8 Tips for Successful Email Workflow Management

An email workflow isn’t just about moving an email from “idea” to “send”—it’s about streamlining the entire process and alleviating the pain every marketer has felt:

“Is this approved?”
“Will this be ready in time?”
“Is ‘.final_v3’ the final version”?

These phrases are all too familiar because every send has many decision points and variables, which can make email workflow management difficult. But with the right approach to an email workflow, you can mitigate the back-and-forth and bring efficiency to the forefront.

While you might not have full say on the demands placed on your email marketing team, you do have a say in how your team gets things done.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to build an email workflow that not only speeds up your processes but also ensures fewer mistakes and a smoother path, from concept to inbox.

What is email workflow management in email marketing?

Email workflow management is the practice of completing a series of steps needed to run an email program, from ideation to send and post-send analysis.

Every team who sends emails has an email workflow, but that doesn’t mean every team has a good workflow. (It is a tall order, after all).

Your email workflow management strategy should include:

• List growth
• Planning
• Production
• Automation
• Testing
• Analysis

Let’s dive into what that might look like for you and your team.

List growth

At the heart of every successful email strategy is your email list. These subscribers have opted in to hear from your brand, and without them, even your best-crafted emails go unnoticed. 

Building your list is the first step in creating an effective email workflow that delivers value and enhances the subscriber experience. Let’s explore some key entry points where subscribers begin their journey:

• Website homepage. This could be a signup form at the bottom of your page or in your navigation bar.
• Pop-up forms. Timed and targeted newsletter signup forms that prompt visitors to subscribe.
• Social media. Use a “link in bio” tool on Instagram or a landing page tailored to your company’s profile.
• Landing page. Forms for gated content, exclusive discounts, and special offers

Once you’ve set up these entry points, ensure you’ve got the right marketing automation tactics in place to keep your workflow running smoothly:

• Opt-in confirmation email. Typically the first email a subscriber gets from your brand. Immediately confirms an email subscription, whether that’s a single opt-in (SOI) or double opt-in (DOI).
• Lead magnet delivery email. Gives access to the promised content (e.g., ebook, checklist, discount code).
• Confirmation emails. For webinar sign-ups, eCommerce order confirmations, subscription renewal reminders, and other key actions.
• Welcome emails. A warm greeting, perhaps with a discount as an incentive or a simple introduction to your brand.

Having these elements in place sets the foundation for a seamless email workflow that nurtures your subscribers at every step.

Planning

The art of a great workflow is characterized less by control and more by flexibility. Instead of creating rigid rules around your email marketing workflow, think more about creating light structure.

When it comes to email workflow management, it all starts with a solid plan. Without one, things can quickly get off track. Setting realistic goals, timelines, and expectations ensures everyone stays on the same page and things run smoothly from start to finish.

(Pro tip: an email campaign planning template can help you get there!)

Set realistic goals

Start by thinking about what you really want to achieve with each email campaign. Are you trying to boost sales, get more people to engage with your content, or grow your email list?

Whatever it is, keep your goals specific and measurable. Try not to get too ambitious—aim for progress over perfection. Breaking bigger goals into smaller, manageable steps helps you stay on track without feeling overwhelmed.

Create realistic timelines

Time is always of the essence, but rushing never works out well.

Plan out every stage of the process, from brainstorming ideas and writing copy to designing, testing, and scheduling the email.

Keep your team’s workload in mind so you’re not overloading their plates. (And if you’re a team of one, be sure to give your own bandwidth careful consideration, too!) Leave breathing room for last-minute tweaks or feedback—it’s always better to overestimate than to fall behind.

 

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Don’t forget to factor in flexibility (within reason) as part of your email workflow.

Set clear expectations

Open communication makes all the difference. Make sure everyone knows what’s expected of them—who’s handling what, when it’s due, and what the approval process looks like. That way, no one’s left guessing, and you can avoid unnecessary back-and-forth. When everyone knows their role and deadlines, it makes the entire workflow a lot more manageable and helps avoid those last-minute scrambles.

Share your team’s responsibilities and workflows in a central location for better visibility, clearly outlining roles and tasks.

Here’s an example from Litmus’ own email team: outlined are key areas of responsibility for each member and how stakeholders can get in touch with requests.

🔥 LitTip: A tool like Litmus can help you create and send better emails faster. Learn more about how Litmus can help.

