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TALE
Email’s ability to produce marketing and sales results is unmatched. It is unique in hunting down prospects, and there’s nothing better when it comes to nurturing and converting leads to sales. A typical 4,200% ROI confirms that.
Yes, email is astounding. No doubt, as a marketer or marketing operations person, you’ve heard – and likely told – many tales of how email produced eye-popping results. What doesn’t get told with near the frequency are gut-wrenching tales of horror that happen during the email creation process – that space between an email brief and deployment.
Lots of nightmare-producing moments have occurred in that space. Such tales of horror need to be shared with folks like you. The reason isn’t to frighten you but to help you learn how to avoid the most nerve-wracking email creation horrors forever.
You’ll be able to read 7 Tales of Horror in Email Creation here, and we’ll be adding them to this page every 2 weeks until September 2022. Each offers a real-world experience that drove the calm to be crazed. Read them for more restful nights and, more importantly, easier to manage days, and be sure to come back for more. Better to be smart than scared when it comes to email creation.
It’s cloudy in New York. The sky has a decidedly ominous look to it. Christine is walking on a once-again-crowded sidewalk to get to her company’s office, where she’s the Director of Digital Marketing. She’s feeling good and anxious simultaneously, mainly because of a text message she got last night from Jane, a member of her team coordinating the email review & approvals process.
The message read: We worked through the issue on the email. You should see another proof mid-morning tomorrow.
Not just any email. The email kicks off a new marketing effort that everyone is counting on to make the goals for the current quarter. As Christine navigated the sidewalk filled with others who, like her, had RTO’d (returned to the office), she was glad to know she and her team were one step closer to getting this crucial email done when it had to.
At 10:20 am, a soft bling sound emits from Christine’s computer, alerting her to the arrival of a new email. She looks at the inbox and sees it’s the email proof.
Christine opens the email and scrolls down to look at the email proof placed in the body of the email. She peers at it and says, “okay, we’re almost home,” and reviews the material carefully, looking at every aspect of this digital communication.
Christine realizes this email is nowhere near ready. Things need to be fixed. After typing a series of instructions, she emails the proof back to Jane.
Moments later, her Slack icon bounces. It’s a message from Jane. She asks, “Why did you review that version of the email? That was the old one that we fixed already!!!!! Plus you know whenever you forward emails, they tend to get wacky with all the back and forth.”
Distressingly, this wasn’t the first time a review of the wrong version occurred while readying an email at Christine’s company. Proofs were inserted into a handful of emails and sent to different individuals in the review and approval process. The threads of these emails got frighteningly long with changing commas to periods, fixing grammatical errors, and inserting the latest company logo. Because various people reviewed the various revisions at various times, the proof versions were labeled haphazardly. Little was done synchronously.
Finding the latest version – the proof that Christine hoped was the definitive “final final” – took a headache-inducing amount of time. Emails had to be sorted through, proofs re-examined, timestamps on those emails needed to be compared. Contradicting comments had to be evaluated.
The ominous sky over New York that morning was an omen Christine overlooked. The endless forwarding of emails with proofs that were forwarded and then forwarded again caused the campaign kick-off email not to be issued as planned. The dominos of the multi-faceted campaign fell one by one as a result. Not surprisingly, the company missed the quarter’s goals. You don’t want to know what happened next.
Christine and her team are not alone. Many experience this tale of horror unnecessarily. The overwhelming majority of companies create emails today the same way as in the 1990s. Emails are typically created by specialists using single-purpose tools, working in silos. That’s why 80% of all brands take two weeks or more to get one email out the door. Much of that time is taken up by endless back-and-forth in the email review and approval process – the curse of the forwarded email.
Christine and her team didn’t have to suffer this email creation horror.
They could have put a Stensul Email Creation Platform™ at the center of their email creation process. It provides a single environment that brings together all involved to streamline collaboration and simplify email creation.
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