MarketingSherpa Video Archive

How a Seasonal Retailer Evolved from Promo Emails to Year-Round Content Marketing

Marcia Oakes, Senior Online Marketing Manager



Calendars.com faced a challenge that was inherent with its products: Not everyone wants to buy or has a need to purchase a calendar year-round.

As a highly seasonal brand, the company relied on promotional messaging in the hopes of maintaining engagement through its slower months. For Calendars.com, this meant April through July.

"There are only so many 'calendar clearance' messages that our subscribers will receive before they will opt-out," Marcia Oakes, Senior Online Marketing Manager, explained.

In her MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 presentation, Oakes explained how Calendars.com ditched this approach of entirely promotional messaging to embrace a more content and social media-oriented strategy.

Calendars.com branded "Flip Day" — the day when people flip their calendars to a new month — and looked at it as an opportunity to create fun and creative content to foster more engagement with subscribers.

Content was developed for the newsletters, and social media was incorporated to share more content with subscribers from Calendars.com's social media channels.

Watch her presentation to learn how the strategy worked to increase open rates 71% for the non-promotional Flip Day campaign.

Download the slides from this presentation

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 — Want to see more presentations like this one? Attend #SherpaEmail, Feb. 23-26, Las Vegas

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Email Summit 2014: Finding your email voice