Campaign Calendar and Broadcast Send Management

The calendar I run usually sends fewer broadcasts than the one it replaces, around a third fewer in the first quarter, and the constraint that sets the number is the complaint rate rather than the content plan. I hold accounts to 0.08 percent complaints in Google Postmaster Tools. The 0.30 percent Google publishes for bulk senders is not a target; it is the point at which placement has already gone. How a week runs: Monday, a one-page brief per send: who receives it defined as a query rather than as a name, who is excluded, the single thing the send is for, and the measure that will settle whether it worked. Tuesday, build. Wednesday, QA. Thursday, send. Friday, a readout of what the last send changed and what that means for the next one. Briefs and readouts live in your project tool rather than in my inbox, so the record survives me leaving. QA is the same list every week. Every link resolved and tagged against one UTM taxonomy agreed at the start. Render checked in Outlook 365 on Windows, in Apple Mail, and in the Gmail app on both iOS and Android. Dark mode confirmed in the two systems that behave differently from each other. A seed send read on a phone before the real one goes. Send-time optimisation gets switched on only once an account has enough click history to justify it; before that it is a random number generator with a good name. The number of sends is an output: Volume is reviewed monthly against complaints, unsubscribes and the size of the engaged band, and it moves in both directions. In practice accounts have settled between one and two sends a week. When a month underperforms the answer is not two more sends. It is usually that the audience for the last four was the same audience. Full-list sends happen for a genuine whole-audience event and rarely otherwise: a price change, a policy change, a closure. Everything else goes to a defined band with an explicit exclusion set attached. The Spanish calendar: Rebajas open in the first week of January and again in early July, and they move real volume. The gift moment is 6 January, not 25 December, so a December plan copied from a US brand misses the week that pays. August is dead for a fintech and busy for a sun-care line. For a nonprofit the last week of December carries a disproportionate share of individual giving, and the fact worth putting in the appeal is the deduction itself, 80 percent of the first 250 euros of annual giving under the Ley 49/2002 regime as amended for 2024, which most Spanish charities leave out of their own year-end email. Pressure across channels: Email cannot be planned alone. Contacts per person per week across email, push and SMS get agreed with whoever owns those channels. Where nobody owns that number I will say so early and cap email at a level that leaves room, which is a conversation some teams would rather not have. Outside the retainer: Flows are separate work. Broadcasts and flows compete for the same inbox and I coordinate the calendar against them, but I do not run both under this engagement. Landing pages and product pages are yours. New template design sits in a separate build, though I work inside an existing module set and extend it where needed. No purchased lists, no cold outreach, no reactivation of an appended file, whatever the vendor claims about its provenance. Not a fit: A team where every send needs committee sign-off 48 hours out. The calendar is weekly and it does not survive an approval chain longer than the build. And an account that wants a fixed number of sends per month written into the contract, because that number is a finding rather than a deliverable.