No matter how many requests your email creation team handles on any given week, well before those completed emails get sent to your subscribers, each one needs to go through a review & approval process. Typically, it’s a process with several places prone to problems that slow things down drastically, prompting plenty of angst for all involved.
It often takes time before problems are noticed. But the moment you recognize there are problems with your review & approval process, you need to act. In our work with hundreds of email marketing pros, Stensul identified five steps to take to improve your email review & approval process. By doing so you’ll see your email creation process become more efficient overall.
Here are the five steps you can take:
1. Communicate clearly
When you bring people together to review & approve an email, you need to make it absolutely clear what you need each one to do. Ideally, have this occur in a single work environment that encourages the best sort of collaboration. If everyone doesn’t have visibility into the process, they’ll not understand what needs to be done, how, and by whom. Further, spell out what they should and shouldn’t review and comment on. There’s no point in having anyone take time to look at something they don’t have to. For example, someone who knows nothing about code shouldn’t review coding.
2. Avoid mistakes
Any time there are a lot of cooks, there’ll be mistakes in the kitchen. The same holds true for marketing emails. Stensul found the most frequent mistake that gets made – and all too often made again – is reviewing the wrong version of an email in proof form. Unless everyone knows which version they should be looking at, mistakes will happen.
Using a method that ensures the right version is being reviewed by the right people – at the right time – will help avoid this common mistake.
Add personalization, segmentation, and dynamic content into the mix, and the likelihood of mistakes will rise. Of course, these tactics are proven to boost email results. But, if mistakes are not identified before the messages go to subscribers, the problems can include bunches of consumers opting out of your database.
The truth be told, it’s practically impossible to eliminate all errors all the time. However, by bringing all the parts – email versions, segmentation, and dynamic content variables – and the people performing the review & approval together in a well-managed, coordinated way, you can reduce errors in a big way.
3. Stay on schedule
Stensul found the main reason SLAs are not met or launch dates are missed is an email gets stuck in a review & approval process. The need to meet a deadline cannot be understated. Being late with an important email campaign can mean you don’t make your numbers for the quarter. The reason that email is does not get sent as planned is the review & approval process is not simple nor streamlined. It’s chock full of places where it can get bogged down, even lost. That often happens because a multitude of mechanisms that only serve to make a review & approval process disjointed and disorganized. Nearly half of surveyed companies use email to send proofs to reviewers and approvers. Think about how long and confusing some of those email threads can be. Slightly less use a project management system, while almost 40% use Google Docs or other file-sharing systems. About 20% use PDF markups, often distributed as attachments to emails.
It should not be surprising most that marketers point to approval delays as the main reason they’re unable to stay on schedule. Many acknowledge their approach is far from organized. That’s necessary to ensure everyone reviews the same version so the email is deployed on schedule.
4. Keep everyone informed
Participants in an email review & approval process aren’t like an NFL team, huddling up before they execute the next play. It’s quite the opposite. In most organizations, people involved in the creation and the review & approval processes operate in silos. Comments are made in what amounts to a vacuum. You won’t know what others are doing – or should be – because the communication is far from what it should be. When all reviewers and approvers can easily communicate, ideally in real-time in a common environment, there’s visibility, understanding, and efficiency. Everyone is informed about what’s happening throughout the process to reduce questions, concerns, and delays.
5. Get management’s endorsement
At every company there are people who do not put a priority on adhering to a process or put a premium on meeting the deadlines associated with that process. To change that, a system of responsibility and accountability needs to be put in place. More important, thought, is management – whether it’s the tea leader, department head, or a senior executive – has to endorse the need for and method behind the process. Not doing that will allow that problem to grow and have more severe impact on much more than the timely review of an email. Time and money will be lost. You, your team, and others they support will become frustrated, affecting morale and productivity,
To learn more about making your review & approval process simpler, speedier, and just work better, download the eBook How to make your email review & approval process more efficient.
