Email Marketing Calendar Template for Ecommerce

Last Updated: February 2026

Most email marketing calendar guides tell you to pick a template, fill in topics, and schedule sends. That's how you end up with a spreadsheet full of dates and nobody reading your emails.

After managing email calendars across dozens of DTC ecommerce brands, we've learned that the calendar itself is the easy part. The hard part — and the part that actually drives revenue — is deciding who you're talking to before you decide what to say.

This guide covers how we actually build email marketing calendars for ecommerce clients in Klaviyo: the structure, the cadence, the content mix, and the month-by-month framework that keeps campaigns generating revenue without burning out your list.

Start With Who, Not What

Here's the mistake we see in almost every brand we audit: they build a calendar around topics. "Week 1: New arrivals. Week 2: Best sellers. Week 3: Blog post." Then they blast each campaign to the same list.

That's a content calendar, not an email marketing calendar. There's a difference.

An email marketing calendar starts with the audience. Before we write a single subject line, we ask: who are we sending this to, and why would they care right now? A first-time buyer who ordered three days ago needs different messaging than a lapsed customer who hasn't opened an email in 60 days. A VIP who's bought five times doesn't need the same social proof that converts a prospect.

When we onboard a new client, the first thing we do is map out their audience segments — not their email topics. Read our guide to Shopify email segmentation for how we approach this. Once we know who we're talking to, the content practically writes itself.

What Actually Goes in the Calendar

Our client calendars track four things per send:

Notice the order: audience comes first. That's intentional. We decide who we want to reach, figure out what that group needs to hear, and then schedule it. The audience determines the content, not the other way around.

If you're using Klaviyo, you can build these segments once and reuse them across campaigns. Our free audience builder tool gives you 22 pre-built segments to start with.

Send Frequency: How Many Campaigns Per Month

This is the question every brand asks, and the answer depends on your list size, product catalog, and how much you have to say.

Here's what we typically run across our client accounts:

• Smaller brands (under $2M revenue): 4-6 campaigns per month. One to two sends per week. Enough to stay in inboxes without overwhelming a smaller list.
• Larger brands ($5M+): 12-24 campaigns per month. Three to six sends per week. But — and this is critical — most of these are segmented. You're not blasting 24 emails to your entire list every month.

The key detail most guides miss: higher send frequency works when you segment. A brand sending 20 campaigns per month might only be sending 6-8 to any individual subscriber. Different segments get different campaigns. VIPs get early access. Recent purchasers get product education. Prospects get social proof. Our email marketing benchmarks break down how campaigns and flows perform differently across brands.

If you're sending the same email to everyone on your list every time, you're doing it wrong — and you'll burn through your engagement faster than you think.

The Content Mix That Actually Works

Most brands default to one of two extremes: either every email is a discount, or every email is a newsletter that reads like a blog post. Both kill performance over time.

Here's the mix we use across our DTC clients:

Soft-Sell Product Education (40-50% of sends)

This is the backbone of a healthy email calendar. Instead of saying "buy this product," you educate the customer in a way that naturally leads to a purchase. For a health and wellness brand, that means breaking down specific ingredients and how they work. For a food brand, it's recipes and usage ideas. For apparel, it's styling guides and material breakdowns.

The key: every "educational" email still links to a product page. It's education that sells — not education for its own sake.

Social Proof and Reviews (20-30% of sends)

Reviews and customer stories are some of the highest-performing campaigns we send. They work because they're not coming from the brand — they're coming from real customers. A well-designed email featuring three 5-star reviews with specific details ("I've been using this for 6 months and my skin has completely changed") will outperform most promotional emails.

We pull these directly from Shopify reviews and feature them as the main content, not buried as a sidebar element.

Promotional and Sales (15-25% of sends)

Contrary to what you might expect, we don't recommend running a lot of sales. For most DTC brands, constant discounting erodes your margins and trains customers to wait for sales. When we do run promotions, they're intentional: product launches, seasonal events, or genuine limited-time offers.

The exception is BFCM and a handful of other major retail moments — those are when you lean into promotional sends. The rest of the year, the soft-sell approach drives more sustainable revenue.

Brand and Lifestyle (5-10% of sends)

Behind-the-scenes content, founder stories, mission-driven messaging. These don't convert directly, but they build the brand affinity that makes everything else work. Keep these to a small percentage of your total sends.

If you're looking at your email calendar and more than half of your sends are discount-driven, we should talk. You're leaving money on the table and probably damaging your deliverability in the process.

