Is your email marketing team so focused on execution they have little time to architect an effective email marketing strategy? Earlier this month, I had the privilege of taking the “virtual stage” at the MarTech Conference, an online event hosted by Third Door Media. My presentation, “7 Expensive Email Mistakes & How to Avoid Them,” addressed this very issue — highlighting the primary mistakes that are costing email marketing teams hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing spend and hundreds of hours of work.
The Cost of an Ineffective and Inefficient Email Marketing Process
Because my role as stensul’s Director of Solutions and Enablement is focused on helping enterprise marketing teams scale their email programs, I know firsthand the struggles marketing organizations routinely face when trying to move an email campaign from creation to delivery. If you’re like most of the marketers we talk to, you’re having to manage a complicated and convoluted email creation process that involves designers, developers and copywriters who are often working on a variety of disconnected tools.
Getting approvals can be even more challenging with ongoing back and forth conversations between stakeholders and the MOPs team overseeing the entire process.
Time and again, we see email marketing teams with too many people spending too much of their time on details that could be streamlined with the right agile approach and technology. Inefficient and ineffective processes are not only taking up valuable time and resources, they’re opening the door to expensive mistakes that negatively impact email marketing programs.
But how can an enterprise marketing organization redirect their efforts to avoid costly mistakes happening across their email marketing ecosystem?
3 Questions to Avoid Expensive Mistakes
It starts with asking the right questions to pinpoint your team’s major weaknesses and address them accordingly. During my MarTech Conference presentation, I provided a deep-dive into the critical questions email marketing teams should be asking themselves to avoid expensive mistakes.
Here are the top three questions that can help you identify which mistakes are costing you the most time and money:
1) Do you know who is working on each email and how much time they are devoting to the email creation process?
This is a difficult question to answer, but it provides invaluable insight to your overall process. As marketers, we have no shortage of data when it comes to email deliverability and performance, but it’s much more challenging to quantify the actual time and costs involved with moving an email through the creation process.
Knowing who is touching each and every email, and how much time they are spending on it, gives you an unprecedented level of insight into just how much your email marketing programs are costing you.
2) Do you have a bullet-proof system for ensuring that every single email is error-free, consistently on-brand and ADA compliant?
Often, when I ask new clients this question, they say yes. But, after getting deeper into their “system,” things get a bit shaky. The system turns out to be a spreadsheet or a one-person QA team that reviews every email. This isn’t a system and it won’t scale as your email volume grows.
To enable a truly bullet-proof system, email marketers need an email creation platform that provides creative guardrails to maintain brand guidelines and compliance regulations, delivering an agile environment to adapt to any scenario and the ability to grow along with your marketing goals.
3) Can you scale your email production without adding more staff or sacrificing the quality of your emails?
The primary goal of any agile email marketing team is to increase email production capabilities without sacrificing the quality and performance of your email marketing efforts. To adjust to market demands, email marketers must be able to increase their email volume to meet business needs. Unfortunately, many MOPs teams are caught in the crossfire, trying to balance increased production demands without the benefit of additional staff or resources — all while staying on budget.
MOPs leaders often believe they have two options here: Either hire more staff to manage increased email volumes or implement automation solutions that come with the promise of scalability. The reality? It isn’t a zero-sum game — it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
In fact, introducing the right email creation platform gives you the ability to scale production without having to add more resources. For example, because stensul provides a collaborative environment with no-code design features and creative guardrails, it streamlines the email creation process. Marketing organizations using stensul can increase the numbers of email they are sending because less time is needed to launch campaigns.
If there’s one consistent truth across the email marketing landscape it’s this: The biggest mistake email creation teams are making is that they’re spending too much time on execution and too little time on strategy. To achieve the right balance between execution and strategy, email marketing and MOPs teams must focus on speed and agility when designing their email creation process — but, as with most agile practices, this is easier said than done. Creation teamsteams need an agile email creation platform to avoid costly mistakes.
Not only can the right platform keep you from making expensive mistakes, it allows you to dramatically scale your email marketing efforts in an efficient and effective way. Most importantly, it brings an agile process to an outdated system that is often overrun with bottlenecks and delays, saving your entire marketing organization hundreds of hours of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in email marketing costs.