Production

Time to put it all together! This is where your planning and strategy starts to take shape.

Creating great email campaigns isn’t just about writing the perfect copy—it’s about having the right systems in place to make the whole process smoother and faster. That’s where building email modules and setting up a solid email design system come in. By organizing your workflow this way, you can save time and keep things consistent across all your campaigns.

In this section, we’ll show you how to build your email modules, set up an email design system, and write copy that connects with your audience. These steps will help you create a more efficient email production workflow—making it easier to get emails out the door and into your subscribers’ inboxes. Let’s get started!

Build out your email modules

Email modules, sometimes referred to as components, are the building blocks of your emails. By building and testing them ahead of time, you’ll save major time on development down the line.

These can be broken down into the following:

• Snippets, which are tailored to a specific email, like a call-to-action (CTA) button.
• Partials, which are consistent across multiple emails, like an email footer.

🔥 LitTip: with Design Library in Litmus, you can store and organize your snippets in one place, making it easy to go modular.

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Set up an email design system

When it comes to email design, one tool we’ve found incredibly effective—and seen others embrace with great success—is an email design system. These systems are built with two key goals in mind: efficiency and consistency.

An email design system typically includes:

• Brand colors and assets like logos, icons, and imagery
• Reusable email modules for building emails, such as snippets and partials
• Customizable email templates for consistent use across campaigns

Investing the time, resources, and amount of time needed to create an email design system is well worth it. Trust us—it’s a game-changer for scaling your email efforts.

Craft your email copy

Email copy is the bread and butter of your campaigns—it’s where messaging meets design to guide subscribers toward action. But writing for email isn’t like writing for other marketing channels. Factors like character counts and truncation can make or break your message.

It all starts with your email marketing strategy: align with stakeholders on expectations, goals, CTAs, and segmentation to set the stage for your email copy to shine.

Before you dive into writing, don’t forget to consult with your email designer to determine the ideal character counts for your layout. This ensures your copy fits seamlessly into the design and avoids awkward truncation.

Build your email

Now that your email copy is ready, it’s time to bring it to life! Use pre-built email modules mentioned earlier to save time, or take it up a notch by creating your own set of reusable email templates.

What makes a great email template? It should:

• Have clear, reusable components that make building emails easy.
• Be thoroughly QA tested so everything works perfectly in your subscriber’s inbox.
• Be accessible and look great in Dark Mode.

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Automation

We’ve covered optimizing your day-to-day workflow as an email marketer, but what about an automated email workflow?

Automated emails are triggered and sent based on a subscriber’s behavior, preferences, or contact information. These emails work in sync to achieve a specific goal, such as:

• Onboarding new customers or users with a series of emails introducing them to the product or service.
• Reminding subscribers with an abandoned cart email.
• Sending a warm greeting to new subscribers with a welcome email.
• Celebrating subscribers with a milestone email (e.g. anniversaries, birthdays) from your customer relationship management (CRM) software to enhance the customer experience.
• Automating follow-up emails based on specific actions, like filling a form on your landing page or attending a webinar.

In short, an email automation workflow can help you do more, with less—saving time, reducing manual effort, and ensuring that the right message reaches the right person, at the right time. Win win!

Testing

Before you hit “send,” take a moment to run your email through checkpoints to ensure what you built is what they see. The goal is to make sure the email your team builds is exactly what subscribers will see in their inbox, with no broken links, images, or surprises (like white lines in Outlook).

🔥 LitTip: With Litmus, you can automate manual tasks when it comes to QA testing. This includes:

• Pre-send spam testing to improve deliverability.
• Accessibility testing to ensure your email can be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of their ability.
• Preview your emails in 100+ email clients and devices to see how your subscribers see your emails.
• Automatically catch broken links and images with Litmus Email Guardian.
• Check ALT text and loading speed with Litmus Previews & QA.