Month-by-Month Calendar Framework

Here's how we think about the ecommerce email calendar across the year. This isn't a rigid schedule — it's a framework you adapt to your brand, your product cycle, and your audience.

Q1: January - March (Recovery and Re-engagement)

Q1 is about converting the BFCM and holiday buyers you just acquired. Most of them bought once on a discount and won't come back unless you give them a reason.

• January: Post-holiday re-engagement. Welcome sequences for new holiday subscribers. Product education for first-time buyers (how to use what they bought). For relevant brands, lean into New Year's themes — an alcohol alternative brand can own Dry January, a fitness brand can ride the resolution wave.
• February: Valentine's Day is obvious, but only if your product fits. Don't force it. Focus on review-driven campaigns and customer spotlight stories. Check our February marketing calendar for specific date strategies.
• March: Spring product launches, wardrobe refreshes (apparel), spring cleaning angles (home goods). Our March marketing calendar covers the key dates.

Send frequency in Q1: steady. Don't ramp up unless you have a reason. This is the quarter to focus on quality over quantity and let your flows do the heavy lifting.

Q2: April - June (Brand-Specific Moments)

Q2 has fewer universal retail holidays, which makes it the best quarter for brand-specific campaigns.

• April: Earth Day for sustainability-focused brands. Tax refund season (people have money to spend). Spring product drops.
• May: Mother's Day is significant for women's brands, beauty, wellness, and gifting-friendly products. Memorial Day weekend kicks off summer sales.
• June: Father's Day, summer kickoff, graduation season. Heavy on social proof and gift guides.

This is a good quarter to lean into your content mix — product education and reviews should make up the majority of your sends. Save the aggressive promotions for brands that have a genuine seasonal angle.

Q3: July - September (BFCM Prep Starts)

Q3 is a sleeper quarter. Most brands coast, which is a mistake.

• July: Summer campaigns, mid-year product features. Start cleaning your list — you want a healthy list going into Q4. This is the time to run re-engagement campaigns and suppress contacts who aren't opening.
• August: Back-to-school for relevant brands. Labor Day preview. Start planning your BFCM strategy — not the campaigns themselves, but the offer structure, the segment strategy, and the flow updates.
• September: Fall product launches. BFCM campaign production starts. Early access list building — start teasing what's coming and collecting VIP/early access sign-ups.

Q4: October - December (Peak Season)

This is where the calendar gets dense. Send frequency ramps up significantly, and the content mix shifts toward more promotional sends.

• October: Halloween for relevant brands. BFCM campaigns should be fully built and staged by mid-October. Teaser campaigns start going out. We're usually 6-8 weeks ahead on creative at this point.
• November: BFCM is the main event. Early access for VIPs (the Tuesday or Wednesday before), full launch on Black Friday, extended through Cyber Monday, sometimes into the following week. Some brands do 2-3 sends per day during BFCM week. This is the one time of year where high volume to broad segments makes sense.
• December: Holiday gift guides, shipping deadline urgency, last-minute deals. Then a cooldown in the last week of December — nobody's buying, don't force it.

The biggest mistake in Q4: not starting early enough. If you're building your BFCM campaigns in November, you're already behind. We start planning in August and building in September.

Find Your Brand's Calendar

Generic holiday lists tell you to send something for National Donut Day. That's not strategy — that's filler.

The real opportunity is identifying the holidays and moments that are specific to your brand and your customers. These are the campaigns where you can ramp up frequency because you have something genuinely relevant to say.

Examples of brand-specific calendar moments:

• Alcohol alternative brand: Dry January, Sober October, holiday season ("enjoy the party without the hangover")
• Women's wellness: Mother's Day, International Women's Day, Breast Cancer Awareness Month
• Pet brand: National Pet Day, adoption awareness months, seasonal product needs (winter coats, summer cooling)
• Outdoor/fitness: New Year's resolution season, spring training, race season, summer adventure
• Food/supplement: Seasonal flavor launches, health awareness months, recipe seasons

Map these out at the start of the year. Build them into your calendar as anchor points. Then fill around them with your core content mix.

When to Ramp Up (And When Not to Force It)

There's a common anxiety about send frequency: "Are we sending too many?" Usually, the answer is no — if your content is relevant and well-segmented. But there are specific moments when you should deliberately increase your cadence:

• BFCM / major sales: 2-3 sends per day during peak days is normal. Start building campaigns 2 months out.
• Standard holidays: Ramp up 3-4 weeks before with teaser content, then increase to daily sends during the event window. Start campaign production about a month ahead.
• Product launches: Pre-launch teasers, launch day, follow-up social proof. Usually a 1-2 week burst.
• Flash sales: Short, concentrated bursts — announcement, reminder, last chance. Compress into 24-48 hours.
• Brand-specific moments: When the calendar moment is directly relevant to your product, you've earned the right to send more.

