Time to Market and the ROI of Email Builders

You've mapped out your entire email marketing workflow from design to launch and the post-mortem analysis, but a stubborn question persists: how long should it really take to build an email?

Despite the process you have in place, each email campaign seems to take a different amount of time. It's not always easy to predict how long an email will actually take. In marketing, time to market is a competitive differentiator. Being able to capitalize on an opportunistic moment can be the difference between your campaign landing or not. Delays can take the wind out of the sail of a campaign before it even leaves the dock.

Getting ROI out of your email marketing strategy feels like it should be simple: send emails, send better emails, send more personalized emails, and get better results.

But when you get down to it, the workflows and ability to have a fast time to market for your emails is a central linchpin in your email campaign strategy. That's where email builder tools come in—by enabling the entire workflow and speeding up the critical parts that need a little bit more technological process.

Where Time Actually Disappears

Most of the delay is not HTML; it's process. If you control these steps tightly, the "coding an email" portion is usually under an hour with a solid email builder. Here's where the real time goes:

1. Idea to brief and targeting

Campaign planning and strategy should exist before you touch the editor. Defining what you want to send, who you want to send it to, and making sure you're aligned from the start often takes longer than anticipated.

2. Copy and design iterations

Email industry census data shows "design and content production" alone often consumes most of a working day. Your design team builds it in Figma, the team agrees on it, and then it moves into development, but not without rounds of feedback first.

3. QA overhead

Serious QA across devices and clients is now standard. The development stage aims to create a design that's true to your Figma mockup while accounting for responsive design elements and the unique proclivities of individual ESPs. This requires testing to make sure it works, integrating with your marketing automation platform to ensure personalization tokens function properly. This can sometimes go quickly and sometimes trigger additional review and revision rounds.

4. Stakeholder approvals

This is what pushes many teams into the multi-week bucket. Once the design and copy are approved, integration with your MAP solution can sometimes create issues—especially if you're hand-coding or using a native MAP builder. Sometimes things don't look the way they should when you send that first test email.

The Real Timeline for Email Creation

The real timeline for email creation is one of those activities that's simple for everybody to perceive, but as we know, beneath the surface it's much more complex.

An email idea comes from your team and launches off an entire workflow. It starts with the strategy and the brief—understanding exactly what you want to send and who you want to send it to. Next, it goes to your design team, who builds it in Figma and gets team agreement. Then it moves into development, where the goal is creating a design that's true to your Figma mockup but also accounts for responsive design and ESP quirks.

Once the email passes through QA processes and stakeholder approval, it's ready to deploy. Then comes the post-mortem analysis once the data rolls in.

This entire process can take two to three weeks—and research shows that the larger the team, the longer it takes. According to MarketingProfs data, up to 53% of marketing teams say it takes more than two weeks to send an email.

If this is you, you're not alone.

How Email Builders Improve Time to Market

Email builders are a core tool in the campaign creation process. They provide orchestration, helping you move your email through every stage: Design to Build, Collaboration, QA, and Deployment.

Design to Build

Email builders like Knak allow you to connect with your design tools like Figma to quickly port over your email and get it ready to be integrated with your marketing automation system.

No-code builders provide drag-and-drop interfaces that let you create on-brand, templated emails, taking the heavy lifting out of coding. They're responsive by default because vendors like Knak take care of all the maintenance of best practices and modern standards for all email service providers.

Collaboration

The human element of an email campaign can often be the trickiest to navigate. Stumbling blocks exist when you're porting your design from Figma into email format. Maybe you send a test email out to a stakeholder who's on a different ESP, and the responsive design needs tweaking.

Collaboration is also about communication. Getting the right sample emails and information in front of stakeholders in a way they'll appreciate is key. Asking a VP to sign in to your Marketo or Eloqua instance to find an email and review it there isn't going to have a high success rate.

Email builders with built-in commenting and approvals allow you to escape the email chains with screenshots and instead focus on point feedback. You're working in a collaborative tool that's easy to navigate, keeping stakeholders engaged without asking them to learn your MAP interface.

QA

Email builders handle cross-client rendering and responsive design out of the box, so you don't end up with emails breaking in Outlook. You're working from a production-ready environment from the start—no more "looks broken in Outlook" surprises after you've already cycled through three rounds of approvals.

Deployment

Having bi-directional sync with your marketing automation platform allows you to instantaneously sync your email to the right campaign. This eliminates manual copy-pasting, reduces the number of broken tokens or links that could appear across different platforms, and allows you to send the email the moment it's approved.

Calculating the ROI of Email Builders

While in the marketing world we want return on investment to be a hard number, sometimes things are a little bit more qualitative than quantitative.

Time saved per email may be easier expressed in the number of Slack messages you get about any given email. How long does it take to send an email? This is something you can measure directly if you have a project management tool—seeing how long it takes from the moment you create the task to the moment you close it out.

On the qualitative side, think about the opportunity cost of sending slow emails versus the opportunity benefits of being able to quickly execute campaigns. There's also the quality component: how good are the emails you're sending? And the volume question: how many emails are you capable of sending?

Can you increase your capacity with email builders? The answer is absolutely yes.

The Math

If one email takes two weeks to complete, you can produce roughly 26 emails per year per person. If one email takes one day, you can produce 250 emails per year per person. Multiply that by your team size.

But it's not just about volume. It's also about:

• Opportunity: Campaigns you can run that you couldn't before
• Agility: Ability to respond to market changes in real time

Testing: Capacity to A/B test more variations and learn faster

What to Factor In

When calculating email builder ROI, consider:

• Time saved per email (hours of work eliminated across all stakeholders)
• Cost of that time (salary plus overhead for designers, developers, project managers, reviewers)
• Volume increase (how many more emails you can produce)
• Opportunity value (campaigns you can now execute that were previously impractical)
• Risk reduction (fewer broken emails, better brand consistency, less rework)

Don't forget to account for:

• Developer time freed up for higher-value work
• Agency costs eliminated or reduced
• Ability to scale email production without adding headcount

Why Email Builders Improve Time to Market

Email builders help you improve your time-to-market metric because they don't just operate as a no-code design system—they also allow you to orchestrate across various platforms.

The tools your team uses, from Figma to Asana or Monday to your marketing automation platform, are the key processes that help stakeholders and practitioners collaborate and execute marketing campaigns.

No-code email builders like Knak help orchestrate between all of this, providing a central communication platform that integrates with the tools you use every day while centralizing a process that's easy to fragment.

The ROI of email builders is truly in the opportunity benefits. By mitigating opportunity costs, you ensure your team stays on track and delivers emails quicker. Time to market matters more than ever, and email builders have become infrastructure—not a nice-to-have.

Calculate your current email creation time. Then calculate what you could do with 10x velocity.