Campaign creation is the heart and soul of marketing operations and the daily work of every campaign operations team. The emails, landing pages, and assets you create and share with your audience drive pipeline and grow your business. But behind every deployed campaign lives an entire lifecycle that most people never see.
A campaign brief originates in a project management tool. Design files move through Figma or Adobe. Email code gets written (or copied from somewhere). Reviews happen across Slack threads, email chains, and annotated screenshots. Brand approvals surface in yet another system. Finally, the finished asset lands in your marketing automation platform, ready for deployment.
The tool count adds up fast: Knak's 2026 research found that 54% of teams use three to five separate tools to produce a single email, and 60% involve four or more people in producing one. Each tool serves a clear purpose, but few of them talk to each other, so the result is less a workflow than a relay race where each handoff creates risk.
What is campaign creation?
Campaign creation is the process of building, managing, and distributing assets in service of a marketing campaign. It runs from the brief through design, build, and review to handing finished emails and landing pages to your marketing automation platform, which sends the emails and publishes the landing pages.
When we think about campaign creation, we typically think about outputs: the emails sent to prospects, the landing pages where they convert, the assets that move them through your funnel. These outputs matter. They're what your audience sees and interacts with.
But campaign creation operates on two distinct levels that determine whether your team can produce these outputs efficiently:
The technological component covers the tools you're using and how you're moving assets and artifacts between teams. This includes design software, development environments, collaboration platforms, content management systems, and the marketing automation platforms where campaigns ultimately deploy. The technology component is about capability: what can your stack actually do?
The process component covers how the humans behind your team actually work. This includes workflows for moving from brief to design, collaboration patterns for review and approval, handoff protocols between teams, and the tribal knowledge that determines how work actually gets done. The process component is about coordination: how do people and tools work together?
Campaign creation sits between creative strategy and campaign execution. Strategy determines what you'll say and to whom. Execution sends campaigns and measures results. Campaign creation is everything in between: translating strategic intent into functional marketing assets. Emails and landing pages are where that complexity shows most, so they are the focus from here on.
What are the steps in the campaign creation process?
The campaign creation process runs from brief to design, build, review and approval, and finally sync and launch in your marketing automation platform. Each step usually has a different owner and a different tool, so the handoffs between them are where time goes and errors creep in. The table shows who owns each step and where it typically breaks.
Step | Owner | Typical tool | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
Brief | Campaign manager | Asana, Workfront, Wrike | Context scattered across email and Slack |
Design | Designer | Figma, Adobe | Rebuilt by hand for email |
Build | Marketer or ops | Email builder, MAP editor | Rendering differs across email clients |
Review and approval | Brand, legal, regional leads | Builder comments, PDFs | Feedback spread across tools |
Sync and launch | MAP admin | Marketo, Eloqua, SFMC | Tokens and modules can break |
Here's how those steps combine in a Figma-to-Marketo workflow:
- The campaign manager approves the brief in Asana, and the designer starts work in Figma
- The designer creates a mockup and shares it for initial review
- The email builder imports the Figma design (or the designer recreates it using builder modules)
- The builder applies responsive design and email-specific rendering code
- The team reviews the email within the builder, leaving comments on specific elements
- Copywriters and brand managers provide feedback without context-switching to other tools
- Once approved, the builder syncs the email to the chosen Marketo program
- The campaign manager configures audience, schedule, and tracking in Marketo
- The email deploys using the normal MAP workflow
Campaign creation in the martech stack
In the martech stack, the critical transition is turning design files from Figma or Adobe Creative Suite into functioning email code, and the workflow around it is inherently modular. Organizations have solved the campaign creation process in different ways. Some involve developers who hand-code emails. Others rely on native editors within their marketing automation platform. Many use dedicated email builders. Some teams are even experimenting with ChatGPT to generate email designs.
This modularity serves a purpose, because different teams have different capabilities, constraints, and preferences. But modularity also requires human coordination. The best results happen when reviewers can see the email in context, provide feedback, and approve changes before deployment.
The challenge isn't the modularity itself but coordinating these modules into a coherent workflow. Most martech stacks jump directly from static design files to marketing automation platforms, leaving everything between design and deployment to ad hoc processes that vary by team, campaign, and whoever happens to be available. A complete email and landing page technology stack fills that gap with a production layer between the two.
Email builders and campaign creation
Email builders help solve a major issue in campaign creation: creating on-brand, responsive, and code-complete emails that work across dozens of email clients with wildly different rendering behaviors.
