One of the most common reasons email programs underperform is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of a plan and a consistent marketing calendar. When you sit down to send an email campaign without knowing what comes next, you end up being in a reactive state rather than being the one who is behind the wheel. If your brand is stuck in the rut of sending something when you remember to, scrambling before holidays, and being quiet during long stretches of time because you have too much going on and just can’t get to it, read on. This guide is for you.
A monthly email marketing calendar fixes all of this uncertainty and headache. It gives your email marketing program structure, consistency, and strategic intent. It makes sure you are showing up for your audience regularly, not just when you have a promotion to announce. And it makes the actual work of creating email campaigns much easier because you are not starting from scratch every time.
Here is how to build a monthly email marketing calendar that works for your e-commerce store.
Start with Email Flows, Then Build Around Them
Before you plan your email marketing campaigns, make sure you understand what automated flows you have in place for your store and what they are already handling. Your Welcome Series, Abandoned Cart, Post-Purchase, Browse Abandonment, and Winback flows are email automations that are running in the background for every customer and sent at various stages of their journey.
Your email campaigns layer on top of those automated email flows. They reach your broader list with timely, relevant content that your email automated flows do not cover. When you plan your calendar with this in mind, you avoid duplicating effort and make sure the two parts of your email program are complementing rather than competing with each other.
Map Out the Month in Four Layers
A useful way to approach monthly email marketing planning is to plan it around your overall monthly marketing calendar. What key events, campaigns, or promotions do you have going on throughout the month? Do you have any new product launches? You can think of your email marketing plan in the following buckets:
- Product Specific – Tied directly to a product, collection, or offer. Sales, launches, restocks, and bundles live here in this type of email campaign.
- Educational Content – Teach your audience something. Be useful, informative, and educational. Think of content like How-to guides, ingredient breakdowns, styling tips, care instructions. These types of email campaigns build trust with your audience and ease purchase hesitation.
- Brand Story – Share the founder, people, values, and/or mission behind your brand. These types of email campaigns are the real winners. They turn customers into fans.
- Events and Seasonal – Anything tied to a date on the calendar, whether that is a holiday, a local event, an anniversary, or a cultural moment your brand can authentically connect to.
Not every month will have all four, and not all of them will carry equal weight, but having these different email marketing categories and buckets in mind will help you build an email marketing calendar that is varied and purposeful rather than a string of promotional blasts.
How Many Emails Should I Send Each Month?
At LTM Digital, we recommend sending email campaigns at a minimum of once per week for e-commerce brands. Even if you’re just starting out, that frequency is enough to stay present without wearing out your welcome. Brands with large, highly engaged lists and strong content operations can go higher. Brands that are newer or still building their list should start at the lower end and earn their way up.
Within that range, a reasonable monthly structure might look like this: one educational or relationship email in the first week to open the month with value, one mid-month promotional or product-focused email, and one email tied to an upcoming holiday or seasonal moment if one applies. That gives you a consistent presence without turning every email into a pitch.
Building the Calendar in Practice
When you sit down to plan the month, start by pulling up the retail calendar and marking any dates that are relevant to your store. Not every brand needs to email about every holiday, and flooding your list with generic holiday promotions is a fast path to unsubscribes. Be selective. Lean into the moments that genuinely make sense for what you sell.
Next, look at your product roadmap. Are you launching anything new this month? Restocking something that sold out? Running any promotions or events? These become anchors in your calendar, and you can build content around them.
Then fill in the gaps with educational and relationship content. If you have blog posts, guides, or social content that performed well recently, an email that links to or adapts that content is a low-effort way to deliver value to your list.
Planning Your Segments Alongside Your Calendar
One of the most underused calendar planning practices is deciding, at the time you plan each email, which segment it should go to. Not every email should go to your full list. A re-engagement campaign goes to lapsed customers. A VIP preview goes to your top spenders. A first-purchase incentive goes to subscribers who have never bought.
When you plan your segments alongside your content, you reduce the volume of emails going to any single contact, which improves deliverability and reduces unsubscribes. You also make each email more relevant to the person receiving it, which directly improves performance.
Using Klaviyo to Schedule and Manage Your Calendar
Klaviyo does not have a dedicated calendar view built into the interface, but you can manage your campaign schedule effectively by creating drafts in advance and scheduling them for specific dates and times. As you build out each campaign, you can schedule it immediately, which keeps your pipeline organized and removes the last-minute scramble of same-day sending.
For your broader planning, a simple spreadsheet or project management tool works well alongside Klaviyo. Map out each month with your campaign dates, the audience segment, the subject line idea, and the primary goal of each email. This gives you visibility across the whole month at a glance and makes it easy to spot if you are over-indexing on promotional content or going too long without a relationship-building send.
Reviewing and Adjusting as You Go
A calendar is a plan, not a contract. If a product sells out before your campaign goes out, adjust. If news breaks in your industry that makes a planned email feel tone-deaf, reschedule it. If one type of email consistently outperforms another in your reporting, weight the next month’s calendar toward more of what is working.
The goal of a monthly calendar is not rigidity. It is intentionality. When you know what you are sending and why, you make better decisions, you create better content, and your list performs better over time.
At the end of each month, spend 20 to 30 minutes reviewing what you sent, what performed, and what you would do differently. That feedback loop, repeated consistently, is what turns a decent email program into a great one.
If you want help building out your email calendar strategy or connecting it to the right segments and flows in Klaviyo, we are happy to work through it with you.
Continue reading: How often should you send marketing emails? A data-backed answer and Klaviyo segmentation guide: How to stop emailing everyone the same thing.