It looks like we’re headed toward economic turbulence, if not already in it. The good news is it will likely be less severe than the Great Recession of 2007‒2009. Back then, leverage—the financial term for debt—was the cause. Today, the debt levels of the banks, brokers, and bondholders are far lower than in the prior problematic economic period.
More important, today, the term leverage has taken on a different meaning, relatable to all businesses. It isn’t about financial machinations. It’s a strategic business approach, including an email creation operation.
Leverage means enhancing available resources and capabilities to increase competitive advantage. Strategic capabilities are a company’s core competency that let it outperform others in the industry, provide superior value to the customer, and achieve extraordinary profit.
Email creation and email marketing are strategic capabilities. Can you say you’ve leveraged all aspects of your email creation to optimize your competitive advantage? If not, here’s what you should consider doing.
Optimize your planning for an economic downturn
Assuming there’s a planning process in place at your organization, look at how you can compress the time it takes to construct a plan. Remember that it needs to be comprehensive, and consider all factors and contingencies.
Orient the plan to allow your operation to deal effectively with the ups and downs of economic change—from budget, to personnel, to production, and performance. This simultaneous assessment/planning approach is not only about cost analysis. It’s about optimally applying available funds for better investment and performance returns.
See where there’s inefficiency in spending or use of personnel and, in particular, technology. Identify it and then plan to reduce if not eliminate it.
Optimize your workload to deal with economic turbulence
As seen during the pandemic—and as anticipated with the expected economic turbulence—the need for personalized, frequent communications with customers of consumer companies is high. Nothing does better at that than email.
That means your workload will grow. You must look for ways to streamline and simplify your workflow so you can do more with the same or fewer resources.
Optimize your people
Check to see if you have the right people in the right jobs. To optimize your people’s performance and positive attitude, see that they’re optimally leveraging their strongest skills. In addition, make sure they’re doing things that they enjoy.
If they need to have skills refreshed or new ones added, find the necessary training and provide it in a way that works to keep the operation efficient.
As a team leader, you must step up the frequency and quality of communications with each team member and the team. In potentially stressful times, having someone ask about their work and their physical or mental health is enormously important.
Optimize your process
You can have exceptional people capable of doing exceptional things. If the process they’re using is not optimized, however, you won’t realize the benefit they represent.
Optimizing your process is very much about leveraging the right technology in the right way. If your organization’s email creation process looks anything like what’s shown here, it’s far from optimized.
What’s more, you have technology in your martech stack that can be optimized if you make the effort to integrate it as much as possible for even better performance and greater value.
To optimize your process, change it
To optimize your process—even staring at a possible economic downturn—change it. 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 quality or adding more resources. It creates a single, collaborative environment to streamline the overall process for more efficient workflows and faster production cycles. In fact, an email creation platform can reduce creation time by as much as 90%.
It has features that add speed to the production, review, and approval processes. It does not deploy emails; instead, it sits in front of your ESP or MAP. This is the critical difference between email creation platforms and ESPs or MAPs. Instead, it complements your existing ESP or MAP, integrating with the rest of your marketing technology stack to streamline your email production.
To learn more about keeping your email creation operation performing at its best, regardless of the economy, download the Stensul eBook, How to recession-proof your email creation process.
