Creating an email campaign feels more like navigating a maze than executing a smooth process. Whether it’s the endless feedback loops, time-consuming manual tasks, or trying to keep up with brand guidelines, email creation can become a bottleneck that slows down productivity and frustrates teams.
Internal agencies often face unique challenges: They have to meet the high expectations of multiple stakeholders across departments while balancing the need for creative flexibility and maintaining consistency. Add the ever-increasing demand for personalized content, and it’s easy to see why email creation has become a significant pain point for many organizations.
In this blog post, we’ll dive into the most common issues internal agencies face when creating emails and explore how addressing these challenges can lead to faster, more efficient, and on-brand email campaigns.
Shifting your focus from execution to strategy can revolutionize how you operate and drive better marketing outcomes. Read on for tips on how to overcome typical pain points to accelerate your team’s creative strategy.
1. Perception as a tactical team instead of a strategic partner
The Problem: Many internal agencies are often seen as task-driven production teams. This viewpoint can prevent them from being invited to the table early enough to influence bigger strategic decisions, limiting the value they bring to the overall marketing strategy.
The Fix: To shift from being an execution-focused team to a strategic partner, communication is key. Work on building relationships with your stakeholders by showcasing your team’s expertise not just in delivering work, but in thinking creatively and strategically. Schedule regular meetings where your team can present insights, trends, and proactive ideas to demonstrate thought leadership. Positioning your internal agency as a strategic driver depends on efficient processes—demonstrating the ability to consistently meet and exceed expectations earns credibility.
2. Inefficient content creation processes
The Problem: A common struggle is getting bogged down in a disjointed content supply chain. Delays, endless revisions, and miscommunications can stall email and marketing asset production, wasting time and talent.
The Fix: Streamline workflows to remove inefficiencies that cost your team precious time. Implementing tools and tactics that standardize the content creation process can drastically reduce bottlenecks. From having clearer briefs to adopting modular content frameworks, your team can reuse approved assets more easily, speeding up time-to-market for campaigns. Simplifying review and approval processes is also crucial—having one source of truth for feedback ensures fewer revisions and less back-and-forth.
3. Lack of visibility into performance and workflow bottlenecks
The Problem: When your team doesn’t have a clear picture of how their efforts contribute to overall business goals, it’s hard to optimize. Additionally, without insight into where bottlenecks occur in your processes, inefficiencies will continue to stifle progress.
The Fix: Integrate tracking and reporting mechanisms into your agency’s processes to gain visibility. By closely monitoring timelines, resource allocation, and campaign outcomes, you can pinpoint where delays happen and adjust accordingly. For example, if your team struggles with repeated changes late in the review process, it may be time to revisit how you capture initial input or how early key stakeholders are involved in the process. Leveraging data-driven insights on workflow performance also enables your team to make a stronger case when requesting additional resources or support.
4. Overloaded teams leading to burnout
The Problem: With the increasing demand for content and creative assets, many internal agencies find their teams overwhelmed. This dilemma can lead to burnout, decreased morale, and a drop in creative output.
The Fix: Prioritize workload management by being selective about what work your team takes on and where it adds the most value. Build a process that encourages collaboration across teams and roles, reducing the siloed effect that leads to duplicate effort or rework. Another helpful tactic is investing in templates or automated workflows for recurring tasks. This will help free up your team’s time for high-value, creative work. Equally important is building a culture that encourages regular feedback and collaboration, fostering an environment that supports mental well-being while maintaining productivity.
5. Difficulty scaling campaigns to meet demand
The Problem: As your business grows, the demand for more personalized, localized, and segmented campaigns increases. Scaling these efforts quickly while maintaining quality can be a real challenge, especially when resources are limited.
The Fix: Scalability comes down to having a flexible content creation model. Investing time upfront in building a library of reusable assets, modular templates, and preapproved elements can empower your team to create personalized content faster and at scale. Establishing a process for reusing and repurposing content reduces the need to start from scratch every time, allowing your team to meet increasing demand without sacrificing quality.
The gist of it
Moving from a reactive, order-taking model to a proactive, strategic partner requires a shift in both mindset and process. By tackling common pain points—streamlining content creation, optimizing workflows, managing team workloads, and improving visibility into performance—your internal agency can focus more on strategy, helping your organization produce more impactful marketing campaigns.
Arm your team with the right tools and tactics to become not just creative producers, but strategic contributors that drive marketing success.
Stensul can help solve many of these common problems. See how it up-leveled the creative team at Holiday Inn Vacations Club in our recent fireside chat.
This blog post highlights common pain points and offers actionable solutions for internal agency leaders. Through strategic changes, internal agencies can shift their role and demonstrate their value to the larger marketing ecosystem.
