Top 3 Email Creation Friction Points
How can we reduce complexity?
It’s the question on everyone’s mind regardless of your department, your company, your role.
At the recent B2B Forrester Summit in Austin, Texas, I hosted a talk on streamlining email marketing processes where I broke down 3 ways our customers are reducing friction in email marketing operations, saving money, and delighting their teams with Knak.
Understanding the Challenges
The typical email creation process involves several steps: request, create, revise, approve, and execute. Yet those who are in the trenches of this process know that, while straightforward on paper, complexity lurks beneath the simplicity. With frequent setbacks due to last-minute changes and other unexpected complications, the workflow often feels like an endless loop of steps forward and backward.
In speaking with our customers, we identified 3 of the most major friction points:
- The need to hand code to create emails
- The dependency on external agencies to build email templates
- The management of countless and disjointed feedback and review cycles
And discussed how the introduction of Knak has worked to eliminate these bottlenecks.
Eliminating Email Creation Bottlenecks with Technology
Let’s take a look at how Knak has enabled revolutionary changes for the marketing teams at Trimble, Amazon, and Google Cloud.
Trimble - Limitations of Hand-Coded Creation
Trimble’s challenge was maintaining brand consistency across numerous marketing platforms and teams. Their solution was to shift to a no-code, drag-and-drop email builder, which enabled quick and consistent email creation. The team now uses modular components that can be easily assembled, ensuring brand standards are maintained without extensive manual oversight. As a result, the time spent on building emails has been drastically reduced, and the marketing team’s efficiency has improved significantly.
Challenge: Maintaining brand consistency across 10 Marketo Instances
Marketing Team Structure: 9 MOPs supporting 400 marketers across the globe
Original Tooling: Using in-MAP templates for each instance
Results:
- 8.3 minute average build time to create an asset (across email and landing pages)
- Brand consistency across 30 brands
- 400 marketers now enabled to build
Amazon - Personalization and Localization
At Amazon, the translation of marketing assets into various languages was a significant bottleneck, involving time-consuming manual processes. With Knak’s AI-powered translation workflow, Amazon’s content is now being translated directly within the platform into 75 different languages, streamlining operations and ensuring consistency across all translated materials. This is significantly reducing the time spent on translations and is allowing for quick updates to be made in one place while being reflected across all versions.
Challenge: Translations were taking too much time and effort
Marketing Team Structure: Agency and Translation Service Provider
Original Tooling: Custom Marketing Automation Tool
Results:
- 88% increase in speed to finished translation
- 4x reduction in build time
- 50% reduction in time to Bar Raise an email
- 130 marketers now enabled to build
- 3,336 created in the first 60 days post-launch
Google Cloud - Rounds of Feedback and Iteration
Google Cloud was facing what they called a “change-request death-loop” - a lengthy feedback process typically requiring five rounds of revisions per asset. Their email developers were having to coordinate edit requests from numerous contributors coming from numerous locations, make the changes, send the email back out, then do it all over again.
By integrating feedback directly into the asset itself through Knak’s platform, including automated quality assurance and render testing, Google Cloud managed to cut down change requests by 90% and significantly reduce associated costs. This integration has also led to greater satisfaction among team members, who can now produce content more quickly and with fewer iterations.
Challenge: The change-request death-loop
Marketing Team Structure: 300 email builders, 300 collaborators
Original Tooling: Agencies and internal web developers
Results:
- 90% change request reduction
- > $2 Million in cost avoidance
- 200+ marketers now enabled to build
The Takeaway
Using Knak to consolidate their 5-step creation process into a single platform, companies like Trimble, Amazon, and Google Cloud have made massive strides in making their email marketing smoother and more efficient. They've cut down on the need for coding, eased the translation process, and made feedback rounds more streamlined and straight-forward.
The result? Marketing that's more efficient, content that hits the mark faster, and happier teams.
