12 Days of Data, Day 12: 2020 Email and Marketing Campaign Calendar

Introduction

Welcome to the 12 Days of Data, our look back at the data that made marketing in 2019. We’re looking at the year that was from an analytics perspective to see what insights we can take into the next year and decade. Sit up, get your coffee ready, and let’s celebrate some data.

2020 Email and Marketing Campaign Calendar

On Day 12, we offer a final gift to you, the gift of predictive analytics. Every year, we run forecasts for clients about what’s likely to impact their business in the year ahead, but no forecast is more broadly applicable than our email marketing predictive forecast which details the best weeks of the year to launch major marketing campaigns.

The way this forecast works is that we look at when people search for a basket of terms around being out of office, terms such as “outlook out of office”, “gmail out of office”, and “out of office template”, among many others. When people are searching most for these terms, they’re likely to immediately afterwards be out of the office – and that means you shouldn’t be sending email, launching major marketing campaigns, or anything that involves massive audience awareness and commitment. They’re not in their inboxes or even the office!

Conversely, when people search for these terms the least, they’re most likely in the office, reading email. Those are the times to spin up ads, to sponsor a social post, hold that webinar, and of course, send that email campaign.

So, without further ado, the 3 weeks in each quarter of 2020 when people will be in the office, and thus you should launch marketing campaigns, in order of priority for each quarter (not chronologically):

Key Takeaways

The takeaway here is to plan your calendars accordingly. If you’re working on scheduling webinars, these are the weeks to aim for. If you’re thinking about throwing an event, people are less likely to have conflicting commitments these weeks. If you’ve got a drip email program you want to get off the ground in 2020, these would be the weeks to turn it on, to give it a try.

Whatever your plans are for 2020, use these 12 dates to deliver more impact.

We hope you’ve enjoyed and found valuable the 12 days of data. Insights and analyses like these are what we do for our clients all year long, so if you’ve got a data, analytics, or insights challenge going into the new year, please reach out. We’re happy to help build insights like these and many more for you to make 2020 your best year ever.

Happy holidays from all of us at Trust Insights.

Methodology

Trust Insights used Google trend data, blended with AHREFS keyword data, to analyze the last 5 years of search volume for 110 search terms around the topic of out of office software and templates. Using custom code, we forecasted forward by week the next 72 weeks, then truncated the analysis to calendar year 2020. Because the measures are normalized, we used the arithmetic mean as the measure of centrality. The period of the study is January 1, 2020 – December 31, 2020. The date of data extraction is December 22, 2019. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.