Plan an Entire Year of Content with this Retail Marketing & Events Calendar Template

You’re probably thinking that it’s a little too soon to be planning next year’s retail marketing calendar. But why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?

In fact, there are a lot of benefits to planning your retail and e-commerce marketing campaigns early. A few include:

You’ll start filling your sales funnel early, which means people will be closer to making a purchase decision by the time peak buying periods roll around.
Working far in advance means you’ll have more time to build up plenty of marketing runway.
You can be more creative, since you’ll have plenty of time to do it right.
There will be fewer last-minute fire-drills, making your work life more manageable.
While I’m not expecting you to have all of your retail marketing activities for next year planned, this template and infographic should help you build up at least a quarter or more of marketing campaigns.

If you’re not ready to start planning yet – no problem. It’ll be here waiting for you when you’re ready to get started.

There’s even a printable retail marketing infographic and calendar template to help you when it’s time to get planning.

Retail Marketing Calendar Templates
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of planning your ecommerce marketing calendar 2020, you’ll want to download these templates.

You’ll find:

A Marketing Campaign Planning Template to organize your entire retail marketing campaign.
A Retail Marketing Calendar with all the upcoming holidays to plan your campaigns around.
A Printable Retail Marketing Infographic to keep up with all the key marketing dates.

What is a Retail Marketing Calendar?

Let’s start by discussing a little about what a retail calendar actually is.

A retail marketing and events calendar is usually a spreadsheet that gives the marketing team a single source of truth for all the upcoming marketing activities.

It’s the birds-eye view of the marketing strategy, new merchandise launches upcoming events and promotional schedules.

A robust calendar should outline deadlines, tasks, and all required actions that must take place for content to publish on time.

It's the document that makes sure your marketing activities go from imagination to reality.

Companies who sell a product via a brick-and-mortar, e-commerce store, or pop-up shop can all benefit from a retail marketing calendar.

Planning Your Retail Marketing Events and Campaigns
When sitting down to start strategizing about your upcoming retail and sales campaigns, there are a few things you can do to make sure your initiatives are successful.

Some marketers feel that these steps are a waste of time and take away effort that could be used to produce customer-facing content.

However, marketers are 356% more likely to report success when they engage in a few planning activities before launching a campaign. Here are a few areas to focus on:

Goal and Objective Setting
The main goal of retail marketing is to bring visitors to the store… be it a digital or physical location. Then, we need to convert these visitors into paying customers.

Rarely does a visitor complete a purchase their first time in the store. The buying cycle typically involves numerous interactions prior to making a sale.

The individual will visit the store, see an ad or social media post, follow the company, sign up for its mailing list, visit the store again, put something in the shopping cart, abandon the shopping cart, click an ad, go cold for a few weeks, open a discount email, visit the store again, and finally complete their purchase.

It’s a convoluted process… and it can take weeks or even months.

Defining goals and objectives can help you make sense of the often complicated marketing funnel.

Let’s go through how to set goals that actually contribute to the bottom line.

“Get more visitors.”

This is not a very well-thought-out business goal.

Why? Because it doesn’t specify much more than an outcome.

Your marketing goals need to provide clear guideposts for what success looks like. In other words. Your goals need to be S.M.A.R.T.

Here’s what your goal should look like instead:

‘We need 20,000 website visitors and 5% converted into leads, within the next 12-months in order to achieve our revenue goal of $1.2 million.”

Find Your Retail Marketing Goal With This Step-by-Step Process
Start by figuring out how much revenue you need to generate and how much you want to grow.

Step 1:

Figure out how much revenue you need to generate and how much you want to grow.

Your company sold $1 million worth of merchandise last year. You want to grow by 20% in the coming year.

That means you need to sell $1.2 million next year.

Here’s the equation:

Total Sales Previous Year x Percentage Growth = Revenue Increase

$1 million x .20 = $200,000

$1 million + $200,000 = $1.2 million

Step 2:

Calculate the average price of your sales.

So, you sold $1 million dollars in merchandise last year and you had about 20,000 total customers.

That means the average person spent $50 in your store.

Total Sales Previous Year / Total Number of Customers = Average Price of Each Sale

$1 million / 20,000 = $50

Step 3:

Figure out how many customers you need to reach your revenue goal.

Assuming the average sale of $50 remains constant...

You’ll need about 24,000 customers next year. OR 4,000 more than you had last year.

Total Revenue Next Year / Average Sale Price = Total Customers Needed Next Year

$1.2 million / $50 = 24,000

Step 4:

Calculate your visitor conversion rate.

Not everyone who visits your store will make a purchase or become a customer. You need to figure out your conversion percentage to make an accurate approximation for how many total visitors you’ll need to bring in to meet your revenue goal.

Taking the numbers from above, your store had 1 million total visitors last year and 20,000 of them turned into paying customers. In that case, you converted 2% of visitors into paying customers.

Total Customers / Total Visitors * 100 = Conversion Rate

20,000 / 1,000,000 * 100 = 2%

Step 5:

Calculate the total number of visitors you need to reach your growth goal.

The final step is to figure out how many visitors you need to bring in as a marketer to reach the revenue goal of $1.2 million dollars in sales. Assuming you continue to convert 2% of visitors

Total Customer Needed / Conversion Rate = Total Visitors Needed

24,000 / .02 = 1.2 Million Visitors

That’s your north star as a marketer. Everything you do should be focused on driving 1.2 million people to visit your store.