If you’ve worked with almost any email production platform out there, you’ve felt the pain. You may have even spent hours in an email builder trying to fix a line of code to make your emails look perfect yet still have accidentally sent an email with a placeholder like “Hi ” instead of the recipient’s actual name.
There are so many aspects of email marketing that can have pitfalls and take away from the actual marketing. If we described the perfect skill set for an email marketer, it might look something like:
- Copywriting expert
- HTML expert
- Conversion optimization expert
- Marketing expert
- Design and branding expert
It shouldn’t take all of these skills combined to keep customers informed and retained, and to win at email marketing.
The reason the email production and marketing landscape is this way is simple: the current tools evolved organically over the decades that email has existed, instead of with the modern email manager or marketer in mind.
Today, there are thousands of frustrated people working with an inadequate email production platform for various reasons. Lots of bright people’s time is being wasted working around email platforms that just….don’t cut it.
Email Management – Current Challenges
Coding required often
Many of the solutions out there for email marketing involve at least knowing the basics of HTML and being able to go directly into the code and tweak things to make updates to the email template. If you don’t have HTML for email coding experience, you’re likely to get stuck needing some help on something minor.
Email production – Device, provider, and usability testing
Many of the email platforms popular today were built for technical people, and usability testing wasn’t high focus. Today, it’s critical to be able to quickly and easily send test emails to check for functionality, personalization, mobile responsive content, as well as UX.
Collaborative environment
Collaboration is something that almost didn’t exist at all years ago in email production and now is crucial to how people work. Even relatively small teams working together on email campaigns struggle to streamline decision making and collaboration across multiple tools.
Email management like a CRM
Being able to produce emails in a system that acts as CRM for email management can often be the difference between time wasted and company revenue.
Time – the ultimate resource
Antiquated email production processes are wasteful, because having to go through each line of HTML or move around in a software that is not built for users with low coding knowledge takes time. Emails aren’t something brands can afford to get wrong, they have to look and feel perfect.
Errors, bugs, & customer loss
We’ve probably all sent an email with the wrong merge tag in it, sometimes even in the subject line. Often email production gets rushed QA because of the difficulty in sending test emails, or overall bad UX in the email software. This can lead to customer loss in addition to public embarrassment (think brands with sensitive customer information).
Email Production Tech Stack Checklist
Brand consistency
If your brand’s email production team is spread out across content writers, developers, translators, designers, and marketers, brand consistency is tough to get right. Make sure you’ve got a tool that ensures you can easily check for brand guidelines and style guides right inside of the tech. There should only be one source of truth.
Scale
- Find a platform that will scale as you scale your business. Whether that’s by accommodating teams in other markets, or facilitation internationalization and localization, think ahead. Find a tool that will still fit your goals five years from now and beyond.
- Your email production platform must double down your team’s skills, and make up for the areas that aren’t your core competency. Not all marketers are design experts, so it’s best to find a platform that can guarantee on-brand emails every time. Similarly, not every marketing team has expert email HTML coding experience available, so it’s imperative that their email production tool can provide the same quality of email they require without forcing them to find coverage for the coding part.
- Scale your reach to customers with an email builder that offers you access to new email marketing techniques you haven’t tried yet. You should be able to experiment with image carousels, coupons and countdowns, but also explore what AMP for email can contribute to your conversion metrics.
Interactive email
One of modern email’s coolest features, where you can swipe, vote, click, or play right inside of an email and get much more interaction with the audience. If you’re using an email software that doesn’t have these features baked in, you’re missing out.
Flawless approval processes
Remember those email chains that went around to numerous different people and departments all trying to approve an email before sending? Now imagine sending dozens of emails at a quick pace. Nightmare-ish!
Make sure the collaboration and CRM features of the email product tool you’re using has flawless approval processes in it. Like this:
Integration
Working in a number of separate platforms creates more room for mistakes that might make your emails look bad but also lead to loss of revenue or retention. Integrations can fix all of that. Make sure these are all integrated:
- Email design or production platform
- Email service provider (ESP), or whichever system you use to send
- Email marketing platforms
- CRM
- Analytics tools for attribution and conversion tracking
- Email testing service: device and provider previews
- Translation services
Dark mode
You can learn everything you need to know about dark mode here. Bottom line, it takes some careful planning to not end up sending high contrasting, awkward email visuals.
Simple UX testing
One of the biggest problem areas in email production are visual and ux or interaction testing. Brands that send pixel perfect emails that work when their audience interacts with them are obsessed with UX testing. Make sure your email production system has this capability or risk mistake-riddled emails.
AMP compliant
As the world moves towards a majority of mobile email usage, fast loading, clean coded emails win the day in interaction and response. AMP compliance is critical to maximize email performance metrics.
Being AMP compliant isn’t difficult, here’s our guide to getting started with AMP.
Email technology is evolving, and using outdated technology can harm a brand’s email communication, sales, and everything in between. Thankfully, new solutions are here, and can change the way we do email at scale and quality. Check out our webinars for everything new happening with email production.
Dyspatch can help. Let us show you how.
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