Essential Tips for Managing Your Email Creation Workflow

Efficiently streamlining your email creation workflow is crucial for maximizing productivity. By establishing an "email factory", you can rapidly deploy campaigns and marketing assets, ensuring swift delivery and optimizing return on investment (ROI).

That's why we've put together essential tips to help you streamline your email creation process aka the email production.

Importance of a Streamlined Email Creation Workflow

The email creation workflow is the art of moving emails from idea to completion in an organized and efficient manner, then seamlessly starting the process again for the next one.

This organized series of steps reduces team stress, boosts cross-team collaboration, and improves the quality of your emails. It also minimizes mistakes and enhances the quality control of your email campaigns.

Simply put, establishing an email production process is essential to reap the benefits of email marketing fully.

Benefits of an Efficient Workflow

Saves Time: Once the workflow is set, it frees up time for other tasks.

• Automates “Everything”: Efficient email workflows automate everything including micro processes like scheduling, personalization, and segmentation, reducing manual intervention and streamlining operations
  
• Nurtures Leads Better: Provides relevant information to make leads more receptive to sales contact. Companies with efficient workflows see a 451% increase in qualified leads, showing the effectiveness of lead nurturing efforts in accelerating subscriber progression through defined segments and personalization stages.
  
• Increases Brand Affinity: Efficient email workflows build stronger brand loyalty by consistently delivering content that resonates with recipients' interests and needs, often utilizing pre-built elements or a modular design system to enhance brand consistency.
  
• Personalization: Efficient workflows leverage data to segment audiences effectively and automatically deliver personalized content to subscribers based on their preferences, enhancing overall personalization efforts.
  
• Reduces Errors: Workflows built on pre-built designs and a siloed system leverage automated checks and standardized processes to minimize mistakes. Hence, they reduce human errors and ensure consistency across campaigns.
  
• Reduces Costs: An efficient workflow cuts costs by freeing up creative time. It also empowers sales and CRM/marketing teams to handle email tasks independently, reducing dependence on technical and design support for routine campaigns.
  
• Boosts Revenue: It boosts revenue by optimizing assets and enabling more tests within the same timeframe, leading to improved campaign performance and higher conversion rates.
  
• Speeds up Sales: It speeds up sales and go-to-market by streamlining processes, allowing for higher frequency in campaign execution. This means more campaigns can be launched within the same time period, maximizing outreach and accelerating sales cycles effectively.

However, there are still hurdles in the email creation process that require attention to improve efficiency.

Common Challenges in Email Creation

• Deliverability issues: A major challenge in email creation workflow is getting your emails into recipients' inboxes. Spam filters, blacklisting, and incorrect email addresses can all affect deliverability and thus time spent with resolving the issues.
• Personalization and Segmentation: Setting up email workflows can be tricky, leading to errors. These mistakes can cause incorrect email sequences or missed triggers. Personalizing and segmenting emails can be tough too. Generic emails often fail to engage recipients. Optimizing emails or build flows that are meaningful enough take more time obviously.
• Rendering Problems: Email client rendering tests also prolongs send time and we all know how tricky those Outlooks can be.

Agile Email Creation Guide

Learn the “Agile Email Creation” method to streamline your processes and enhance conversions.

Download Guide

5 Tips and Best Practices for Improved Email Production

Managing your email workflow shouldn’t be complicated. Little adjustments can work wonders for your team. So, let’s look at a few simple tips to help you improve your email production process.

Tip 1 Establish clear objectives Free Up Time Where You Can

Knowing your strategic goals before changing tidbits in your usual way of creating emails is important. What would you like to improve? Time spent on a single campaign to scale efforts? CTR%, creatives or, other performance-boosting magic? Reduce communication ping-pong? Or simply make the email process less stressful?

Note down what you feel is wrong now. Look for a solution that solves that. To avoid being productivity-Coelho, here is our tip:

Most problems can be solved by giving yourself more time, so Tip Number #1 - free up time where you can: automate what you can, reduce the number of tools, or search for a centralized tool, and dump processes that are leading to no change in results like rendering tests (when using a bulletproof visual builder) or email code dev if you are still doing it manually.

Tap to AI for repetitive tasks like writing templating language snippets for dynamic content.

