One number sums up the appeal of email as a marketing channel: 4000%. That’s the ROI for email. $40 returned for every $1 spent, regardless of industry or category. That’s better than most other channels. Marketers see email as more crucial than even social media among marketers. They hold that view because it works hard. Unfortunately, they also are dealing with an email creation process that’s far from efficient.
Creating those emails for most companies is hard work. A survey among companies, from mid-market to enterprise level, across all industry sectors, found it took email teams two or more weeks to get a single HTML email deployed.
That is one serious contradiction. The best-performing digital communications vehicle takes longer and is more challenging to create than any other.
Emails take too long to produce
Email’s ability to produce spectacular results is a testimony to the dedication and perseverance of email teams, likely yours too. Respondents to a recent survey among email marketers and marketing operations (MOPs) pros said emails take too long to move through the production cycle, resulting in a painful email creation process.
There are too many bottlenecks
The email creation process used by most organizations involves specialists operating in silos using single-purpose tools. Lots of back and forth mark it with frequent and severe bottlenecks that stretch a blood-pressure-raising workflow even more. On top of that, the emails produced often have deliverability or accessibility issues, as well as being off-brand and not properly compliant with regulatory requirements.
There’s an excellent chance members of your team overseeing email creation are understaffed and overworked. The reason might just be the way they have to create emails. Given that, it should not surprise that an analysis of thousands of email creation efforts found that teams spent 90% of their time tackling production-related activities. That left just 10% of allocated time for performance-boosting activities like A/B testing, strategy refinement, and personalization.
The answer isn’t hiring more people
The solution is not to hire more people to create the emails that need to be prepared and deployed. That just makes a highly inefficient process more expensive.
If even some of these challenges to email creation efficiency can be found in your process, that is reason enough for you to manage a process change to your email creation process.
To learn more about managing an email creation process change, get the Stensul eBook Process change management in email creation. To see an efficient email creation process in action, request your personal Stensul demo here.
