Agile email marketing makes your email marketing team more adaptable to changes and flexible due to its modular approach. Instead of modular emails, marketers can also use pre-built templates like Pardot templates. Instead of relying on the hit-and-trial method, agile marketing allows your team to focus on the data collected from your previous email campaigns. The email creation process focuses on the customer’s needs and encourages cross-team collaboration. In short, email marketing allows you to maximize your resources while reducing expenses and increasing ROI. Here are the 5 ways to make your email marketing agile.
How to make your email campaigns more agile?
● Prepare the resources
Before you start working on your strategy, you need to prepare your marketing tools and get your team in order. To begin with, check whether your current marketing tools are capable of handling your forecasted marketing demand. The tools should enable cross-collaboration amongst teams, simplify the template-making process, and automate email campaigns. At the very least, you need a collaboration tool and an email marketing tool.
Next, you have to prepare your team for cross-collaboration. Cross-collaboration helps you make the most of existing teams and roles without hiring new talents. As a result, it reduces your expenses and boosts your ROI. If you find your email marketing team lacks the necessary skills, you can pick talents from other departments to make up for the gap. For example, you can ask your content team to prepare a compelling copy for your upcoming promotional email campaign. The requirements will vary according to the email marketing needs of the company. But, you have to prepare your teams to handle the key areas like marketing analysis, copywriting, design, development, and strategy.
● Prepare your email strategy
Now, you need to prepare a solid strategy that aligns all the different processes. The aim of your agile email marketing strategy should be to minimize the communication gaps between your development, copy, and design teams. If your teams are working in silos, the chances of miscommunication errors increases.
Preparing a single brief that carries the outline of your email templates makes it easier for your team to follow. You can prepare a detailed brief carrying all the elements of your email template. You can also prepare a smaller brief with only the basics. At a minimum, the brief should specify the email’s purpose, content strategy, and the guidelines for template designs.
● Streamline your workflows
Usually, the email creation process is linear. That means your team needs to complete one step before proceeding to the next one. However, with agile email marketing, you can create multiple workflows and your teams can work independently on them. For example, different departments can simultaneously work on your email copy and design.
To further boost your email workflows, you can use pre-built email templates, like Pardot templates. Most email marketing platforms have libraries that house thousands of pre-built email templates that are also optimized for the campaigns. You just have to enter your email copy, links, and images.
Creating your own modular email template also increases the efficiency of your workflows by improving the reusability of the template. You can create a master HTML document that holds the different modules of your email templates. All your teams can update the master HTML document. As a result, the modules hold all the latest codes, copies, designs, and images. The email marketer only needs to plug the modules together to create a template for their email campaigns.
● Collect feedback
After streamlining your production process, you need to consolidate your feedback channels. Use your project management tools to create a single communication line where you can share the email sample and gather feedback from the different teams. Having a single channel for the reviews decreases redundancy and prevents the teams from leaving contradicting feedback.
Create the URL of your email and share it with your stakeholders. The email should be unrestricted to allow the email marketing teams to experiment with different interactive elements and gauge its results. The email reviewer can give live feedback on the changes. You can also collect these reviews on a spreadsheet to track their progress easily.
● Test and analyze your emails
Lastly, you need to thoroughly A/B test your emails before sending them to your subscribers. A/B tests produce valuable data that shows if the email is meeting all your subscriber’s needs. From these tests, you can collect a second round of feedback based on your campaign performance and forward it to your review communication channel. The metrics you should focus on will vary depending on the purpose of your email campaign.
The analysis part of the email campaigns can be cumbersome, and email marketers might be tempted to skip this step. But, this step is the most important one in the agile email marketing process. The insight collected from this data tells the team what not to do during the upcoming campaign, thereby increasing their efficiency and making the creation process more agile. Testing, collecting, and analyzing the campaign performance metrics to improve your upcoming campaigns are considered to be the last step of the agile email marketing methodology.
Conclusion
Following the above-mentioned steps introduces agility to your email marketing methods and will increase the speed of the email creation process. Adopting the agile email marketing strategy will help you stay ahead of your competition.
Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.