Earlier this week at Litmus Live Week, we shared that 78% of marketers said email is very important to business success (up 7% from last year). Well, if you’re like me—proudly in email marketing for ~15 years—you’ve known that for quite some time. As I’ve developed teams, one thing I always find myself asking:
How can we do more in the same amount of time? Or better yet… less time? 😱
As marketing leaders, and like our friend in the above video, I bet you’ve asked it, too. And it’s one of those things I know I feel equal parts comfortable asking (it’s always been asked of me, I rationalize!) and not comfortable asking (I know how painful it can be!).
So, clearly, something’s gotta give
Maybe your career journey was like mine, and you worked your way up from being a marketing or email marketing specialist to leading the team. Or maybe you’ve been an email developer or designer and emerged as the person who now is coming up with the strategy and managing the resources. No matter your career path, chances are you’ve probably been in email service providers (ESPs) before. And likely, along the way, you had a great email developer in your life (if you weren’t a developer yourself!) who taught you the evils of the WYSIWYG editor (errr, broken code anyone?). According to our 2020 State of Email survey, 39% of email marketers are using their ESP’s email editors, up from 21% in 2019. Not the best trend when it comes to email rendering going right. But we get it. It’s convenient. But what’s the right way to do it?
Maybe email templates are the answer
Email templates are awesome. And a key step on the right path to setting your team up for success. We recently shared pretty much all you want to know when it comes to email templates, and they are definitely a part of the solution. More than ¾ of marketing teams are using email templates as a part of the development process, but the process is still painful. The number of people and departments who are involved in the approval process has gone up since last year…
…and many report that the approval process is either too lax or too burdensome. And with 40% of email teams reporting that they still feel under-resourced, getting effective emails out the door quickly can feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
Empowering more on the team is the only answer
So what if you could combine a WYSIWYG editor that even, ahem, I could use… that also doesn’t break code? One that has some bumpers built in to keep your brand guidelines in check when it comes to every email you send? Even when giving the power to make edits to people on the team without coding skills? With Visual Editor in Litmus Builder, it can really happen. Meaning—those last-minute text edits you want? You can go in and make them, all while feeling confident that you won’t be messing up the code. Even better? Anyone else on the marketing team could make the edits, and the whole team can feel good about it.
So what’s that mean for you and your team?
It means you now have:
- A way to scale
- The power to focus your team on more strategic initiatives
- The ability to really dial in your most effective channel—email—by testing, personalizing, and more
But we both know that our perspective isn’t the only one that matters. You need to get buy-in from your team, too. Be on the lookout for the next two blogs in this series where you’ll hear from a developer and a marketing specialist with their views on Visual Editor in Litmus Builder.
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