7 Things Marketing Ops Can Stop Doing Right Now (Because of Knak)

Marketing in the software industry is always about doing more. Doing more of this. Doing more of that. Get more done. More, more, more! But it’s important to occasionally ask yourself: is “more” better? Is more what we want out of our work? More responsibilities? More tasks?

If you’re a normal human, chances are you absolutely do not want to do more. You actually want to do less. A lot less. And yield better results. You want to look at your to-do list and absolutely crush it without breaking a sweat. You want to make a bigger impact with minimal effort.

So, instead of telling you all about the great things that Knak can help you do more of, we want to talk about what Knak lets you do less of. Or, more accurately, what you can stop doing altogether. We want to show you all the amazing things you’ll never have to do again.

1. Coding emails and landing pages

Let’s be honest for a second: Adobe Marketo Engage is the gold standard for sending email, but building emails in it (or any enterprise MAP) absolutely sucks. It’s time consuming. It requires knowledge of HTML and CSS. And even if you’re proficient in that, you still find yourself troubleshooting and tweaking code to make things look right. It’s about as unintuitive as it gets. And that’s before a stakeholder chimes in with 11th-hour changes that will have you doing it all over again. 

Using Knak means coding emails and landing pages is a thing of the past. You will never need to touch a single line of it again. You use the drag and drop editor to build the email the way you want it to look, and when you send it (using your enterprise MAP), it looks like it’s supposed to across ALL devices and email clients.

It’s so easy that literally anyone on your team can build campaigns. Which is great news, because it means you can apply your valuable time to anything else. We’ll touch on that in more detail a little further down the page.

Result:

• Less work for you
• No more HTML/CSS
• Campaigns out the door faster

2. Endless rounds of email testing and QA

Here’s a scenario that I’ve encountered many times in my career. There’s a major news announcement going out to your entire list. Everything is approved. And all there is left to do is render test the email before sending. So you send a QA email to the team. And, sure enough, something about it doesn’t render correctly on Android. So, you go into Marketo, make a few small changes, and resend the test email. Now something is off in Gmail. So you dive back into the HTML to fix it, resend, and now something in Outlook doesn’t look right. You’ve taken a whole afternoon to hack your way through some html to fix the issue, and now the send has to wait until tomorrow because you still need final approval. (Also, why in this day and age, do email clients interpret HTML and CSS differently?) And when you finally DO send the email, your bosses’ boss asks you why the subject line has “=?UTF-8?Q?=F0=9F=A4=A6?=” in it.

Using Knak, you can test and QA every email campaign in one place. If something doesn’t look exactly how you want it to on one device or email client, you can easily make the adjustment right there, without impacting the way it looks on other devices/clients. Furthermore, you can collaborate right within Knak, so all comments and changes are consolidated in one place.

This turns an otherwise lengthy, cumbersome, and error-prone process into something that’s simple, fast, and fool-proof.

Result:

• Less work for you
• No more wonky emails
• Campaigns are out the door faster

3. Running one-size-fits-all campaigns

Email marketing is the best bang-for-buck tactic in the marketing toolbox and has been for some time. But gone are the days of blasting your list and expecting good results. This email needs to be as relevant as possible – in comes dynamic content and velocity script. That’s where things start to get complex (especially for non-technical marketers). And due to swift turnaround times, what could be an engaging and personalized experience sometimes ends up as something basic, generic, and not all that effective.

Knak makes personalization a lot easier to execute. You can create truly personalized emails without even leaving the platform. So there are no extra tools required, nor do you have to know how to code. You can simplify conditional logic (like usage, age, or currency) and even combine segments (like region and occupation, or industry and title). So targeting your customers with actually relevant content becomes simple. And that means your campaigns are going to see far better results.

Result:

• Less work for you
• Better results
• Campaigns out the door faster

4. Chasing stakeholders and contributors

Isn’t it funny how “top priority” campaigns don’t always seem as urgent when stakeholder input is required at any stage other than final approval? Tracking down stakeholders and contributors at various stages of campaign creation can really sap your momentum — not to mention prolong timelines.