Tip 2 Organize & Prioritize

A successful email workflow starts with organization and prioritization. Begin by mapping out your workflow on paper, then gradually implement each component. For instance, segment your audience strategically, automate repetitive tasks, schedule email campaigns in advance, and create a feedback loop for ongoing insights to refine your strategies promptly.

It all becomes simpler with an email design system or a centralized tool that seamlessly integrates and streamlines these processes. Read more about it later in this article under the headline "Building Your Dream Email Creation Workflow".

Prioritize the tasks

Prioritizing tasks in the email creation pipeline is crucial because it ensures that the most important and time-sensitive emails are addressed first, preventing delays and bottlenecks.

It helps maintain a clear focus, increases efficiency, and ensures that all team members know what to tackle next, leading to a more streamlined and effective email marketing strategy.

Tip 3 Craft the perfect content for your target audience - forget the cliches

It’s paramount that you tailor your content to each customer throughout their buyer's journey. Focus on delivering value and building rapport gradually. This is what marketing influencers and school teachers say, at least. But how do you achieve perfect content in reality?

To create content that aligns with both your customers' needs and your business goals and make it easy for customers to progress to the next stage of their journey without obstacles stands on a key step: collecting relevant information from your leads and customers.
Simply put: talk to them. Or mimic it.

Here’s a workflow to inspire you:

Read customer support tickets. Try to answer them in their style but not for the single customer who reported but to a segment that is created based on their profile. Give them stuff they said they need or emphasize their problems and offer solutions. Repeat.

Tip 4 Ensure your customer database is always up-to-date

This connects directly to analyzing your leads/subscribers/recipients/addresses and can be done before or after sending your emails.

Maintaining an up-to-date database helps you confidently identify qualified leads based on your company's offerings. It ensures your emails stay current and perform at their best.

In addition to these you save time by doing it as part of campaign optimization and not as a standalone process. Our tip is to do list-management when you analyze a campaign’s performance - a few days later after a send. If you send sequences, then go back every month to see performance and make list/filtering changes beyond the usual A/B tests of content.

Tip 5 Establish an email design system with a modular approach instead of full-email templates

An email design system, built on modules and components or brand variables, offers flexibility and simplifies the process of exploring new ideas, making work faster, easier, and more enjoyable than using full-page or full-email templates.

Pro tip:

Establish a modular email design system with Chamaileon in just a few simple steps.

• Use Brand Variables: Set up default values for colors, fonts, logos, and frequently used text snippets as Variables to maintain brand consistency.
• Define Components: Save elements like text, images, and buttons as Components for easy reuse and consistency across emails.
• Create Blocks (Modules): Structure emails using Blocks (Modules) to organize content sections that can be saved, reused, and easily modified.
• Utilize Templates: Save finalized email designs as Templates to ensure consistent layouts and simplify the creation of new campaigns but do not stick with them too much.

Read more about it here.

Building Your Dream Email Creation Workflow

One overlooked aspect of a good email creation workflow is its role in streamlining efforts to establish a true "email factory." Here are a few steps to help you create your own email production factory.

Despite the challenges, you can still create your ideal workflow to achieve the best results. Here’s how!

Identify your email roadblocks

Take the first step and identify the primary obstacles in the way of your email production process.

Here are the common roadblocks in email workflow management that hinder team productivity.

Lack of collaborative tools and centralized processes

Not having a centralized tool for creating email assets isn't just a team challenge; even solo marketers benefit from a unified platform where everything—design, copy, code, and data for personalization—is readily available for a streamlined email creation workflow.

However, with a comprehensive tool such as Chameileon, there's no need for coding as well  thanks to its drag-and-drop email builder.

The main issue arises when components for the next email campaign are scattered across different systems or stored on your computer in separate folders, undermining the establishment of a single source of truth. This fragmentation leaves marketers and teams grappling with incomplete systems.

Delays caused by inefficient approval processes

Two major slowdowns that hinder any team’s progress are gathering feedback and getting approval from all stakeholders.

Delays often stem from too many approvers and fragmented review processes.

Version control and tracking changes difficulties

Depending solely on your inbox and messaging apps to track feedback and changes for every email campaign can become overwhelming as your team and workload grow.

Informal version control methods might suffice initially for smaller teams, but they can cause issues as your workload increases.