Email builders let non-technical people build effective emails, reducing dependencies on developers for one-off templates or minor updates, so teams stop waiting in the developer queue for every change.
Here's what email builders actually do in an enterprise martech stack:
- Design translation
- Collaboration hub
- Technical translation
- Integration bridge
- Brand governance
Design translation
Designers create in Figma or Adobe, but marketing automation platforms require email-specific HTML and CSS that renders correctly across dozens of email clients with wildly inconsistent rendering engines. Email builders bridge this gap, translating design intent into functional email code while handling responsive design and cross-client compatibility.
Translating designs for email clients isn't straightforward, because Gmail renders CSS differently than Outlook and Apple Mail handles media queries differently than Yahoo. An email that looks perfect in a design tool can break when deployed if these rendering nuances aren't addressed during the build process. Email builders handle much of this translation automatically, so what subscribers see stays close to the design.
Collaboration hub
Enterprise marketing operates at global scale with distributed teams. A designer in San Francisco creates the initial mockup. A copywriter in London refines the messaging. A regional marketing manager in Singapore reviews for local market fit. A brand director in New York provides final approval. Collaboration is where value gets incrementally added to the asset as multiple people across different teams contribute their expertise.
Email builders centralize this collaboration, so instead of feedback scattered across Slack threads, email chains, and screenshot PDFs, review and approval happen in one place. Comments attach directly to specific elements. Reviewers can see exactly what they're approving in the context where it will actually be used, regardless of where they're located or what time zone they're working from. That matters for delivery: Knak's 2026 research found that 85% of marketing teams missed at least one launch date in the past 12 months because of workflow constraints.
Technical translation
Developing emails requires considering responsive design and email client-specific rendering issues that don't exist in standard web development. Much of the code that powers modern websites doesn't work reliably in email clients, and many CSS properties that are standard on the web are blocked or unsupported in some of them. Modern layout techniques like flexbox or grid require fallback approaches for classic Outlook for Windows, which renders email very differently from a browser.
Email builders tackle this complexity by creating responsive, well-designed emails with email-ready code. Whether through modular building blocks that generate clean code or through direct integrations with design tools like Figma, email builders remove the specialized email development knowledge barrier. Teams can create emails that work across major clients without needing to understand the technical intricacies of each platform's rendering quirks.
Integration bridge
Email builders offer a bridge between design, collaboration, and deployment. They sync assets into Marketo, Eloqua, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so you don't create more silos in your attempt to solve workflow coordination. Assets created in the builder become native objects in your MAP, deployable through your existing campaign workflows.
How do enterprise teams keep email on-brand when many teams create it?
Enterprise teams keep email on-brand by building governance into the system rather than relying on each builder's judgment. That means locked, approved modules, color palettes and font kits, role-based permissions over who can edit what, tiered approvals so routine sends flow and exceptions get review, and one shared template library across regions and business units, the core of email governance.
The need for system-level governance grows with the team: as marketing teams scale and distribute globally, maintaining brand consistency becomes much harder. Different team members create emails for different campaigns, regions, or business units. Without governance enforced at the system level, brand drift is likely. A workable rule: copy and image changes inside locked modules go through the normal review, while new layouts, new claims, or regulated language go to brand or legal.
The result shows up at launch: by 2024, after Knak rolled out to approximately 250 marketers within Google, the team saw a 90% reduction in change requests at launch. System-level governance also matters more as more people build. "In a matter of weeks, we went from having just five people creating emails to over 80 people with the ability to create emails," says Cory Riley, Marketing Operations Solution Lead at Citrix.
Campaign creation as infrastructure
Campaign creation is like plumbing: you notice it when it doesn't work. When emails take three weeks to create instead of three days. When brand inconsistencies slip through because review processes are informal. When campaign velocity slows because every request waits on the same two people. When technical debt accumulates because emails are copied and modified rather than built from governed components. The slow end is real: Knak's 2026 research found that 19% of teams need three or more business days to produce a single email.
The organizations that get campaign creation right don't necessarily have more resources or better tools. They have infrastructure that enables their resources and tools to function as a system. They understand that campaign creation isn't just about making emails but about enabling teams to make emails at scale, with consistency, without dependencies on heroic individual effort.
Email builders serve as critical infrastructure in this system. They don't replace your design tools or your marketing automation platform. They connect them, orchestrate them, and enable the workflow that moves campaigns from concept to deployed asset.
Knak is the agentic production layer for enterprise marketing: the system between creative brief and send, connected to the MAP you already run. If your campaign creation still lives in handoffs, map your current steps against the table above and start with the one where work waits longest.
