Email, as a marketing tool, has been around for more than 25 years. In that time, you’d think creating emails would have become easier, more time-efficient, and with better collaboration by those involved. But it hasn’t.
Today, email creation teams of specialists operate in silos using single-purpose tools. The information flows between each member via nonsynchronous, often offline communications. This process results in it taking days, and often weeks, to create a single email. Along with taking too much time, it costs too much. And horror stories are all too common.
What’s more, that’s not the exception—it’s very much the norm. This approach has forced teams to allocate 90% of their time to creation and only 10% to strategy. And that eliminates any chance to fine-tune strategy or conduct A/B testing, for example.
The missing element is collaboration—from the email brief to email deployment. With collaboration integral to email creation, all involved can act simultaneously, give instantaneous feedback, and have visibility into the creation process.
So, how can you remove those barriers to collaboration and efficiency in email creation? Add an email creation platform to your company’s marketing automation technology stack.
Everyone can be an email creator
Email creation today is little more than an analog-to-digital adaptation of the way direct mail pieces were produced decades ago. From inception of the idea for an email to the finished piece, discrete assets are trafficked from one point and one person to another. Should something need to be corrected, the email draft is trafficked back to be fixed by the appropriate specialist. This is obviously an inefficient and costly way to create emails. Plus, it clearly limits what’s possible with email marketing programs because teams spend more time and money creating them than strategizing how they ought to prompt subscribers to take action.
Those who identified the need for an email and who are most clear about what the message should be are often not central to its creation. They also don’t have visibility into the process to ensure all goes as envisioned. The same is true for those responsible for design, branding, and regulatory compliance.
But with an email creation platform, marketers don’t have to stop when they hand off the email brief to designers. Not only can they stay involved, they can actually create the email without HTML-code-savvy developers. And those caring about compliance can rest assured because the email created will adhere to all requirements due to preconfigured guardrails.
A collaborative email creation platform allows everyone to be an email creator because it removes the requirement of knowing how to code HTML from the equation for most email needs. By moving the creation process upstream, with the needed guardrails in place, marketing organizations become far more agile. They’re better able to create a higher volume of emails and to do so at a lower cost per email created. Plus, they regain time to do invaluable A/B testing, more segmentation, more personalization, and so on.
An email creation platform enhances collaboration and more
That’s just some of what you can learn by reading the Stensul eBook, Collaborate! How to bring marketing teams together to create better emails faster. It explains how using an email creation platform does more than bring people together to collaborate on making better emails faster. It explains how the platform:
- Simplifies email creation by automating much of it, reducing the number of steps, touchpoints, and touches to make an email ready to be deployed.
- Democratizes email creation, shifting it from the control of a handful of specialists (designers, copywriters, developers, and others) to all authorized email requesters.
- Cuts the time to create emails from weeks or days to hours without any lessening of quality or performance.
- Increases email volume by as much as 10X because the creation process is simpler, faster, and less prone to error and revision.
- Reduces the cost per email created as much as 80% by requiring fewer personnel to be involved, particularly those with technical skills.
The eBook also offers a real-world example of how one company using an email creation platform, in the words of a marketer, “…turned email design from torture to fun.” They saw a 97% reduction in email creation time. In addition, the emails they created on the platform produced a nearly 30% rise in the click-through rate (CTR) over similar ones before adopting the platform.
To help you find the email creation Platform that’s right for your organization, the eBook provides a checklist and explanation of what to look for. Among the features and functions that can maximize the benefits of collaboration are the following:
- Drag-and-drop functions
- Modules and templates
- Brand and compliance guardrails
- Integrated content sources
- Review and approval features
- Email export services
- Automatic link validation and tracking parameters
- User role optimization
- Custom elements
To learn more, read the Stensul eBook, Collaborate! How to bring marketing teams together to create better emails faster. To see Stensul in action, click here.