Manually checking your emails before every send? That’s a great habit! Here’s a list of key things to keep an eye on to ensure everything’s in good shape:

• Rendering. Check that your email displays correctly across mobile, desktop, and webmail environments.
• Plain-text version. Ensure your plain-text email versions are visually appealing and include working links.
• Images. Use retina images to guarantee crisp, clear visuals and check that no images are broken. Don’t forget to add ALT text!
• Dynamic content and personalization. Test dynamic content and make sure you have fallbacks in place for personalization.
• Dark Mode. Test your email in Dark Mode to ensure your colors aren’t inverted.
• Merge tags. Verify that merge tags work as expected and include fallbacks where necessary.
• Load time. Aim to keep your email load time under 2-3 seconds.
• File size. Ensure your email is under 102KB to prevent Gmail from clipping it.
• Accessibility. Check that your email is accessible to screen readers and visually impaired users.
• Links. Test your links to ensure they work and are being tracked properly (e.g., with UTM parameters).
• Analytics. Make sure your analytics code is added and activated for tracking campaign performance.
• Preview text. Optimize your preview text to avoid awkward truncation (typically around 50 characters). Use our preview text hack if needed, and remember that AI-generated summaries might replace your preview text!

Analysis

Taking the time to look at how your emails performed is a key part of any successful email workflow. It’s not just about tracking open rates or clicks—it’s about learning from each campaign and using those lessons to make your next one even better.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• How did this email stack up against your usual results?
• What did your A/B test reveal?
• What can you take away from this campaign to improve the next one?

Reviewing your performance helps refine your strategy and paves the way for future success—something your future self will thank you for. 💪

Why is it important for marketing teams to effectively manage email workflows?

A well-managed workflow operates like a fine-tuned machine: when running smoothly, it keeps the engine of your marketing efforts moving without a hitch.

Most importantly, it makes your day-to-day processes easier by adding clarity and keeping things organized. No more guessing who’s doing what or stressing over last-minute scrambling (like last-minute email requests).

A well-managed email workflow runs so smoothly that when the inevitable “can we send another email?” request comes in, you can handle it without a hitch.

 

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What does an effective email marketing workflow look like?

• Boosts efficiency and productivity. Automates repetitive tasks and eliminates redundancies, giving you back time in your day to focus on planning, strategy, analysis, A/B testing—you name it.
• Ensures consistency and branding. Uses repeatable processes (like email modules), snippets and partials, an email design system, and email templates to maintain brand standards—regardless of who creates the email.
• Improves accuracy. Integrates tools to seamlessly transfer data and minimize email mistakes (after all, we’re all human!).
• Enhances visibility and collaboration. Centralizes workflows to create a single source of truth—keeping every stakeholder aligned and informed.
• Drives scalability and growth. Streamlines email creation to free up time for experimenting and expanding your program.
• Maintains compliance. Automatically includes legally required elements to ensure compliance.
• Delivers actionable insights. Manages consistent efforts more effectively, and provides valuable opportunities to iterate and improve.

What are common challenges in email workflow management?

Everyone wants work to be as easy and effective as possible—so why do so many teams struggle with their processes?

According to our research, the biggest blockers marketers face during email production are building, designing, and testing their emails. Other major hurdles include collecting feedback, creating content, and getting buy in.

It’s clear: it’s tough out there for busy email marketers. Let’s break down the common workflow management roadblocks that slow teams down.

Lack of centralized processes and tools for collaboration

Taking different routes and modes of transportation works for meeting up with your friends, but the same isn’t true for email workflows.

If team members and stakeholders all use slightly different processes and tools, there’s a greater chance you’ll lose vital information along the way. At the very least, a lack of centralized methods and tools slows down your email workflow. 

Inefficient approval processes leading to delays

When we surveyed email teams about their workflows, two of the most common bottlenecks were collecting feedback and getting buy-in from all stakeholders. Too many approvers and a fragmented review process cause email workflow delays.

🔥 LiTip: Use a tool like Litmus Proof to streamline your process by centralizing feedback in one place—just like the 700,000+ users who already rely on it for clear and efficient collaboration.

Difficulty in maintaining version control and tracking changes

Your inbox and messaging apps fill up too quickly to rely on them to track feedback and changes for each email campaign. While informal version control and changes may work for a while on a team of one or two, as your team and output grow, this can lead to problems. 

Inability to integrate with other marketing tools and systems

If you feel like you work on an email island, you aren’t alone. Only 24% of email marketing programs are highly integrated into other marketing channels!

Manually moving info between tools takes time and could lead to errors. Or, you may leave valuable insights undiscovered with marketing tools and systems that don’t integrate. 

Time-consuming manual tasks and repetitive processes

A single grain of sand is insignificant, but put enough of them together, and you have a beach.

