One of the most shocking discoveries we’ve realized is that there are a significant number of brands that do not have, what refer to as, a strategy calendar.

A strategy calendar is a tool that helps guide where you’re going on a given month, and it’s something that a majority of our clients routinely request that we build out with them, if not entirely by ourselves.

The importance of a strategy calendar became apparent almost immediately when we started working with clients at Hey Frankie. Why? Because if we weren’t helping drive the strategy, there was simply no way they’d have made the revenue gains that were being made. It’s a big picture way of thinking.

To be clear, a strategy calendar is not the same thing as a content calendar. The mechanism I’m writing about is the path that helps you drive revenue.

SOME CONTEXT

• When thinking about a period of time, we consider revenue goals and past performance.
• From an email standpoint, most brands benefit from a cadence of two to three emails a week, which is why we’ve used that cadence for this example.
• In an effort to not come off as promotion heavy, we try to spread them out as well as possible.
• One strategy with promotions is to find a winning offer and then repackage it. You’ll see that below with the 15% off and BOGO 30% off (same offer, but helps bump AOV).
• User-generated content, or other such content, is a way to stay relevant without making every email about “buy buy buy.”

Have a look at a sample calendar below.

STRATEGY CALENDAR

In no way shape or form is this a calendar that we’d re-use in the same exact way each month. It’s also not specific for January.

PUT IT TO USE

You’ll find that a strategy calendar will start to fuel the activity for various marketing channels. For instance, let’s take the BOGO 30% off promotion from the calendar above. Here’s how some of the touches might play out for that event.

• January 18th – launch ads a day early to get some momentum.
• January 19th – Send out an email.
• January 19th or 20th – Send out SMS
• January 21 – Send out a last call email and SMS.

In this example, these three touch-points will help take the promotion to the next level and maximize revenue.

By utilizing a strategy calendar, you’ll find it much easier to get where you are trying to go and reduce the times, on a random Wednesday, where you’ll say, “OMG! Let’s send an email today.”

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