If I ask you, or any other marketing operations professional (MOPs pro), what email creation means and there’s an excellent chance your response won’t be short or straightforward.
That’s completely understandable because the way the overwhelming majority of companies create marketing emails today is very complicated and takes a long time. It takes two weeks or more for 80% of all brands to get one email out the door.
The challenges you face to be efficient grow steadily. Whether B2B, B2C, or D2C, all brands contend with an ever-changing, ever-demanding customer base. Add to that ever-aggressive competitors, and the need to move fast without stumbling is critical.
While you’ve harnessed lots of powerful – even cool – 21st-century technology to optimize the efficiency of your martech stack, the email creation process in your organization is pretty much the same it’s been since the 1990s. Since MOPs pros like you focus on efficiency every workday, something like that must drive you up a wall.
Here’s what you, as a marketing operations pro, can do to bring efficiency to every aspect of your company’s marketing operation, including – and especially – email creation.
Be more than an ‘operations orchestrator’
Chief Martec’s Scott Brinker, the well-regarded observer of marketing technology, labels MOPs who work to make their martech stacks work “operations orchestrators.” Think of an orchestra conductor who brings together different elements to produce a fantastic performance.
And like the conductor who works with the members of an orchestra to buy into the approach for playing a particular work, you need to go beyond simply making the stack work. That’s what’s required if you hope to see the 15-20% improvement in marketing effectiveness that can occur when marketing operations is done well.
You need to be more than an “operations orchestrator,” caring only about whether the stack works. You need to advocate for efficiency across the entire spectrum of marketing activities. And nowhere is the need for that more obvious than in email creation.
Understand what email is today, inefficient
Email creation is not efficient because it involves many repetitive, mostly manual tasks done by several specialists working with single-purpose tools, operating in silos. It looks like this:
- A marketer prepares a brief
- A copywriter and designer review the brief
- The copywriter develops the email’s messaging
- The designer designs the email’s look and feel
- The marketer reviews and approves the copy and layout
- If changes need to be made, it goes back to the copywriter and or designer
- A developer then turns the layout and copy into HTML code for it to be reviewed by the prior folks
- Any fixes/tweaks that need to be identified in the review sends the email back to the developer
- Once all is right, the email goes for “final review” by those responsible for brand and regulatory compliance and, maybe, senior management
- Of course, if changes are needed, it goes back to the developer for fixing
- Once fixed, the email goes through QA
- If any issues crop up, it needs to go back for code corrections
- Finally, with everything as it should be, the email is sent to the MAP/ESP for deployment, assuming deliverability, accessibility, and similar matters have been addressed
Lots of back-and-forth mark the traditional email creation process
It’s a process prone to bottlenecks, delays, and frustration. All of which, as a marketing operations pro dedicated to efficiency, you can help eliminate.
Make your email creation workflow efficient
The way to reduce email creation time from a week or more to an hour or less is to put an Email Creation Platform at the center of your email creation process.
An Email Creation Platform accelerates launch times and increases send volumes without sacrificing the quality or adding more resources. It has a suite of features that add speed to the production, review, and approval processes. Importantly, an Email Creation Platform brings everyone together in a single, collaborative environment to streamline the overall process for more efficient workflows and faster production cycles.
ESPs and MAPs are centered on automating various aspects of your email marketing efforts. An Email Creation Platform sits in front of those systems and is focused on the creation process. It complements your existing ESP and MAPs, integrating with the rest of your marketing technology stack to streamline your email production.
An Email Creation Platform can reduce email creation time by as much as 90%, freeing up 3-4 full-time resources or more to focus on higher-value work and strategy.
Integrate applications to enhance marketing operations efficiency
An Email Creation Platform can optimize many of the applications already in your martech stack. It seamlessly integrates with image libraries, link tracking, dynamic content, messaging, and workflows. In addition, the platform allows a completed email to be uploaded with a single mouse click to your MAP or ESP.
These integrations save steps, time, and reduce the risk of the inadequately trained doing things they shouldn’t or didn’t mean to do in the deployment platform.
The more integrations, the more efficient your entire martech stack can be.
To learn more about making your organization’s email creation process more efficient as any marketing operations pro would, click here to download the eBook The email creation handbook for MOPs pros.