Knak combats this in one really important way: It makes it possible for campaign creation to move to a self-serve model. So, instead of trying to coordinate stakeholders and contributors across different documents and get them to align and finalize the campaigns, they can now manage much of this process themselves. And you’ll never again have to ping one person to find out if they’ve connected with another person regarding a campaign asset ever again.

Result:

• Less work for you
• No more back-and-forth
• Campaigns out the door faster

5. Doing everything yourself

Somewhere along the way, marketing operations functions went from the facilitation of marketing activities to the folks who do all the heavy lifting like brand enforcement, creating lists and segmentations, orchestration of testing, chasing approvals, making revisions, and so on. This is actually really common in technical roles that require increasingly technical solutions. But, it’s less than ideal. Because the real value that you add to the team should be in your strategic vision, the smart implementation of technology, and improving processes rather than clumsily building emails day after day. 

From building to QAing to coding to chasing stakeholders and contributors around in a seemingly futile attempt to get a simple email out the door, Knak takes the time-consuming work of campaign creation off your plate and distributes it around the room. By enabling your teams to create their own campaigns, and test them across different devices, email clients, and browsers, all you really need to do is press send in your marketing automation platform.

Full disclosure: Moving to a self-serve model will probably illicit some pushback from stakeholders. After all, it’s more work on their part. But with a small amount of change management, they’ll quickly realize that it’s to their benefit, and they’ll be a lot happier with the speed at which things move.

Result:

• Less work for you
• Teams empowered to take ownership
• Campaigns get out the door faster

6. Worrying about rogue branding from decentralized teams

Decentralized teams and field marketers sometimes work at a disadvantage. They have the same goals and KPIs as everyone else. But sometimes they just don’t get the visibility they need to get their campaign requests at the top of the pile.

So, being the scrappy initiative takers they are, they DIY it. But the colors are wrong. The fonts are wrong. The logo is stretched to an aspect ratio that would make your first Geocities website blush. The links to social media are broken or non-existent. And the people they’re marketing too are borderline wondering if it’s a scam campaign (with your company name on it). That’s not great for your brand. And it’s certainly not going to help that team achieve their goals.

Knak helps prevent that from happening in a few ways:

• Establishing and locking-in your brand’s fonts and colors, so marketers can’t create hot pink and neon yellow emails (without approval).
• The ability to create a library of approved images that align with your brand and objectives.
• Reusable themes and modules (like headers and footers) to save building time and ensure consistency.

So, not only are your decentralized teams and field marketers empowered to create their own campaigns, they can do so without you having to worry about what they’re putting out into the world. (Learn more about different marketing operations models).

Result:

• Less work for you
• Everything is always on-brand
• Campaigns are out the door faster

7. Context switching

How many browser tabs do you currently have open? How many apps are running on your computer? How much time do you spend toggling between them, losing your place, getting distracted by another task on your to-do list while trying to find where you were again? Resolving a comment in one document, then copy-pasting something into another before exporting it to another platform and then uploading from there? Oh look, there’s a Slack notification — better get to it! Might as well take a look at the messages you missed in other channels while you’re there. Oh sweet, time for lunch.

Where was I again?

Context switching affects all of us. With so many tools at our disposal and so much work-related (just work-related, right?) content competing for our attention, it’s so easy to get distracted.

While Knak can’t eliminate context switching across your entire workflow entirely, it does streamline how campaigns get built, tested, and collaborated on into one tool. Instead of (painstakingly) building your email in your MAP, testing it in Litmus or similar platform, addressing QA or feedback in a Google doc or via email, it all happens in Knak.

Result:

• Less work for you
• Fewer distractions in your day-to-day
• Campaigns go out the door faster

Have you spotted the trend here?

It doesn’t take a DoD cryptographer to see what happens when you start using Knak. In addition to saying goodbye to email coding, wonky emails, and endless distractions, you’re saying hello to on brand campaigns, a team that’s empowered to do what they do best, and more-effective campaigns that get results.

More importantly, you’re also getting a significant amount of your time back because you’re not stuck in the trenches struggling with the daily minutiae of your job. And your organization and stakeholders’ bottom line is absolutely going to love the fact that campaigns are going to market up to 95% faster than they were before you started using Knak.Want to see what doing a lot less looks like? Check out this absolutely zero-pressure demo video.