The person sitting atop your company’s marketing organization is usually the Chief Marketing Officer, or CMO, who likely doesn’t fully appreciate how you and your team create emails.
CMOs are laser-focused on results—big-picture-type results. They tend to look at things from a 50,000-foot perspective. As such, they’re not going to fully understand how the sausage gets made in email creation, so to speak. By looking into the sausage making, however, you can realize opportunities to create significant gains in performance.
Why good email creation matters
A perfect example is showing your CMO how an efficient email creation process can yield better email results that will have a meaningful impact on business performance. That’s clearly something your CMO will care about and is a great way to get them to care about email creation. What’s more, because CMOs have the highest turnover rate of any exec in the C-suite, a better way to generate better results will be of keen interest.
Whether you’re a CMO, a marketing team leader, or a team member, what matters is moving the needle—doing things that make an impact, that drive results. The hoops you and your team must jump through to get an email created and out the door are of little interest.
Because email is consistently a strong performer, with a higher conversion rate than social media, and producing an ROI of $42 from every dollar spent, your CMO will want more emails, sent with greater frequency, and at greater volume. All indicators point to that goal—if it’s not already happening. The global market for email marketing is growing from $7.5 billion in 2020 to an anticipated $17.5 billion by 2027.
The other side of that coin is that your email creation process is very likely complicated, time-consuming, and, for those building the emails, frustrating. That’s how it is with the two most popular ways to create emails, design-to-code and template & modules. These processes involve specialists operating in silos while using single-purpose tools that don’t “talk” with each other. Inherent in these approaches is lots of back-and-forth and as a result, all sorts of opportunities for bottlenecks and headache-producing delays.
Indicative of the inefficiency of those traditional email creation methods, 80% of companies take more than two weeks to get just one email out the door. You need to move beyond thinking about blowing past your SLAs. Instead, consider the impact of a tightly timed email promotion that hits subscribers’ inboxes late.
Yes, it is all about time—how to use it better by allocating it to activities that make a difference. Unfortunately, the way you’re currently building emails prevents that from happening.
How an email creation process gets bogged down
Stensul analyzed thousands of email creation efforts and found a stunning data point. The overwhelming majority of email creation efforts used up to 90% of available time on production-related activities. The remaining 10% was allocated to strategic activities. The industry, type of company, or size didn’t matter in this analysis.
The harsh reality is most email creation teams, yours included, are mired in a creation process that prevents doing things known to make a massive difference in the performance of emails—A/B testing, segmentation, personalization, and including dynamic content in emails.
Stensul determined that email ROI could improve at least six percentage points if a team had time to conduct A/B testing. If they had time to personalize the email, engagement could improve by 77%, and being able to segment can yield a 760% increase in revenue from one email effort.
What adding an email creation platform can do
So, how do you find—or recapture—that time? The answer is to put an email creation platform at the center of your email creation process. An email creation platform simplifies and speeds the entire creation process, from developing the design concept to uploading an email for deployment. In particular, it significantly shortens the review and approval routine.
It creates a single, collaborative work environment that lets people—even those with little or no coding skills—efficiently create quality emails that maintain all corporate branding and regulatory requirements in minutes. It easily scales as the demand for email grows, without needing to increase the size of your team, be they full-time employees or outsourced services.
In addition, an email creation platform will integrate easily and securely with adjacent technology in your martech stack. This integration lets you gain added value from capabilities like image libraries, live content, dynamic content, link tracking, messaging, workflow, or whatever leading MAP/ESP your organization might use.
Win your case with statistics
To appeal to the results-oriented nature of your CMO, here are a few examples of the effect adding an email creation platform can have:
- A pharma industry services provider needed 71 fewer hours to create an email that rendered mobile-ready with ease.
- A national retailer cut its creation time in half, in part by reducing touchpoints by 70% with an email creation platform.
- A top-tier real estate development company reduced email creation time by 95%, saving 254 hours per month and freeing up team members for higher-value work.
- A global computer hardware leader saw its email creation process go from 2 weeks to 1 day, freeing up time to conduct A/B testing while increasing email volume from 12 per month to 150 per month.
- One year after platform implementation, a division of the world’s largest health insurer saw a 19% increase in leads and an additional $32 million in sales pipeline.
To learn more about how to have your CMO care about email creation, download the Stensul eBook, What your CMO needs to know about email creation. It also includes bonus slides in either Google Slides or PowerPoint formats to help convince them of the need for an email creation platform.
