Email and marketing operations teams running large scale email marketing programs for financial institutions face a unique set of challenges. Because they’re in a highly regulated industry, it’s especially difficult to implement agile workflows and speed up marketing processes. Add in requirements around ADA compliance, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regulations, or AI, and things gets even more complicated
It’s imperative that larger financial services organizations adopt the agile principles to stay competitive. But how does a legacy financial institution stay agile without risking compliance or brand guardrails? Through a better creation operating model that prioritizes the process, technology, and the people.
The solution: Process, technology, and people
So what’s the solution for the email marketing teams that support large scale financial service organizations? It starts with three primary components: Processes, technology, and people.
The process
Studies show that for every $1 you invest in your email marketing program, $43 is returned. That’s a high ROI for any size organization whether they’re in regulated industries or not. Elevate your email marketing processes so that you can optimize your efforts and open the door to increased revenue.
When it comes to email creation processes, most financial service companies are early in their email creation maturity level. Creating a single email often involves:
- Building the email from scratch
- Creating a PDF file or mockup of the email
- Sending that file around to stakeholders for reviews and approvals.
- Coding for production
- Finally, deploying in an ESP
Because financial services email marketing programs are regulatory-centric, the review and approval process is overly time-consuming, and often, the customer-centric tone of the email is lost by the time the team gets to a finished version. It can be a slower model that leaves little room for collaboration or creativity.
Implementing email modules is an effective way to adopt a more agile email creation process that frees up a lot of the constraints and challenges financial services marketing teams face. By migrating to an email module design system, even marketing organizations in regulated industries can quickly advance their email marketing maturity level.
The technology
From a technology perspective, many financial services marketing teams are creating emails using a variety of tools and solutions, each group on its own platform. Developers are in Dreamweaver, designers in Photoshop, Figma or Sketch. Copywriters are working in a Word doc or Google Doc while often managing the creative brief and workflow process via a spreadsheet or other project management system. Everyone is working in a different platform and none of the tools being used integrate with each other. The lack of a collaborative work environment causes innumerable bottlenecks throughout the email creation phase.
A primary goal of your email marketing stack should be collaboration. How great would it be if you could take all the single-player tools being used and combine them into one platform? A solution that not only enables a collaborative work environment, but also has guardrails in place to keep regulatory and compliance issues in check.
This is what an email creation platform offers. It provides a sophisticated level of technology that comes with a comprehensive set of administrative and end user features to power agile workflows for even the most regulated industries. Its collaborative work environment allows for easy and auditable review and approval processes. This moves your team one step beyond the benefits of modular email design.
Everyone working and commenting within the same platform—designers, copywriters, the business teams that requested the email and the regulatory team as well—not only enables a collaborative environment, but it also drastically speeds up the review and approval process.
The people
The people who make up your marketing organization are your most important asset. However, without the right processes and technology in place, their jobs are exponentially more difficult. Our research shows the average marketing email at a financial services company can take 21 days to move from idea to completion, with five to 10 full-time employees investing countless hours simply to produce one email. That’s a lot of people and time invested in just one email!
Imagine what those team members could create if they had more time to devote to high-value activities. Instead of managing the review and approval process, they could focus on testing initiatives, customer experience strategies, and ways to improve overall marketing performance.
By enabling agile processes and implementing technology to support it, you empower your people to perform at a higher level and create greater opportunities to achieve measurable business outcomes.
If we take a step back, we can easily see how processes, technology, and people are the ultimate solution to enable agile email creation for financial services and really any other regulated industry.
The takeaway
Create optimal, agile processes that allow your team to respond quickly and efficiently. Support your agile processes with technology that provides a collaborative work environment and comes equipped with guardrails to keep regulatory issues in check. Once the process and technology are in place, your people will be able to spend more time on hitting company goals.
Stensul has helped a number of large scale financial services organizations elevate their email marketing maturity level. Schedule a call to see how our email creation platform can help you enable more agile workflows, while maintaining strict regulatory guidelines across your email marketing campaigns.