Difficulty integrating with other marketing systems and tools

If you feel isolated in your email marketing efforts, you're not alone—only 24% of email programs are well-integrated with other marketing channels. Manually transferring information between tools is time-consuming and error-prone.

Plus, you might miss valuable insights if your marketing tools don't integrate.

Tedious manual tasks and repetitive processes

While a single grain of sand is insignificant, together, they form a beach. Similarly, small manual tasks and repetitive processes may not seem like issues individually, but their inefficiencies accumulate.

With 62% of email marketing teams spending two weeks or more on each email, even minor time-savings per message can make a significant difference over the year.

Map out your email creation journey

Creating a roadmap for your email journey helps streamline your workflow. Steps involved in email creation from concept to launch typically include:

• Conceptualization: Ideate and conceptualize! Set clear goals and objectives. Develop a strategic content plan and messaging strategy to ensure smooth sailing throughout the email production process.
  
• Content Creation: After setting clear objectives, write a compelling copy that will engage readers. Plus, you must incorporate relevant multimedia such as images, video, or GIFs to enhance engagement.
  
• Design: Designing an email goes beyond creating eye-catching layouts. Email design systems are crucial for their dynamic components and modules, offering flexibility that traditional templates lack, making it easier to repurpose them for new content.
  
• Coding and Development: A streamlined email creation workflow eliminates the need for coding in 2024, saving time and company resources. To centralize email creation across multiple platforms (ESP + CRM), invest in an all-in-one visual email builder platform like Chamaileon. These tools ensure responsive emails across devices and clients without requiring coding skills.
  
• Testing: Today, testing focuses less on rendering issues thanks to advanced visual builders and email-specific design systems with pre-built modules and templates. However, thorough testing remains crucial for personalization, dynamic content, links, landing pages, and tracking to ensure seamless campaign performance across all aspects.
  
• Approval and Review: After testing, it's crucial to gather feedback from stakeholders and team members, as even a quick "health" check could uncover issues that someone working on an asset might miss. This practice ensures that even one-man marketers benefit from external reviews to enhance clarity and effectiveness.
  
• Deployment: Then comes the big moment: the launch! Schedule the email launch at the optimal time for maximum impact. Moreover, segment and target the audience strategically to improve relevance.

Improve Collaboration and Communication - not for teams only

Tips for Effective Communication

To foster smooth collaboration in email creation;

• Prioritize regular meetings to track progress and goals - find someone to talk through results/performance even if you are the only one doing those. Feedback is always appreciated.
• clearly define roles,
• use collaborative tools with real-time updates, and work or at least plan together
• encourage feedback loops, (see point one)
• maintain open communication channels for idea sharing, but restrict communication for approval to a tool/channel.
• and document processes for clarity.

These strategies enhance accountability and efficiency across the email workflow.

Assigning Roles and Responsibilities

When everyone knows their tasks, they can focus and avoid duplicating efforts. Start by writing out your current email process and making sure everyone understands their role. This helps identify any gaps that might be causing delays.

To simplify things, create a pre-send email checklist and assign tasks to team members.

Moreover, manage permissions in your email creation software to keep everyone focused on their responsibilities.

Establishing a Review and Approval Process

Before sending your message to your entire list, getting a fresh perspective is crucial. However, the approval process can become unwieldy. Focus on including only necessary stakeholders and consolidating comments and questions in one place.

Here's a suggestion:

Move email design feedback away from the inbox and adopt a unified method. Few tools currently offer this feature, allowing flexibility before finalizing assets.

For instance, if your team approves campaigns in Google Docs, it's only for the copy. However, changes often occur when creating emails from this approved copy.

Commenting on Figma files faces similar challenges as they're not final assets. A better solution involves commenting on test-email screenshots from an inbox view, though this process can be tedious for longer emails.

Ideally, use a tool that enables direct email preview commenting for smoother feedback.

Limit reviewers to 2-3 people to streamline the process.

Tools for Team Collaboration

Effective collaboration is made simpler and faster with the right tools. General task-management apps such as, Jira, Asana, and Trello help teams manage and assign email tasks efficiently BUT for God’s sake do not overuse them or put every single asset creation into them. Most of these are pretty bad when handling repetitive tasks like a weekly newsletter.

Therefore, work within a tool that centralizes efforts rather than fragmenting them.

