A calendar for your sends
The Campaign Calendar lives inside StoreFront Communications, the email and SMS engine built into every UltraCart account. It works as your email marketing calendar, showing every scheduled, sending, and sent campaign on a single screen, so you can spot gaps, avoid stacking three emails on the same morning, and keep a steady rhythm in front of your subscribers.
You can view your plan three ways. Month is the default seven-day grid with campaign chips inside each day. Week switches to an hourly layout so you can see and set exact send times. Agenda is a scrolling list of days that have something scheduled, and the calendar drops to it automatically on phones and small screens. One detail to commit to memory: every time on the calendar and in the scheduling tools is shown in Eastern Time. The header even reminds you with a "Times shown in ET" label.
Scheduled isn't sent
Here is the single most important thing to understand when you schedule email campaigns: setting a send time does not guarantee a campaign goes out. In UltraCart, a scheduled campaign sends only after two separate gates both clear. Until they do, the campaign sits on the calendar but will not deliver.
- The email must be approved. Email campaigns are submitted to UltraCart for review. Until the email is approved, a scheduled campaign will not send.
- The campaign must be activated. Even after the email is approved, the campaign itself has to be activated out of draft. An approved but un-activated campaign will not send.
The calendar rolls these two gates into a single review status and shows it everywhere the campaign appears. If a campaign reads Needs approval or Needs activation, treat that as a to-do, not a warning you can ignore. The campaign only reaches Ready to send once every email in it is approved and the campaign is activated.
How to schedule email campaigns
You set a send time on a campaign from the Add Campaign or Edit Campaign dialog. The whole process takes about a minute.
- Open a campaign, or create a new one, and find the field labeled When should we send out this campaign?
- Pick a date and time. The picker uses a 12-hour clock in five-minute steps and will not let you choose a time in the past. Remember the times are Eastern.
- Confirm the campaign reaches Ready to send: submit the email for review and activate the campaign.
Once a date is set, two more controls appear. Repeat Monthly turns the campaign into a recurring send from the scheduled date, which is handy for a monthly newsletter or a first-of-the-month reminder. Clear Date removes the scheduled time. Be careful with that second one: if the campaign was in the scheduled status, clearing the date sends it back to draft, and it will not go out again until you re-schedule and re-activate it.
Scheduling itself is optional. The field's helper text says as much, and a campaign with no send time simply stays a draft until you schedule it or send it manually. If you would rather trigger sends from customer behavior instead of a fixed clock, marketing automation flows handle abandoned carts, welcome series, and post-purchase follow-ups on their own.
Reading send status
Each campaign shows up as a chip on its scheduled day, and in week view, its scheduled hour. The chip carries the campaign name, the send time, a (recurring) label and dashed border if it repeats, and two pieces of color-coding that tell you everything at a glance.
The status dot reflects where the campaign sits in its lifecycle: gray for draft, blue for scheduled, orange for in flight, green for sent or completed, and red for archived. The review badge answers the more useful question, which is whether a scheduled campaign is actually cleared to send:
- Needs approval (red): the email has not been submitted for review. Open the campaign and submit it.
- In review (orange): submitted and awaiting UltraCart review. No action needed, though it must be approved before the scheduled time to send.
- Rejected (red): the email was rejected in review. Edit it and resubmit.
- Needs activation (orange): the email is approved but the campaign is still a draft. Open it and click Activate.
- Ready to send (green): approved and activated. Nothing to do, so it will send on schedule.
- No email step (gray): the campaign has no email to review. Add an email step.
On desktop, hover any chip to open a preview popover with the email image, the send time, the target lists, recurrence, and a plain-language read on the review status. Click the chip to open the campaign. Pairing the calendar with your lists and segments is the fastest way to confirm the right audience is attached before a send goes live.
Plan around holidays
The calendar marks common United States holidays so you can plan sends around them, or deliberately onto them. Holidays appear as small labels on their day in every view, and they are informational only. They never block scheduling, so a Black Friday send is entirely up to you.
Holidays come in three flavors, separated by label color. Public federal holidays cover dates like Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving. Observance dates cover cultural moments like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Halloween. Retail dates cover the commercial heavy hitters: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Eve, and New Year's Eve. When a fixed-date public holiday lands on a weekend, the calendar also marks the observed weekday with a dashed "(observed)" label, so do not be alarmed if a holiday seems to appear twice. For the season that drives 30 to 50 percent of annual revenue for many stores, mapping these dates early is the difference between a planned campaign and a rushed one. A steady, well-spaced calendar also protects your sender reputation and supports long-term customer retention.
See what's coming
You do not have to open the full calendar to know what is going out next. The Upcoming widget on the Communication dashboard lists campaigns scheduled in the next 30 days, up to seven of them, with a headline like "Next communication: in 2 days · Needs activation." Each row shows the campaign name, send time, a relative time that refreshes every minute, a status dot, and the same review badge you see on the calendar. Click any row to open the campaign. If nothing is queued, the widget reads "Nothing scheduled in the next 30 days" with quick buttons to view the calendar or create a campaign.
Best times to send
Once you trust the mechanics, timing becomes the lever. Engagement studies consistently point to the middle of the week, with Tuesday through Thursday outperforming Monday and Friday, and weekends trailing well behind. Mid-morning, roughly 9 a.m. to noon, tends to catch people as they clear their inbox. One small trick worth adopting: schedule a few minutes after the top of the hour rather than exactly on it, so your email lands above the wave of marketers who all picked 9:00 sharp.
Because UltraCart shows the picker in five-minute steps, a 9:05 a.m. send is easy to set. Treat any external "best time" advice as a starting point, then let your own results refine it. Your ecommerce analytics show which sends earn opens and clicks, and a few weeks of testing different days and times will tell you more about your list than any industry average can.
Scheduling FAQ
Why didn't my scheduled campaign send?
Almost always because it was not at Ready to send. A scheduled time alone does not send a campaign. Open it and check the review badge: if it reads Needs approval, submit the email for review; if it reads Needs activation, click Activate. It must be both approved and activated before the scheduled time.
Why did my campaign revert to draft?
The scheduled date was cleared on a campaign that was in the scheduled status, which returns it to draft. Re-set the send date, then re-activate the campaign so it returns to Ready to send.
Why are the times an hour off?
All scheduling and calendar times are in Eastern Time, not your local zone. Read and set times as ET. The calendar header shows "Times shown in ET" as a reminder.
Can I repeat a campaign automatically?
Yes. Once a send date is set, turn on Repeat Monthly to repeat the campaign monthly from that date. Recurring campaigns show a (recurring) label and a dashed border on the calendar.
Put your sends on a plan
The Campaign Calendar turns email from a series of last-minute decisions into a plan you can see and trust. Schedule your sends, glance at the review badges to confirm each one is cleared, and use the holiday markers to stay ahead of the busy season. For the technical details on the approval and activation steps, the full Campaign Calendar documentation walks through each one, and you can browse more guides in the UltraCart resource library. Because email is built into the platform, there is no separate app to wire up or pay for. New to UltraCart? See plans and pricing to get started.