4 Actionable Tips to Enhance Your Email Development Process

With 23.8% of marketers spending at least a week producing a single promotional email, it is quite clear how developing an email marketing strategy is a critical and crucial task. Therefore, it becomes imperative to have an email development process that’s not only well planned and efficient but also runs smoothly and fulfills your business’ long-term goals.

Here’s how you can improve your overall email development process and ace your email marketing strategy.

1. Always plan ahead

Planning is the key to success for any email campaign. Remember, it’s good to stay a step forward. So, if you wish to streamline your email development process, get going with a detailed plan where you can think, share, and discuss your thoughts with your team and ultimately come up with new ideas that can boost your email campaign. Once you have created a concrete plan, you’ll want to create a calendar to show how to execute that plan. From the number of emails to be sent to the consistency of the email flow, a calendar will help you stay on top of the tasks at hand.

2. Start with a project brief

A project brief helps you maintain a record of everything that you need to do in your email marketing strategy. From the work you do on your strategy and assets of the email to its goals and campaign results, a project brief is all you need to keep track of all your email marketing stuff. You can either choose from the project brief templates available online or create your own. However, if you are designing with your template, make sure you include the specific criteria listed below:

• Email sending dates and deadlines
• Goals to be achieved and its success measurement
• Your target audience
• Assets such as email form, landing page, template, and segmentation name, etc.
• Groups within your team who are creating the email campaign
• Envelope fields with names of the form along with email addresses, preview text, and subject line
• A copy of your email links to be included and call to action

3. Go for a formal intake process

A formal intake process is an excellent way of synchronizing and managing the whole email development process. This will help you define and give precise roles and responsibilities within your team. Be it the developer, stakeholders, freelancers or designers, everyone would exactly know what, when and how they need to do their work. This, in turn, would make the overall email creation process seamless and ultimately result in a top-notch email campaign.

Here’s how you can set up a formal intake process:

• Inform your team beforehand about your project so that they can give you their feedback.
• Communicate with your team and understand what they are looking forward to in the email campaign. From designers who need to develop the email template to developers who need to code, thorough communication with them can help you create a project brief which is accurate and useful.
• Also, it is essential to update your developers and designers about your brand guidelines. It would help you maintain the look and feel of your email consistent with your website and other digital channels.
• It is a good idea to have a style guide to help the copywriters maintain a consistent tone and brand personality.

4. Continual evaluation

Your email development process is incomplete unless you evaluate its performance. Prior to launching your next email campaign, establish success metrics and KPIs to determine what success looks like for you. Your success metrics may be early-stage metrics like click-through rate or unsubscribe rate, or you may have marketing automation that allows you to track first- and multi-touch attribution and revenue metrics. Whatever you are evaluating, establish a culture of evaluation to allow for experimentation in your email marketing strategy. 

Wrap up

Remember, all it takes is a clear approach, goal-oriented thinking, and the ability to visualize and plan for long-term success.