Email, as a marketing tool, has been around for 25+ years. In that time you’d think creating emails would have become easier, more time-efficient with those involved better able to collaborate. 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 results in it taking days, 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 time allocation to be 90% creation and 10% 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, actions are taken simultaneously, feedback is instantaneous, and all involved have visibility into the creation process.
So, then, 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. Here’s why.
Everyone can be an email creator
As already suggested, 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, one person, to another. Should something need to be corrected, it gets trafficked back to be fixed by the appropriate specialist. This is obviously an inefficient and costly way to create emails. What’s more, it clearly limits what’s possible with email marketing programs, since more time and money is spent 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. Further, they 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 the involvement of HTML-code savvy developers. And those caring about compliance can rest assured since the email created will adhere to all requirements due to pre-configured guardrails.
A collaborative Email Creation Platform allows everyone to be an email creator because it takes the requirement of knowing how to code HTML out of 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 manage a higher volume of email creation and to do so at a lower cost/email created. Plus, time is regained to do invaluable A/B testing, more segmentation, personalization, etc.
An Email Creation Platform enhances collaboration and more
That’s just some of what you can learn reading stensul’s eBook “Collaborate! How to bring marketing teams together to create better emails faster.” Importantly, 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, etc.) 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 technically-skilled
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 being created on the platform produced a nearly 30% rise in the click through rate over similar ones pre-platform.
Lastly, 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:
- Drag and drop functions
- Modules & Templates
- Brand and compliance guardrails
- Integrated content sources
- Review & approval features
- Email export services
- Automatic link validation and tracking parameters
- User role optimization
- Custom Elements
Download your copy of “Collaborate! How to bring marketing teams together to create better emails faster,” here. To see Stensul in action, click here.