On the flip side: don't force sends just to fill the calendar. If you don't have anything worth saying in a given week, a steady one-to-two-send cadence is fine. There are no true "dead zones" in ecommerce email — but there are weeks where a single well-targeted campaign beats three mediocre ones.

How Segmentation Shapes Your Calendar

The type of brand you are determines your segmentation strategy, which determines what your calendar looks like. We think about brands in two broad categories:

Subscription Brands

If your business model is subscription-based, your calendar is organized around the customer lifecycle: prospects, first-time customers, active subscribers, and churned subscribers. Each group gets a different cadence and content type.

• Prospects: Heavy on social proof and product education. Convert them to a first purchase.
• First-time customers: Onboarding and usage tips. Get them to the second order.
• Active subscribers: Cross-sell, loyalty perks, referral programs.
• Churned subscribers: Winback campaigns with a reason to return.

Category Brands

If you sell across categories — like a brand that offers grills, knives, and cooking accessories — your calendar is organized around product categories and purchase history. Someone who bought a grill doesn't need another grill email, but they're the perfect audience for grill accessories or seasonings.

• Category buyers: Cross-sell into related categories. "You bought a grill — here's the rub kit our customers love."
• Multi-category buyers: These are your VIPs. Early access, loyalty rewards, referral asks.
• New prospects: Start with your hero product or best-selling category.

Both approaches use the same calendar structure (audience, topic, date, notes) — the segments just look different. The point is: your calendar should reflect how your customers actually behave, not a generic content schedule.

Let Quarterly Audits Inform the Next Quarter

We run quarterly audits on every client account. That's not just checking open rates — it's looking at which segments are growing or shrinking, which campaign types are driving the most revenue per recipient, and where the gaps are.

The audit directly informs the next quarter's calendar. If social proof emails crushed it last quarter, we'll increase their share. If a particular segment stopped converting, we'll adjust the approach or shift resources elsewhere.

The calendar isn't a set-it-and-forget-it document. It's a living plan that evolves based on what's actually working. Build it at the start of each quarter, review it weekly, and update it when the data tells you something changed.

Putting It All Together

Here's the process, condensed:

1. Map your segments. Who are you talking to? Prospects, first-time buyers, repeat customers, VIPs, lapsed. Build these in Klaviyo first.
2. Set your cadence. 4-6 sends/month for smaller brands, 12-24 for larger. Remember, most of these are segmented — not full-list blasts.
3. Define your content mix. 40-50% soft-sell education, 20-30% social proof, 15-25% promotional, 5-10% brand. Adjust based on your quarterly audit findings.
4. Plot your anchor dates. BFCM, brand-specific holidays, product launches, flash sales. These are your ramp-up moments.
5. Fill between the anchors. Steady cadence of education and social proof. Don't force sends just to fill the calendar.
6. Review quarterly. What's working? What's not? Adjust the mix and the segments for the next quarter.

An email marketing calendar template is just a spreadsheet. What makes it work is the strategy behind it: audience-first planning, a disciplined content mix, and the willingness to adjust when the data tells you to.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many emails should an ecommerce brand send per week?

It depends on brand size and list engagement. Smaller brands typically send 1-2 per week. Larger brands with well-segmented lists send 3-6 per week — but most of those are going to specific segments, not the full list. The right number is as many as you can send while keeping each email relevant to the person receiving it.

Should every email be a promotion or sale?

No. If more than 25% of your sends are hard promotional or discount-driven, you're training your audience to only buy on sale and eroding your margins. The majority of your calendar should be soft-sell product education and social proof — content that drives purchases without discounts.

How far in advance should I plan my email calendar?

Plan the full quarter at the start of each quarter, with anchor dates (holidays, launches, sales) mapped for the full year. For BFCM, start planning 2 months out and building campaigns 6-8 weeks ahead. For standard holidays, a month of lead time is usually enough.

What if I don't have enough content to fill the calendar?

Don't force it. A steady one-to-two-send-per-week cadence is perfectly fine if that's all you have worth saying. Customer reviews alone can fill multiple sends per month — each review-based email features different products and testimonials. Combined with product education and the occasional brand moment, most brands have more content than they think.