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 supporting 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 build itself is a small share of the elapsed time: with Knak, Vanguard's average asset build time is 8.8 minutes. 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
Design and creative production is the second most-cited obstacle to launching campaigns on time, named by 38% of teams in Knak's 2026 research. 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: 69% of organizations say marketing emails go through two to three rounds of revision before approval.
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. Approvals and sign-off
This is what pushes many teams into the multi-day bucket: getting approvals and sign-off is the most-cited obstacle to launching campaigns on time, named by 47% of enterprise marketing decision-makers in Knak's 2026 research. Once the design and copy are approved, integration with your MAP can sometimes create issues. Sometimes things don't look the way they should when you send that first test email.
The real timeline for email creation
Email creation looks simple from the outside, but each email runs through a full workflow: strategy and brief, design in Figma, development, QA and approval, deployment, and the post-mortem once the data rolls in.
In Knak's 2026 research (n=333), the most common time to produce a single marketing email, from brief to send, is one to four hours (29% of teams), but a long tail of teams takes far longer, and 85% of marketing teams missed at least one campaign launch date in the past 12 months because of workflow constraints. The slowdown tracks company size more than team size: teams with more than 75 marketers tend to produce email faster, while teams at companies with $1B+ revenue are over twice as likely to take five to ten business days or more (14% vs. 6% overall). If you're in the slower group, you're not alone.
How long one marketing email takes, brief to send | Share of teams |
|---|---|
At least one full business day | 36% |
At least three business days | 19% |
More than 10 business days | 2% |
Source: Knak, Marketing Production in the Age of AI (2026, n=333). Each row includes the teams in the rows below it.
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.
Email builders let you produce on-brand emails from approved templates and modules, taking the heavy lifting out of the build. Knak lets you customize how each part of an email displays on mobile. Rendering still deserves a check before send, since there are plenty of reasons emails break even when the code is clean.
Collaboration
The human element of an email campaign can often be the trickiest to manage. Stumbling blocks exist when you're porting your design from Figma into email format. Maybe you send a test email out to a reviewer who reads email in a different client, and the responsive design needs tweaking.
Collaboration is also about communication, and getting the right sample emails and information in front of reviewers 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, and the chains are still common: Knak's 2026 research found that 51% of teams coordinate campaign workflow and sign-off through email, Slack, or Teams threads. You're working in a collaborative tool that's easy to use, keeping reviewers engaged without asking them to learn your MAP interface.
QA
Email builders take much of the cross-client rendering and responsive design work off your team, so fewer emails break in Outlook. You start from a production-ready environment, which cuts down the "looks broken in Outlook" surprises after you've already cycled through three rounds of approvals.
Deployment
A direct sync with your marketing automation platform sends your email to the right campaign without manual copy-pasting. That can reduce the number of broken tokens or links that could appear across different platforms, and lets you send the email once 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 is the drop in hands-on hours across everyone who touches it. A time log or quick survey, before and after, can capture it. A project management tool measures something different: elapsed time from the moment you create the task to the moment you close it, waiting on reviews included. Track both, plus completed emails per month, because each one improves for different reasons.
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? Vanguard's result below suggests you can.
The math
Your email output comes down to three numbers: the hands-on hours each email needs, how many emails each person can keep in flight at once, and the slowest step, which for many teams is review. Elapsed time from brief to send isn't all labor, since much of it can be waiting on reviews. A faster build helps, but shortening review is what lets the same team ship more, because every email in flight finishes sooner and frees its slot for the next one. Vanguard saw a 40% increase in asset output with Knak.
Beyond 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 everyone who touches it)
- 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 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, carry the processes that help reviewers and practitioners collaborate and execute marketing campaigns.
Knak is the agentic production layer for enterprise marketing, and email builders like it 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 rather than a nice-to-have. Track it next to your other email marketing metrics so you can see the change.
Calculate your current email creation time, from brief to send. Vanguard's 59% reduction in time to market with Knak shows what's possible: use it as a benchmark for your own number, not a forecast.
