How One of the World's Largest Pharma Companies Cut Email Timelines by 70% and Took Control of Their Marketing Ops

One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, delivering treatments across immunology, oncology, neurology, and more, was struggling with a legacy, complex marketing process—and when it came to email, their internal teams were stuck in a slow, costly, and rigid model.

What used to take 90 to 100 days (and heavy agency involvement) now takes 20–30 days—or as little as 16 hours. Here’s how they did it.

The Backstory

With hundreds of brands and an industry defined by regulatory complexity, one of the world's largest pharma companies' email process was predictable—but painful. Creative was developed externally, routed through strict medical/legal reviews, and then sent to agencies to be hand-coded for deployment. Every change added friction. Internal teams were handcuffed by a process that was expensive, unscalable, and slow.

Worse, approvals didn’t always carry through to the final HTML, introducing risk. The slightest visual mismatch between the approved mockup and the coded email could require a full re-review, stalling time to market for months.

“We were reliant on external agencies, and they knew it,” said their head of email. “Turnaround was slow, costs were high, and we didn’t have real control.”

The Shift

Enter Knak.

The enterprise’s Digital Lab—an innovation-focused team launched to “bake digital into their DNA”—was on a mission to increase speed, lower costs, and give marketers greater autonomy. Knak was introduced as a core part of that transformation.

The rollout wasn’t easy. It meant reducing agency scope and upskilling internal teams. But early champions of the digital lab helped build momentum through internal roadshows, demos, and direct enablement with marketing teams and agencies alike.

They didn’t just adopt Knak—they used it to change the operating model.

“We didn’t have to hire for the skill set—we hired for the person, because we knew we could teach the tool. That let us build a team of Knak experts from totally different backgrounds.”

The Impact

The results are staggering:

• Time to market dropped from 90–100 days to ~20 days for internal work (and ~30 days when agencies are still involved).
• Over 50% of one of the world's largest pharma companies’s marketing emails are now produced in-house by a 15-person team—with no prior coding experience.
• Millions in agency spend have been reallocated toward more strategic work, like competitive analysis and campaign strategy.
• Iterative content changes are now handled internally, while agencies focus on net-new creative and high-impact initiatives.
• The Knak rollout started with HCP campaigns and expanded to consumer and patient services—now supporting 500–1,000 projects a year.
• And in one legendary moment? They built, reviewed, and deployed a fully compliant email from a bowling alley in 16 hours.

Why It Matters

This wasn’t just a tooling change—it was an operational one. By pairing Knak with an in-housing initiative for marketing automation sends, one of the world's largest pharma companies rewrote its model for scale. They’ve proven that marketers in regulated industries can move fast, stay compliant, and take control of their own work.

And for an organization this large, the ripple effects go far beyond speed: it’s about building a modern marketing org that’s agile, accountable, and equipped for the future.

“Knak is the smallest slice of the process—but it’s where we spend the least time, and that’s a good thing.”

Conclusion

What started as a slow, rigid, agency-led process has turned into a fast, flexible, marketer-led model. By combining strong leadership, clear internal advocacy, and a powerful no-code platform, one of the world's largest pharma companies empowered its teams to take control of execution—without sacrificing compliance.

They didn’t just improve email production. They redefined what internal ownership could look like in a regulated enterprise.

Today, email is no longer a bottleneck. It’s a strategic advantage. And Knak is at the center of that transformation.