important dates beyond traditional holidays by considering audience-specific events, predictable customer behaviors, and regional holidays. For example, they:
- Select holiday calendars for specific countries based on their customer locations, such as the US, France, and Australia.
- Include local festivals, industry-specific events (like National Coffee Day), and cultural observances relevant to international markets.
- Analyze historical data to pinpoint peak buying seasons, slower periods, and seasonal shifts in customer preferences.
This combined approach ensures campaigns resonate with customers by aligning with their calendars, cultures, and behaviors throughout the year.
Tip: Regularly review past campaign performance to fine-tune your calendar and make informed decisions on timing and messaging.
Add placeholder campaigns
Next, Beantown adds placeholder campaigns according to holidays. A placeholder refers to a temporary campaign that you add to your calendar until you are ready to replace it with real content.
Strategies for placeholder campaigns:
Placeholder campaigns should reflect your content pillars and align with your overall marketing goals. Add placeholder campaigns for:
- Promotions, limited sales, or product launches around important holidays.
- Newsletters during months with few to no important holidays.
- Additional brand-specific holidays, like National Coffee Day for coffee brands.
Additionally, keep your calendar flexible. Things can shift at your company or around the world that are out of your control, forcing you to make adjustments.
Tip: Use tags to organize your campaigns by content pillars, location, and more.
Establish a consistent sending pattern to maintain strong deliverability
Similar to Beantown, once you pencil in the campaigns you want to focus on for the next month or quarter, you can get even more specific and consider the optimal time to reach your audience.
These action steps will guide you in identifying the ideal sending cadence for your brand.
Step 1: Review sending cadence best practices
Customers enjoy getting engaging newsletters and enticing offers, but too many messages can turn them off and reduce future engagement.
To avoid subscriber burnout, finding a perfect sending cadence is key . Let’s examine a few best practices to help you create a sending strategy that scales as your business grows.
- Consider your team’s capacity to determine a realistic campaign send for each week or month.
- Use your channels strategically for each campaign based on your target audience.
- Stay consistent each week or month with your campaign send and only increase gradually, if needed.
- Create flexibility per quarter in case you need to adjust your calendar to meet business goals better.
Step 2: Identify high engagement days for your campaigns
Once you establish a sending cadence for your content, you’ll want to decide on the days of the week to send your messages. In general, we do not recommend sending campaigns every day to the same customers. This can lead to list fatigue, and subscribers may stop engaging with your content altogether.
Daily sending should only be done when the customer is aware that they agreed to this cadence at signup. Take fitness challenges as an example, where people sign up to be emailed a daily workout routine. They know what they’re signing up for, so in this case, daily sending can work well!
That said, there are some days of the week will work best for certain campaigns:
- Monday to Wednesday: Early in the week, subscribers are getting back to work and ready to learn. These days are ideal for a newsletter with informative content. Additionally, you can give customers a heads up on a new product launch.
- Thursday to Sunday: The second half of the week is when subscribers are usually heading out in town with loved ones, shopping online, or hearing about great promotions from their friends. These days are perfect for sending promotional offers or reminding customers about a new product launch.
Step 3: Find the ideal day of the week to send your campaigns
While you can play it by ear and pick a day to send your campaign at random, you can also test your options to see if sending on a particular day will impact your engagement.
Start by testing out what day of the week is best for your audience. First, determine which days you’d like to test. Keep in mind, new subscribers will not be included in this test, as the recipients for the campaign will be determined when you schedule your message.
1. Create your campaign and add content as you normally would. When you're done, click Next.
2. Then, click Create A/B test at the top of the left-hand modal.
3. Under Test type, select Test send time.
4. Add a variation for each day of the week you are testing. Adjust the dates so each variation sends on a different day, but keep the time of day and content the same to minimize the variables for your test.
After you have run this test, evaluate your engagement rates (open, click, and conversion) to determine if 1 particular day of the week performs better than another.
Step 4: Use Klaviyo AI to improve sending time
This leads to a crucial question: what's the best time to hit send?
Klaviyo’s AI tool helps you determine the ideal send time for your audience(s). Smart Send Time is a series of tests that determines the time when the highest number of people open your emails. This makes it easier for you to reach your email subscribers during optimal times that lead to higher engagement.
Create a test to determine the best time to send your email campaigns. This tool will continue to refine its recommendations based on customer behavior changes as time passes. Learn how to create a Smart Send Time Test.
Note: Smart Send Time is only available for campaigns with a recipient list of at least 12,000 contacts. Learn more about Smart Send Time.