If you are involved in the process of putting together marketing emails regularly or even just brought into the process from time to time, you are aware of the email trenches of mundane, time-consuming, often frustrating tasks that are required — the time spent going back and forth with people about content and assets; a designer spending time mocking up content changes; a developer making constant copy edits to an email that’s been built; and then there’s QA’ing…

Because of the complexity of developing and building an email that is engaging not only based on its copy but also its creative, some time in the trenches are a necessary part of the process to ensure overall quality. But do you ever feel like so much time and effort is often exhausted in the trenches that the quality may be deteriorating in the process? It may be time to revaluate your production process and spend less time in the trenches.

"...do you ever feel like so much time and effort is often exhausted in the trenches that the quality may be deteriorating in the process? It may be time to revaluate your production process and spend less time in the trenches."

Observe patterns

To try and improve how your production process works, start by looking at what patterns keep coming up while building emails. As you observe patterns, you can start brainstorming ways that you can improve on some of the regular tasks by taking advantage of tools you may already be using to organize those tasks into different workflows. For example, if you use project management software, you may find that you can utilize some of its features to more efficiently collect content and assets into one central place to then have reviewed for feedback by team members that use the same software.

Create systems for reusing creatives

Another area to look for patterns is within the creative of an email. Often times, a designer will reuse elements and layouts to produce new email templates. They do this not only because it saves them time, but to maintain certain brand consistency. To take this approach further, consider asking a designer for a style guide, or look into working with them to develop a style guide specifically for email. This allows you as well as other members of the team to write content in different forms that follow the style guide and makes the designer’s job easier to plug in content in a mockup. The developer can also develop a template’s code around the same set of guidelines and reuse pieces in a similar manner.

Turn your email template into a framework

Using the principles of observing patterns and developing systems in our own work is what lead us to coming up with the idea for Blocks Edit as a tool to edit email templates. And as you start to see how you can break your email templates apart into individual pieces, you will start to see how they can be setup to have an editable interface in Blocks Edit. Then you can invite any member of the team to join in the editing process. And you can get yourself and everyone else on your team out of the email production trenches.

Blocks Edit is your helping hand out of the email production trenches. Sign up for free or request a demo walkthrough and QA session.