A single-market email calendar is easy. Twelve months, a row per campaign, a colour per type. The trouble starts with the second country. Someone duplicates the sheet for Germany, someone else adds a "markets" column that says "All except FR", and by spring nobody is sure whether Japan got the March newsletter or whether it went out on a public holiday.
This template is built the other way round, so it works for one market and keeps working at twenty. Download it free, no sign-up:
- Excel template (.xlsx), with a stage dropdown, frozen header and filters already set up
- CSV version, for Numbers or anything else
For Google Sheets, open a blank sheet, choose File, then Import, and upload the .xlsx. The dropdown and filters come across. The rest of this page explains how to use it.
One row per campaign, per market
The most important rule: a campaign that goes to five markets is five rows, sharing one campaign ID. Not one row with "UK, DE, FR, US, JP" in a cell.
It feels like more work, and for about a week it is. But every real question about a multi-market programme is a question about one market:
- Has the French copy come back from translation?
- Is the Australian version going out on its own date?
- Who signed off the German version, and when?
- What did Brazil actually send in November?
With one row per market, each of those is a filter. With one row per campaign, each is a conversation.
The columns, and why they're there
- Campaign ID. Ties the market rows together. Something short and sortable, such as 2027-03-SPRING.
- Campaign and market. What it is and where it's going.
- Language. Not the same as market. Canada, Switzerland and Belgium each need more than one, and Austria often shares Germany's.
- Send date, send time and time zone. Write the local time and the time zone, e.g. 08:00 Europe/Berlin. "8am" on its own causes more wrong sends than any other field.
- Copy due and translation due. Translation needs its own deadline. If the source copy is late, translation is late, and that's the date that slips without anyone noticing.
- Build by and sign-off due. Counted back from the send date. See the email campaign workflow guide for sensible defaults.
- Owner and builder. One name each. A team name is not an owner.
- Stage. Not started, copy in, translated, built, signed off, sent. Keep it to one word or two so it can be filtered.
- Offer or theme, and notes. The notes column is for exceptions, not for the plan.
Using it for a single market
If you only send to one country, keep the market and language columns anyway and fill them the same on every row. It costs nothing, and the day your company launches in a second country the calendar already works. Everything else on this page still applies, apart from translation due, which you can hide.
Dates that differ by market
The global calendar is where single-market habits cause the most trouble. A few that catch teams out every year:
- Mother's Day isn't one day. The UK celebrates Mothering Sunday in March or April, three weeks before Easter. The US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan and Brazil use the second Sunday in May. Mexico always uses 10 May. France usually has it on the last Sunday in May.
- Lunar New Year moves. It falls somewhere between 21 January and 20 February. It matters across China, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia, and to large audiences elsewhere.
- Ramadan moves too, about eleven days earlier each year, and Eid al-Fitr follows it. Check the dates each year rather than copying last year's.
- Golden Week in Japan runs from late April into early May. Many people are travelling. Plan around it rather than through it.
- Singles' Day, 11 November, started in China and is now a sale date in several other markets.
- Diwali falls in October or November and is a major shopping period in India and for the Indian diaspora.
- Black Friday follows US Thanksgiving, the fourth Thursday in November. It's now a sale date in the UK, much of Europe, Australia and Brazil, but expectations around depth of discount and timing differ. Mexico has its own November event, El Buen Fin.
- Boxing Day sales on 26 December matter in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and hardly at all in the US.
- Seasons flip. If you're sending a "summer sale" in July, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina are in winter. Same creative, different season name.
- Weekends differ. In Saudi Arabia and Israel the weekend falls on Friday and Saturday. A Sunday send is a working-day send.
Treat this as a starting list. Ask each market for their own top ten dates once a year, before you plan the year. For the full list with exact dates, see the email marketing calendar for 2027, country by country.
Send times across time zones
Pick each market's send time in local time, then work out what that means for the person pressing the button. If one person schedules every send from London, a 08:00 Tokyo send is a midnight job. Most ESPs can schedule by recipient time zone, which helps for one market spread across zones (the US, Australia, Brazil), but not when the markets have different content.
Also watch the clock changes. Europe and North America move their clocks on different weekends, so for two or three weeks in March, and about a week around the end of October, the gap between London and New York is four hours, not five. Most of the southern hemisphere moves in the opposite direction, and many countries don't change at all.
Keeping it honest
A calendar is only useful if it's true. Three habits keep it that way:
- Mark sends as sent on the day. Then anything with a past date that isn't marked sent is a real problem, not untidiness.
- Review it weekly, fifteen minutes on a fixed day. Look at the next three weeks, not the whole year.
- Plan at least two months ahead. If a market has nothing scheduled beyond next month, that's the moment to plan, not the week before.
When the spreadsheet stops being enough
Spreadsheets work well up to a point. They struggle when several people edit at once, when you need to share a read-only view with translators or local teams, or when you want sign-off to live next to the plan. That's what the Mailfois campaign planner does: campaigns across boards and markets, a stage and send date for every market, a calendar that shows markets on their own dates, and password-protected links for people outside the team.
You don't have to start again. This template imports straight into Mailfois: upload the file (or paste the cells), and each campaign's rows become one campaign with its markets, stages and send dates. Columns the planner has no field for, like time zone and owner, are kept in the campaign's notes. Your own spreadsheet works too, whatever its columns are called. Create a free account and choose Import in the planner.
Comparing tools to run your calendar in? See the best email marketing calendar and planning tools for 2027, compared honestly on per-market dates, sign-off and real cost.
