8 Tips for Successful Email Workflow Management

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. 

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.

Try this:

• 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:

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. 

Try this:

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. 

Try 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. 

“Implementing an email design system with snippets and partials can help you or your team save hours of time. If you already have an email framework or set of templates, you’re part of the way there! You can use your templates to create snippets and partials for future email creation.” – Carin Slater, Email and Content Growth Marketing Manager at Litmus

Try this:

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. 

Try this:

Tip 7: Implement quality assurance checks and testing 

Email 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:

Tip 8: Continuously analyze and optimize email performance 

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

Try this:

• 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! 

Transforming how you produce email marketing campaigns is a blend of strategy and tools. Simple steps like limiting the number of approvers and setting clear responsibilities on your team help you create more efficiently. If you want to automate your workflow and create the best customer experience in the inbox, Litmus can help. 

Litmus is an email marketing tool that lets you build, test, and analyze your email marketing workflow. Features like Litmus Builder with partials and snippets, ESP sync, consolidated collaboration, pre-send testing, and advanced analytics help you create and send better emails faster. Learn more about how Litmus can help.