Growing your business goes hand in hand with scaling your email channel. But sending email at scale is no small feat, especially considering that campaigns are more complex than ever.
Email recipients expect highly personalized experiences, and because 320 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2021, delivering on those expectations is vital to standing out. Simply sending more emails to a growing list won't cut it.
Instead, you need to get strategic about what, when, and how you send email. You need to be able to build various email types quickly. And you need to get personal by showing customers they're more than just an email address.
I'll share some strategies and tools to accomplish those tasks in a moment. But first let's take a quick look at the challenges of email marketing at scale.
Challenges of Email Marketing at Scale
1. Resource and coding requirements
Anyone familiar with the technical side of email knows the struggles with HTML and the employing of developers to help you navigate that infamously finicky code.
Unfortunately, that means every change, iteration, and dash of personalization requires their help, meaning more time, money, and resources spent—a far cry from a scalable setup.
2. Ease of testing
To ensure every email is engaging and provides the best subscriber experience possible, testing is essential—especially when you consider that nearly 50% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. But when you're coding emails in HTML, that critical step becomes a time-consuming process. And if there are major changes, you'll be forced to start the waterfall process of email production all over again.
3. Efficient collaboration
As your business grows, your team grows; and so, too, will the number of your email stakeholders. That complicates your email approval workflow, especially when review rounds happen in multiple disparate channels such as Slack, or via long email chains—all of which leads to more mistakes, redo's, and miscommunications.
Scaling Email Marketing the Smart Way: Two Strategies
So, how can you address the cited challenges while still giving a growing email list the personalization and complexity it deserves?
1. Understand the bigger picture
By zooming out on both your customers' needs and your company's activity, you can avoid the costly, time-consuming missteps that only compound with a growing list.
First, map your customer journey. Always necessary but often overlooked, outlining the ideal path consumers take when interacting with your brand helps you avoid the misstep of overwhelming subscribers (Read: spamming them).
Start by pinpointing the stages in which various emails make sense. Then, take stock of the team members and sending systems involved at each stage to identify overlaps, rule out unnecessary steps, and cover any gaps with well-timed messages.
While you're at it, from your zoomed-out vantage point identify operational inefficiencies, then address them. Note the bottlenecks and redundancies that arise throughout your email production workflow. Once you've identified any deficits, consider which tools, tactics, and team members could be used to counter them.
And speaking of tactics...
2. Ensure your processes are scalable
There's a lot you can do now to guarantee the success of your email marketing strategy at any list size. That means taking growth into account early so the processes and technologies you have at play are set to scale with you.
Do you plan on expanding into new locales in the next five years, or digging deeper into personalization via dynamic content? No matter your focus, future-proofing your email production processes is paramount.
As I touched on earlier, reducing your dependency on developers is a gamechanger for scaling email; and in 2022 it's easier than ever! Consider which no-code solutions can guarantee trouble-free email so your team can spend more time iterating on content and less time troubleshooting.
Implementing an established, trusted framework for testing, feedback, and approvals is another must-do for those looking to cut down on time while keeping the user experience at the forefront.
Then, make your martech decisions accordingly. Choosing the right email production solution means you can avoid the time sinks and technical dilemmas that slow down businesses. From speeding up creation and automating personalization with a flexible modular design system to streamlining collaboration via in-platform commenting, a best-in-class platform will help you optimize each step of the email workflow.
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Scaling your email channel requires a comprehensive approach.
Email is hard enough to get right as it is. So when scaling, ensure you have the right processes, people, and platforms in place. Because less time spent manually coding, building, and troubleshooting means more time for the things that matter: innovating, iterating, and individualizing email content.
