Each year, Litmus runs a State of Email survey to understand what’s happening in the world of emails straight from those on the front lines of email marketing, ranging from designers and developers to managers and marketing leadership, granting us a holistic picture of email within marketing organizations.
While the questions we ask change annually, there are a few questions that are timeliness. In particular:
What’s the most difficult or frustrating part of email marketing?
Interestingly enough, we find that these answers are pretty unchanging too—and they all center around collaboration. So, just what about email marketing makes collaboration so challenging? And how can it be improved? Let’s dive into the top three pain points and see how you can say, “Goodbye” to them too.
Pain Point #1: Email reviews and approvals
Did you know that 53% of brands take 2 weeks or longer to produce a single email? While there’s a number of reasons behind this, our studies show that a large part of this is due to getting feedback and approvals.
Imagine spending your time planning, designing, and developing an email. Then, once you send it over to other stakeholders, you have to spend hours waiting for feedback, and then go back and forth all over again. You’re doing this for multiple changes within one email—not to mention you probably are juggling other emails too!
Sound familiar? Our studies show that marketers wait an average of 4.2 hours for a single email to be reviewed and approved. And to add even more complexity, small email teams are juggling 1-5 emails at any given time and larger teams will have anywhere from 21-25 emails that they’re trying to execute.
So how can you trim down this important, yet lengthy step in the email process?
First, figure out exactly who needs to be involved in the email review. While it’s important to include the necessary people to make sure the messaging and visuals resonate with the email goals, too many cooks in the kitchen can become overwhelming.
Then, agree upon the structure of the review process. What are the timeframes for obtaining and executing feedback? Who reviews first/last or in parallel?
Once you figure out these parts, having a single tool like to streamline collecting feedback and approvals exponentially. (Hint: Litmus Proof is a great tool for this.). Instead of having to sift through email threads, instant messaging, or any other communication channels, you can consolidate all feedback to sort through and respond in one place.
Paint Point #2: Poor visibility and integration across channels
On average, marketers use more than 12 different types of tools to manage campaigns. While each has its own strengths, it can be pretty frustrating if all the information you need isn’t in one place. In fact, 27% of marketers report that the lack of integration across their MarTech tools is a huge blocker to achieving business goals.
Getting visibility across channels is critical to a smooth email workflow. Here at Litmus, we work where you work, which is why we have a growing list of integrations like Slack, Trello, Google Chrome, and even some of the most popular ESPs within the email marketing world.
Take a peek at Litmus’ ESP Sync feature, which lets you automatically sync your code from Litmus Builder to your ESP with a single click. Once it’s connected, any code changes you make will be automatically updated in your ESP. Meaning—you save the time and hassle of having to hop back and forth between tools.
Pain Point #3: Inability to share insights and analytics
Collaboration doesn’t end after hitting send. In fact, sharing the results from an email campaign is just as important as the entire planning and execution process. In theory, you should assess the results from email campaigns to understand how to grow your marketing strategy. However, many companies lack the ability to quickly share these results and trends to make impactful business decisions.
By investing in a tool to depict these insights, you can help make sure all the valuable time and work your team is spending is creating the results you want. With Email Analytics, you can easily collaborate on messaging and design to stay consistent across channels, while also getting everyone on the same page by quickly revealing reporting. Brands that use Litmus’ Email Analytics see a 16% higher ROI than those that rely on data from their ESPs alone.
Ready to improve how your team works together?
Check out more resources to streamline your workflow and tips on how to collaborate to hit your business goals.
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