There are days when you spend the least of your time designing emails as an email designer.
All too often, you correct errors made by others. Those people break something in the ESP/MAP because they’re under-trained on how best to use the email builder in that platform.
Then there’s the thankless role of being one of your company’s logo cops. Policing brand compliance is never fun, and neither is redoing emails that use the wrong font, color palette, or brandmark. That eats up loads of time.
This blog post explains why that’s the case and what you and your creative operation can do about it.
Design efficiently
The main reason you can’t spend as much time on design matters is the inefficient creation process you’re saddled with.
If you’re struggling with a Design-to-Code process, you’re likely spending more time troubleshooting code issues than designing. Even with a Template & Module process, the clock will tick away as you repair broken templates – instead of more creative pursuits. On top of that, while in that time bind, you may forget to check to see if things like alt text and links are correct.
Because those two approaches to creation mean emails and landing pages are built in your organization’s ESP/MAP, you need to wait for Production to produce a proof before you see what your design will look like.
Time was lost waiting, and then time was consumed with the inevitable back-and-forth to get the proof right, even if it takes 14 versions to get there – which takes lots of time.
An efficient creation process gives you the time those other methods take away. You’re able to think more about your design and create better emails. Here’s how:
Be on-brand always
There’s no need to scrutinize every email to see if the right font is used for the headline, the correct color palette is used, or just about any aspect of your corporate branding guidelines are followed. The robust, programmable guardrails in an efficient process let you set hundreds of procedures and permissions.
Distribute creation, control centrally
Rather than being the only group able to create emails and landing pages, an efficient creation process lets you have people without design or technical skills produce production-ready marketing assets quickly and easily.
With its expansive guardrails, an efficient process means even creation novices can produce quality assets because it takes a no-code approach, meaning if someone can drag-and-drop, they can create. Pre-set templates and modules, reflecting the established guardrails, ensure your company’s emails are of consistent quality and, of course, on-brand all the time,
Further, an efficient process lets you determine who has access and what they can and cannot do.
Beyond the guardrails and permissioning, you can arrange the process so your core team can review it before an email is uploaded to your deployment platform.
Get approvals faster
One frequently cited reason for most companies taking as much as eight weeks – or more- weeks to get a single email out the door was their inefficient review & approval process. Too often, people review the wrong or outdated version of an email proof, and changes are made by people who are unauthorized to do so and are routed in what could be best described as haphazardly.
An efficient process brings all involved in creating a marketing asset to a single, collaborative environment. An email can move quickly through a higher-quality review with fewer touchpoints. The guardrails come into play again in things like logo usage, required footer copy, and more, removing the need to review such elements.
The result is emails are approved faster, allowing SLAs to be met and market opportunities to be optimized.
To learn more about efficient email creation, download 11 things you can do when it takes less time to create emails. It’s from Stensul, the Marketing Creation Platform. It’s reduced creation time by up to 90% for companies like yours.
