Working to boost your marketing performance might make you feel like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. While you may not dash about a storybook scene declaring, “I’m late…I’m late,” there’s an excellent chance you feel that way.
Not having enough time to improve campaign results is all too common. That’s especially the case for email marketing.
Stensul analyzed thousands of email creation efforts and found that production-related activities took up 90% of the time teams had. That left only 10% of available time to conduct A/B tests, audience segmentation or personalization, and utilizing dynamic content to make those email messages more relevant to each recipient.
The impact is profound when you find the time to optimize your email marketing performance. Forrester determined a 40% increase in revenue when email marketers used Movable Ink for personalization—along with a 40% reduction.
Choosing to optimize is the strategic long-term choice. For example, a leading healthcare benefits manager saw a 19% rise in leads and $32 million in additional sales pipeline when they found the time to apply performance-improving techniques to their email marketing efforts.
Three Big Challenges
Regardless of the industry you compete in, the markets you pursue, or the state of your company, most brands face three big challenges:
- Keeping up with changing customer/consumer demands
- Remaining competitive (and relevant) in the ever-evolving marketplace
- Driving customer loyalty
We’ll cut to the chase: overcoming those challenges is difficult. Especially when time is spent chiefly on email creation rather than refining strategy. Additionally, measuring data and feeding it back into email creation is also time-consuming.
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Time Needed to Optimize Performance
A study conducted by Stensul found that 80% of organizations took two or more weeks to get one marketing email out the door. How they went about creating those emails was the root cause.
Email specialists were using single-purpose tools operating in silos. This process prompted a seemingly endless review & approval process that was characterized by lots of back and forth. And with that, frequently missed launch dates and SLAs. Without automation, their methods were inefficient. Marketers simply need more time to optimize performance.
When you save time in email creation, you can be more strategic and be better able to optimize the performance of your program. Whether it’s garnering more leads and collecting more sign-ups or getting more page views, clicks, conversions, and—most important of all—revenue, time is of the essence. Without the bandwidth to boost email performance, you likely won’t see an increase in opens, click-throughs, or downstream activities.
Making Email Creation Efficient
If you stepped back and analyzed your email process, it probably looks like this:
- A marketer/brand manager prepares an email brief that details what the email needs to achieve with which audience
- The marketer shares the email brief with a designer and copywriter who develop a concept for review, often as a PDF.
- The back-and-forth begins with the marketer offering comments.
- When the concept is finalized, a coder then prepares an HTML version.
- An email proof is produced from a MAP/ESP and put on the review route, which involves even more back-and-forth.
- Once all involved stakeholders approve the email, it goes through QA.
- Problems that crop up at this late stage get addressed through more reviews and approvals, and, at long last, the email gets deployed.
The chance for delays, derailments, and worse is painfully apparent. What’s less clear and equally concerning is how often your team’s productivity is stifled by manual, time-consuming tasks.
Efficiency Benchmarks
Evaluations of the two most common email creation methods found the following:
Evaluations of the two most common email creation methods found the following:
Enabling Efficiency
For efficient email creation, you need programmable guardrails that ensure brand- and regulatory-compliant emails. It’s time to streamline every aspect of your review and approval process and fulfill SLAs.
If you’re currently creating emails with siloed tools, realize efficiency by integrating all relevant technology into a cohesive martech stack that powers a collaborative, unified workflow. To best achieve that, put the Stensul Email and Landing Page Creation Platform™ at the center of your email creation process.
Stensul for Email Creation Efficiency
The Stensul Email Creation and Landing Page Creation Platform™ dramatically reduces creation time by as much as 90%. Instead of taking weeks to produce a quality HTML email, Stensul lets you accomplish that in hours. That time-savings means teams can better focus on improving email performance.
Instead of a frustratingly complicated, time-consuming, and costly process, Stensul streamlines collaboration and simplifies creation for all marketers. It is a no-code/low-code approach to email creation, which means you can drag-and-drop to quickly create a quality, high-performing email that will drive strong results more easily than you thought possible.
Organizations using Stensul have saved between 100 and 700 hours devoted to creation activities. In addition, they’ve seen a 5 to 20-day SLA reduction.
Stensul Integrates with Movable Ink Efficiently
A seamless integration with Movable Ink means you can add the power of personalization to your emails more easily. It lets you add dynamic images to your templates while working on an email in Stensul. You can pull content blocks into Stensul as a module, reducing the hassle and potential for error when copy-pasting code snippets. Modules prepared in Stensul can be refreshed and previewed by users for the full Movable Ink experience as they create emails in Stensul.
It’s essential to note that the Movable Ink code is automatically included in the Stensul HTML code, which is then sent to the ESP or MAP, mitigating security concerns as the connection is Secure OAuth 2.0.
Stensul and Movable Ink Scores Big for the Milwaukee Bucks
The Milwaukee Bucks’ marketing team produces hundreds of email sends during the NBA season and many more for events held at its arena, the Fiserv Forum. Creating every single email is now faster and easier, thanks to the Stensul-Movable Ink integration. Before the integration, they had to go through several time-consuming—and error-prone—copy-pasting. My, how times have changed.
Fiserv Forum Know Before You Go Emails
The marketing team transitioned to a new Movable Ink template for arena shows, and the engagement has been great.
- Pre-Movable Ink, 20 emails showed a 23.8% click-to-open rate
- Post-Movable Ink, only four emails showed a 25.3% click-to-open rate
That’s a 6.3% lift in click-to-open rate. Three of the four emails sent using Movable Ink were in the top 5 for driving the most clicks of all Know Before You Go emails sent this calendar year from the Bucks’ Stensul instance.
Movable Ink Scratch and Reveal Emails
The Bucks conducted seasonal campaigns to spur sales for their online store, shop.bucks.com. Each campaign consisted of three emails created in Stensul that routed customers to a Movable Ink landing page. Once there, customers scratched and revealed their unique discount code for a certain percentage off their purchases at the e-shop.
Last Christmas season, the Bucks sent three “Christmas Scratch & Reveal” emails that all led to a Movable Ink landing page where customers scratched and revealed their unique discount code for a certain percentage off on the site. These three emails accounted for nearly 12% of Pro Shop online sales from December 23-25, 2022.
The springtime “Easter Scratch and Reveal” campaign was a winner too, accounting for 7% of the Bucks’ Pro Shop online sales from April 8-13, 2023.
A telling metric of the effectiveness of these campaigns was the click-through rates they recorded. The average click-through rate for the six scratch and reveal emails was 206% better when compared to the average click-through rate of all Bucks Pro Shop emails since the start of last season.
The Bucks were able to strategize, text, and refine the messaging contained in each email because Stensul’s efficient email creation gave them the time to do that.
For more insight into how you can make your email creation process efficient, download the Stensul eBook The 5 phases of email creation maturity. You can see Stensul in action here.
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