Small, manual tasks and repetitive processes don’t seem problematic, but small inefficiencies add up. Considering 62% of email marketing teams take two weeks or more on an email, even tiny time-savings on each message add up over the year.

8 tips and best practices to manage your email workflows better

Yes, the entire process of your email workflow has a lot of moving parts. But even a few simple changes can drastically improve how your team works. Let’s explore a few tips to manage your email marketing:

1. Establish clear roles and responsibilities.
2. Create a centralized email calendar for your team members.
3. Implement collaboration tools for effective communication.
4. Clean up your approvals process.
5. Develop standardized email templates and guidelines.
6. Utilize workflow automations to streamline processes.
7. Implement quality assurance checks and testing.
8. Continuously analyze and optimize email performance.

Tip 1: Establish clear roles and responsibilities

When everyone is clear on what they need to do they can hone their skills and avoid duplicating work.

The first step in improving your email workflow is writing out your current process and ensuring everyone knows their role. Establishing responsibilities also helps you identify gaps in your workflow that may be causing backups.

Action items to consider:

• Create a pre-send email checklist and assign tasks to team members
• Manage permissions in your email marketing automation software to keep folks focused on their responsibilities

Tip 2: Create a centralized email calendar for your team members

Knowing what’s ahead helps with resource planning and a division of responsibilities. Workloads likely won’t always be perfectly balanced, but a centralized email campaign calendar helps. 

Try this:

• Start with the tools you know—60% of teams use Google apps like Drive and Calendar to plan email content.
• Reserve planning time on your calendar well in advance of important campaigns like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Tip 3: Implement collaboration tools for effective communication

Email collaboration and communication is easier and faster with the right tools. Apps like Slack, Jira, Asana, and Trello help email teams keep track of and assign work. 

Next steps to consider:

• Use our free email workflow template for Trello.
• Review your past few email series to find recurring tasks. Can you automate the tasks (or any reminders) in your project management software? 

Tip 4: Clean up your approvals process

Having a fresh perspective on a message before you send it to your entire list is nice. Still, the approvals process can swell to manageable steps. Aim to include only the required stakeholders and keep comments and questions in a single spot. 

Consider this:

• Get email feedback out of the inbox and ensure everyone uses the same method, even if it’s just a Google Doc.
• Limit email reviewers to 2-3 people.

Tip 5: Develop standardized email templates and guidelines

Email templates and design systems speed up email production and create brand consistency.

Actionable next steps to take:

• Create standardized email templates to save up to an hour for every campaign.
• Establish an email design system.

Tip 6: Utilize workflow automations to streamline processes

Email integrations are your email workflow management best friend because they automate repetitive tasks. For example, the Litmus and Slack integration sends real-time status updates and approval requests to keep projects moving. Look for connections between your tools to automatically move work between apps, send alerts, and manage in-progress campaigns. 

Action items to consider:

• Use the Litmus Assistant Beta automatically to create subject lines, check tone of voice, and translate copy to work faster.
• Sync your ESP and email editor to move email code between environments automatically.

Tip 7: Implement quality assurance checks and testing

Email QA testing is non-negotiable that doesn’t have to halt the momentum. Start simple with a QA checklist to quickly reference what you need to do, or automate parts of testing like spam filter tests and device rendering. 

Try this:

• Use Litmus to see what your email looks like across devices and browsers without manually sending the email to yourself.
• Tailor your testing workflow to your build environment and team, like using project-specific test email addresses.

Tip 8: Continuously analyze and optimize email performance

Every campaign is a learning opportunity, both internally and externally. Analyze email performance to identify your audiences’ preferences and create better emails on the first try. Regularly review your workflow, too, to find areas to improve. 

Next steps to consider:

• Use email analytics to find the most popular devices and then narrow your testing scope to save time and work for a majority of your audience.
• Track the time it takes to create an email from beginning to end and monitor how it changes.

Transform your email campaigns and entire process today!

A solid email marketing strategy will likely have many moving pieces, and your type of workflow will vary from program to program. Whether you’re building email modules, setting up a design system, or fine-tuning your QA process, every step in your workflow brings you closer to better, faster results.

Remember, the key to success is consistency and optimization—keep refining your workflow, and you’ll be ready to tackle any campaign with confidence.