Email campaigns are one of the most crucial aspects for marketers. The average ROI of email marketing is around a $10-$36 return for every $1 spent. Considering the high conversion rates that they bring compared to other marketing channels, email marketing is a quick way to stay in touch with customers.
Businesses, however, are spending a lot of time developing emails, which is taking time away from focusing on other activities. As per the Litmus report “State of Email Production,” teams often needed one to two weeks to develop emails. That is a lot of time, so we will learn how to scale email production without hiring more designers through this blog.
Identify What Is Slowing Down Email Production
It is extremely crucial to identify what is slowing down the process to scale email production without hiring designers. Here are some of the common reasons:
- Too many revision cycles: Receiving multiple rounds of feedback from the brand, sales, and marketing teams can often delay finalization and approvals.
- Designer dependency: Designers often have to spend a significant amount of time resizing, making changes, and routine adaptations. Having an email editor in place can help to overcome such resizing and minor change challenges.
- Unclear briefs: To avoid email production from slowing down, briefs have to be clear and to the point from the very beginning. Missing information, late inputs, and constantly changing requirements lead to unwanted back-and-forth. Using AI tools can help get the creative briefs done faster for emails.
- Last-minute changes: Updates related to messaging, pricing, project details, and CTAs can often come last minute. Therefore, the email production process slows down because of a lack of ready-to-send emails.
- Approval bottlenecks: Waiting for multiple sign-offs from the team regarding design and copy can increase the production timeline.
How to Scale Email Production?
While a centralized approach works best in theory, it isn’t helpful in the long run. Inefficient workflows and lengthy production processes can slow down the entire production process.
Most of the businesses operate in a distributed marketing environment. Multiple marketing teams can create campaigns for specific business units and local markets accordingly. Here’s how to scale email production without hiring designers:
- Remove Bottleneck Issues
One of the biggest challenges of scaling email production workflow is the consistent bottleneck issues that occur. A local marketing team or business unit sends an email to the corporate team, which eventually gets lost.
With corporate marketing teams working on a lot of other things, it is common to miss such emails from the corporate team. However, the local marketing teams eventually have to suffer because of the lack of information.
Having a distributed marketing team plays an important role in removing consistent bottleneck issues. Having its own email production process ensures that the distributed marketing teams do not have to depend on the corporate team. This takes the pressure off the marketing team by reducing workload.
- Streamline Workflows
Streamlining workflows is extremely crucial to ensure better business and improved email production. From auditing existing texts to using modern builders, everything needs to be taken care of.
In order to scale email production, businesses must audit past emails and identify what’s working and what’s not. You should also work towards extracting the structural data patterns. Having teams with the top in-demand skills can help to streamline workflows.
Using modern builders can also be beneficial in the long run. Assemble the campaigns within the Email Service Provider (ESP) and use modular email editing tools for managing component libraries.
- Eliminate Time Zone Issues
While teams can easily communicate around the globe, it still becomes a challenge. The email production process slows down when you consider the time zones. Delays can be a major obstacle for businesses. While integrating email hosting with existing business software helps, automation will have to be looked into.
At the same time, cultural sensitivities also have an important role to play. With the local marketing teams having their own email production system in place, it becomes easier for them to reach their customers in a faster and more efficient manner.
The local teams tend to have a better understanding of when to send out the email to customers.
Conclusion
Designing an email can be really intimidating, and if not done correctly, it can slow down the entire process. With the email editing tools, you can drag and drop the information on the templates to get the necessary changes done. However, it is also crucial to watch out for the time zone and workflow issues that may exist within the team. In the long run, however, these tools can be a significant help to cut down the time and streamline the process.