You should be able to manage copy, design elements (if applicable), combine them for approval, and send them out via ESP/CRM. Task management tools can’t help with these needs.

Consider these tips:

• Utilize Chamaileon's email creation workflow.
• Reflect on your recent email campaigns to identify repetitive tasks. Can you automate these tasks or reminders using your project management software?

Testing and Optimization

Next up, you need to test and optimize email assets and creatives.

Establish Clear Design Standards

Creating clear design standards for email templates in your workflow can save you up to an hour on every campaign. For this, set up an email design system. Tools like Chamaileon can help you build effective email design systems.

Clear design standards are crucial because they make it easier to test and optimize your emails. With consistent design, you can quickly identify what works best for your audience, ensuring your emails not only look great but also perform well.

This consistency helps maintain brand integrity and improves the efficiency of your email marketing efforts. By using an email design system, you can streamline your workflow, reduce errors, and focus more on crafting engaging content.

Quality Assurance

Email testing is essential and shouldn't slow you down. Start with a simple QA checklist for quick reference, or automate parts of the process like spam filter tests and device rendering.

No need to mention that systematic and well-planned tests save a lot of time.

Testing today focuses less on rendering issues due to improved visual builders and email-specific design systems with pre-built modules and templates.

To narrow down test cases and save time, use email analytics to determine the most popular devices among your audience. Focus your testing on those devices.

However, rigorous testing remains essential for personalization, dynamic content, links, landing pages, and tracking to ensure seamless campaign performance across all aspects.

Optimization

From the perspective of boosting an email creation workflow, it's best if performance optimization is integrated into the process.

For instance, allocating a dedicated time slot for this purpose is ideal. It's advantageous to plan a campaign or sequence segment with test options from the outset. For example, I typically draft 2-4 subject lines and a couple of headline versions when planning an email, providing material for A/B testing right from the start without additional deliberation.

You can also use A/B testing for performance optimization of your emails. Focusing on components like personalization and dynamic content is more critical than mere rendering tests.

Also, customize your testing workflow to fit your team and marketing environment, such as using project-specific test email addresses.

Continuous Improvement Strategies

Every campaign offers a unique opportunity to learn and improve. Analyze email performance to understand your audience better and create more effective emails from the start. Regularly review your email creation workflow as well to identify areas for improvement.

Monitor the time spent on email creation from start to finish and track how it changes over time.

Conclusion

Streamlining your email creation workflow is essential for saving time, reducing errors, and enhancing the quality of your campaigns.

By implementing clear design standards, utilizing automation tools, and fostering effective collaboration, you can create a more efficient process.

Regular testing and continuous improvement will ensure your emails consistently engage and convert your audience.

Learn the “Agile Email Creation” method to streamline your process and enhance conversions.

Download Guide

Frequently asked questions about the email creation workflow

What are some common workflow mistakes email marketers make?

Common email marketing workflow mistakes include not segmenting the audience enough, which results in generic messages that don't connect well with recipients. This is a time-related issue in most cases because marketers usually are overwhelmed and overworked.

Another issue is forgetting to optimize emails for mobile devices, missing out on engaging a large part of the audience.

Additionally, poor testing practices can result in deliverability issues and lower engagement rates.

How can I measure the success of my email creation workflow?

You can measure the success of your email creation workflow by tracking key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, etc. AND time needed to create a single campaign/email.

Analyzing such metrics over time provides you with valuable insights on how your workflow is performing, helping you identify areas for improvement and optimization.

Moreover, monitoring the time it takes to create and deploy emails can gauge the efficiency of your workflow.

What are some tools that can help me manage my email creation workflow?

Some of the best tools to help you manage your email creation process are Chamaileon, Litmus, and Knak.

Why is A/B testing important in email marketing?

A/B testing is crucial because it helps you find out which campaigns, messages, or call-to-action buttons resonate best with your audience. It's a way to experiment and discover what works most effectively in your emails.

How can Chamaileon.io specifically help me improve my email creation workflow?

Chamaileon.io simplifies your email creation process with its user-friendly platform for designing and managing templates.

It offers collaborative features that streamline feedback and approval processes, ensuring smoother team collaboration.

Plus, Chamaileon.io supports responsive design, so your emails will always look fantastic on any device, all without requiring advanced coding skills. This saves time and ensures your email campaigns are both effective and visually appealing.