Campaign Calendar and Broadcast Governance for Email

The calendar's job is to protect the flows. Broadcast and lifecycle compete for the same inbox placement and the same tolerance, and when a brand adds a send, the money usually comes out of the flows rather than off the top. So we run a frequency cap that the flows win: a profile mid-welcome or mid-abandonment is skipped by the broadcast, and total commercial contacts are held to a ceiling agreed per segment. For one insurer that ceiling is two a month. For a pet retail list it is eight. Neither is a best practice; both came out of the same holdout the flows are measured on. How the calendar is built: A quarter at a time, segment by segment, with each send carrying a stated job and the decision of who is excluded written down before the copy is. Roughly a third of what a brand plans in January does not survive that exercise, and the sends that survive get the room. We plan against your commercial calendar, your regulatory review capacity and your support team's Monday, in that order, because a send that generates two hundred tickets on a bank holiday weekend cost more than it made. The approval trail: In regulated categories every broadcast is archived with its versioned proof, the named approver, the date, and the claim substantiation it relies on, so it can be produced years later by somebody who was not in the room. Financial promotions records are kept for six years. Insurance renewal notices are transactional documents with mandatory content: they do not enter the marketing calendar, they are not subject to the marketing frequency cap, and an unsubscribe does not suppress them. We have found all three of those configured wrongly on takeover more than once. Send-day operations: Rendering pass on the seed set across Outlook 2016 and 2019 on Windows, Gmail on web and on the Android app, Apple Mail in dark mode. Every link checked, including the UTM and the destination's canonical tag, because a broadcast pointed at a redirect chain loses its own attribution on the way. Suppression reconciled immediately before send rather than at build time. On lists above two hundred and fifty thousand, ten per cent goes an hour early and the remainder goes only if placement and complaints hold. Where we hold the line: No send without a named approver, including the one the chief marketing officer wants out this afternoon. Nothing carrying an offer or a claim goes after Thursday, because nobody is at the desk when it breaks. No additional send at the end of a quarter to move a number; that send is borrowed from the next quarter at interest. And a hard stop on the whole programme if the trailing seven-day complaint rate crosses 0.15 per cent, half the level at which Gmail begins to act, until we have found the cause. Not included: Copywriting beyond subject lines and pre-header work, design and template production, paid media, and landing pages. We brief, we schedule, we operate and we own the calendar's outcome. We are not the studio, and a practice that both writes the send and grades it is not much use to you. Who should not take this: A brand sending fewer than four broadcasts a month, which does not need governance so much as a competent person for a day a fortnight. A team that treats the calendar as somewhere to deposit whatever was agreed in a meeting we were not in. And anyone whose answer to a flat quarter is more sends. We will propose fewer, and if that is unwelcome this will be a short engagement.