Free Email Marketing Campaign Planner 2022
The new year is just around the corner and with it new, exciting promotional days and holidays that can be perfectly used for planning original email marketing campaigns. To make sure you don’t miss an event, we have summarised the most important days of the year in our email marketing calendar 2022. In addition, there are a few tips and suggestions that will help you with the monthly design of campaigns.
January 2022: Hope, self-reflection and enthusiasm!
Motivation is especially high at the beginning of every year! Many consumers start the new year with New Year’s intentions and motivation. According to statistics from Statista, more exercises, spending less time on social media and eating healthy are among the most popular New Year’s resolutions. Those intentions are a great way to plan your email campaign in accordance. How can your product/solution help to realize those goals?
But not every recipient has the same needs. To pick up on your customers’ preferences, customer segmentation is helpful. By analysing your customers’ behavioural data, their preferences, location, personality, etc., you can categorise customers and send personalised email campaigns based on their specific needs.
February 2022: Winter blues
While your clients are fully motivated in January, a so-called winter blues often sets in in February. Your clients have set themselves great goals, but in February they may already encounter hurdles that they did not expect. In addition, the wintry temperatures add to this.
Encourage your customers to keep going! This works best with a visually appealing email template. Avoid unnecessary content and optimise your template with web-safe fonts, optimised images and graphics. Recipients expect mobile-optimised, aesthetically pleasing emails that are user-friendly and that share relevant content.
March: Pancakes and birdsong
March brings a number of interesting events, but especially the long-awaited start of spring arrives in March. Finally, the days are getting longer, sunnier and more vibrant. Use this special time of the year to draw consumers’ attention to the gardening season, offer new spring collections or remind them of the upcoming Easter celebration.
Days like Pancake Day on 01.03.2022 are a great way to increase user engagement and reach. With creative competitions, for example, more and more companies are trying to increase their visibility. Call on your target audience to share inspired content and use the trend to not only increase your brand awareness but also strengthen your branding.
April: Sustainable consumption
“Green consumption” is becoming increasingly important for consumers, especially Generation Z shoppers. According to a survey, 62% of Generation Z consumers prefer “sustainable brands”, compared to 54% of Generation X, 44% of the Silent Generation and 39% of Boomers. In addition, the study shows that Gen Z is also willing to spend more money on sustainable products.
Earth Day on 22.04.2022 is the perfect opportunity to highlight your company’s environmentally conscious efforts. Highlight your eco-friendly business, eco-friendly products or show how you support charity projects in a “Behind the Scenes”.
May: Family Happiness
May delights us with many holidays and some reasons to celebrate. Because May is Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Family Day! For businesses, this means turning your focus to family to get the most out of one of the most important seasons in online retail. Make sure to appeal to all ages and family members. It’s not just flowers, jewellery, or sweets that are in demand as gifts here. Trips or spa offers are equally popular to express gratitude and appreciation.
Marketers will also get their money’s worth in May 2022: after a long break, the OMR Festival will finally take place again in Hamburg! Now it’s time to connect again! After so many online events in recent years, it’s nice to get to know each other in person and make new, exciting contacts. If you are also taking part at the OMR Festival, be sure to announce it by email to give everyone the chance to meet you on site.
June: Summer Time!
With the start of summer on 20.06.2022, it’s the perfect opportunity to get creative with some new summer marketing ideas to connect with your customers. For example, you can make great special offers around the topic of holidays. But also funny ideas like temperature-linked sales can add variety: offer a special discount as soon as the temperature exceeds a certain degree.
Current political and social issues are increasingly influencing online marketing. Customers have higher expectations of company values and question them before they buy products or use services. Therefore, companies should also address topics such as LGTB diversity. The LGBT Pride Day on 28.06.2022 (or June as Pride Month) offers the perfect opportunity to do so.
July: What would life be without friends?
Friendship Day on 30.07.2021 is all about good friends. Choose a high-quality email template and design a campaign with a special promo code that your customers can redeem together with their friends. You can also increase conversions with urgency and a limited time offer. Gift vouchers are also ideal to make Friendship Day special for your customers.
Keep in mind that more and more emails are opened from a mobile device. Therefore, it is important that your email template also loads properly from a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet. Design a mobile-friendly template with highly visible CTAs and good loading speed to ensure good campaign performance on all devices.
August: Meow!
Germans’ love of animals grows from year to year, and cats in particular are considered a popular pet among us. To honour the little velvet paws, World Cat Day was introduced on 08.08.2022. But not only the pet market and the 9 million cat owners enjoy this date. Funny cat videos and other cat content sweeten the day for all of us.
The “Day of Recreation” on 15.08.2022 is perfect to give your customers a very special treat. How can your products/services contribute to recovery?
September: Cosy start of autumn
The beginning of autumn marks the start of what is probably the cosiest time of the year. Not only align your offers with this season, but also the colour choice in your email templates. While summer campaigns tend to be characterised by bright designs, dark, muted colours are more suitable for autumn. Here it makes sense to switch to the so-called dark mode. This trend was already established last year and continues. The “inverted” colour scheme impresses with dark backgrounds and light fonts, UI elements and graphics. Perfect for giving content a cosy, visual setting. Dark mode can present certain challenges in email configuration, but it’s worth the effort!
October: Time for more interactivity!
People are naturally drawn to things that stand out from what they are used to. Interactivity is an easy way to differentiate your emails from the rest of the messages in your subscribers’ inboxes. This also opens up a variety of opportunities for interactive content that engages your readers in different ways.
Polls, surveys and feedback forms, for example, give users the opportunity to communicate in the opposite direction and let you know what they think. In this way, companies are able to gather important information about their brand or products while showing their audience that they are interested in their experience.
Interactive campaigns are also conceivable in connection with certain theme and action days. For example, it would be interesting to know what percentage of your salary your target group saves per year (World Savings Day, 29.10.), how much coffee your customers drink per day (Coffee Day, 01.10.) or what your customers’ favourite foods are (World Food Day, 16.10.), wouldn’t it?
November: Sales, discounts and rebates
Black Friday is one of the most important days for online retailers. With the enormous competition in recipients’ inboxes, it is especially important to stand out.
Data-driven personalisation is playing an increasingly important role in achieving this goal. With intelligent algorithms and artificial intelligence, you can send personalised content and thus increase the performance of your campaign. Studies show that even a personal salutation in the subject line of an email increases the average open rate by 22% compared to non-personalised subject lines. Why not test this approach for Black Friday to stand out from the competition?
December: Ho ho ho!
December is, of course, all about Christmas. Are you wondering what a successful Christmas newsletter looks like and what content is suitable for a Christmas campaign?
The (pre-) Christmas period is one of the busiest times of the year for mailings. That’s why it’s important to stand out from the crowd with original campaigns.
Multi-stage campaigns with mailings over several days can help to repeatedly draw the recipient’s attention to different or extended campaigns. Starting with a “Save the Date” campaign announcing the start of a discount promotion and ending with an exclusive Christmas promotion, the campaign is guaranteed to be a success.
An email advent calendar is also a good idea. In 24 days, you can share specific tips and valuable content. Sweepstakes within the email advent calendar are also conceivable. You can raffle off products, vouchers, etc. to customers by email. This campaign is also suitable for increasing your reach and gaining new customers. Cooperations with other companies is also a great option here.
