When faced with a big task or goal, the first step to take is always to break things down. So when organizing your email lists, developing your email campaigns and managing your content, and sending out emails, in order to improve that workflow, we need to take a close look at the individual jobs that need to be accomplished and find how we can replace or augment those jobs with individual tools.

And as you break down your workflow into jobs, you need to look at your assets individually as well. Your contacts data should be self-contained and transferrable across systems. Your business processes should be nimble and flexible. Your content should be modularized and templates should be developed for campaigns in a way that they plug in and out of any ESP.

"...in order to improve that workflow, we need to take a close look at the individual jobs that need to be accomplished and find how we can replace or augment those jobs with individual tools."

Breaking things apart

Let's look at an example. Our email marketing list comes from a database of contacts that we gather through various marketing efforts. We usually keep this in a Customer Relationship Management tool. With this in mind, instead of just copying that list over to our Email Service Provider and managing it there, a better approach may be to keep the central database separated in our CRM tool to manage and then transfer our lists into our ESP as needed.

For developing our email campaigns, it would not only involve using a range of tools, but there could be a team of people and each would have a preference of the tools they use. From the contacts management and automation flow, to email template design, to how it's coded, to the content writing. We should base the decision of the best tool to use based on the best way to get the specific job done. The designer's preferred design tool, the developer's preferred code editor, and writing tools and content managers for marketers. Your CRM manages contacts, your ESP manages email lists.

Bringing them back together

The key to the overall workflow however, means being able to connect these individual tools so each part of the process works smoothly. Either through integrating systems that talk to each other via an API, like automatically importing from your CRM to your ESP in the scenario above. Or being able to move assets from one tool to the other, like content elements from a design tool to a campaign's final output.

By understanding each specific job and tying it to your self-contained assets, your connections themselves become important components in your workflow.

"By understanding each specific job and tying it to your self-contained assets, your connections themselves become important components in your workflow."

Great parts for a greater whole

Break things down, understand each job, find specialized tools, connect them all together around your assets. At the end of the day, taking this approach gives you a clearer picture of your workflow and gives you the ability to fine tune each part of it for better results. It also means that you have a workflow that's tailored specifically around your company and team's needs.

"Break things down, understand each job, find specialized tools, connect them all together around your assets."

For managing your email campaign's content, we've made Blocks Edit to get that job done right. Take a look at how it works, book a demo to find out how it fits into your workflow and sign up to use it for free.