What challenges do email marketing teams face as they expand?

Teamwork in email marketing evolves as teams grow, and the challenges they face often depend on their size. Small teams may have difficulty understanding the complexities of larger teams, while larger teams may miss the agility of smaller operations.

Is effective teamwork really possible in email marketing, or is it more efficient for one person to handle everything? This article looks at the need for teamwork, its origins in email marketing, and how teams of different sizes can navigate unique challenges to create effective campaigns.

At what levels does an email marketer work?

The role of an email marketer is highly versatile and involves managing tasks across multiple levels, as follows:

1. At the most basic level, email production involves writing the copy, designing the layout, and coding the email.
2. Next comes the operational level: sending the email. This includes planning the campaign, setting up the ESP, testing how the email appears across different inboxes and devices, gathering data, analyzing performance, and continually optimizing campaigns in a repetitive cycle.
3. On a strategic level, email marketers define goals, outline objectives and tactics, establish metrics, and assess how the email channel impacts the company’s overall marketing efforts.

Each task comes with its own set of tools, which the email marketer must skillfully juggle. This is already a lot to handle, and in many companies, a single person manages all these responsibilities while also dealing with other marketing or business-related tasks. For example, they could be a solo entrepreneur, a generalist marketer handling multiple channels, or an email specialist who oversees the entire process.

Such an approach works well as long as one person is solely responsible for email campaign preparation. No matter how large or varied the workload is, they manage it independently without needing external coordination.

How teams grow and processes become more complex

The expansion of teams and the increasing complexity of processes happen gradually but eventually reach a critical mass.

The first stage of team growth

Let’s start with small email marketing teams. A typical small team consists of 3-5 people. Initially, beyond the email marketer, additional members usually include a copywriter and a designer to whom to delegate specific tasks. As the team grows, a developer may be added to handle complex interactive emails.

For example, the copywriter might prefer drafting email copy in Google Docs, while the designer creates layouts in Figma. Once the email is designed, the developer codes it and tests it using their tools. Finally, the email is ready to send — until the team lead wants to add another element and tweaks a few lines in the text.

What happens then? Should the email go back to the copywriter or the designer? Where should the request for these changes be noted — in Google Docs, Figma, or just the team chat? If it’s in chat, which link should be used? How will the team lead track whether the changes have been made?

Now, imagine that the email has already been localized into five languages. In addition, the approval process involves the legal department and campaign stakeholders.

And all of this occurs within just the first level of email marketing: email production.

Further process complications

As businesses grow, processes become even more complex. For instance, outsourcing certain tasks to agencies creates two internal and external teams that must communicate extensively with each other. These teams often use different tools, and the approval process becomes more challenging due to the required coordination.

Additionally, internal teams may expand to 10 or more members, forming specialized units, such as separate groups for copywriters and designers. Within these units, colleagues share tasks, adding another layer of complexity.

Building on the example from the previous section, it’s clear that the number of questions, handoffs, and approvals involved in preparing each email only continues to grow. And even this isn’t the limit.

How truly large email marketing teams operate

We spoke with members of large email marketing teams to understand their dynamics:

• distributed teams (50-100 members): These teams exist within companies with multiple structures or business units, each with email marketing goals and workflows. Coordination across these units can be challenging due to their varied objectives and approaches;
• cross-cultural teams in global companies (100+ members): Email marketing teams operate across countries and time zones in corporations. Each country develops its marketing strategies while aligning with the global brand identity. This requires emails to follow a consistent brand style, adhere to corporate strategies, and comply with regional legal regulations.

How team growth impacts efficiency

As teams grow, collaboration becomes more complex, often at the expense of efficiency. Larger teams require significantly more time to execute email campaigns from initial concept to final delivery.

For example, in a global company like Microsoft, triggered emails must be approved across all countries. Implementing a single triggered email sequence can take up to six months due to the extensive review and approval processes.

The time spent communicating about a single task increases exponentially as team size grows. A solo entrepreneur might take one day to complete a task, whereas cross-functional global teams could take months. This inefficiency can be frustrating, especially when the teams involved consist of highly skilled professionals who are already experts in their respective roles and don’t need foundational explanations.

However, in their efforts to scale teams and distribute tasks, companies often inflate and complicate their processes to such an extent that overall efficiency plummets instead of improving.

New challenges for large teams

Large email marketing teams face challenges that small teams and independent email marketers rarely encounter.

For small teams, issues such as accessibility, responsiveness, dark mode optimization, and coding complex email elements can be daunting because a single person often wears multiple hats and may lack expertise in all areas.

Large teams, on the other hand, typically have specialists for each of these tasks. However, their challenges lie elsewhere, and these are the areas they need to address:

1. Teamwork and coordination: As teams grow, ensuring smooth collaboration becomes increasingly complex. The more people involved, the more time is spent coordinating tasks and managing communication. The challenge lies in making interactions more efficient and streamlining processes so that all team members work cohesively, despite the growing size of the team.
2. Brand consistency: Maintaining consistent design elements and tone of voice across all emails becomes crucial as teams expand. For instance, in distributed teams, each unit — a university department or a business unit — might create branded emails. The goal is to ensure that these emails adhere to the same quality standards and branding guidelines so that nothing is overlooked or misaligned.
3. User management and system security: Managing user access in large teams presents unique challenges. With hundreds of users, administrators need efficient ways to add and remove team members, assign roles, and regulate permissions. For example, some users might need rights to create and edit emails, while others might only need access to translate content or make structural changes. Balancing flexibility and security is critical.

Search for solutions

Naturally, teams and management in large organizations are always seeking ways to address the challenges of scaling email marketing processes.

One common approach is to decentralize communication by shifting responsibility to those directly requesting email creation. This idea might seem logical initially — it empowers those closest to the audience’s needs to take the initiative. However, in practice, it often leads to disorganization. Without clear guidelines and oversight, the process can quickly devolve into chaos.

Many large companies establish specialized departments that act as intermediaries to address this issue. These teams are trained to accept requests, process them efficiently, and implement the necessary changes.

The key task: Optimizing teamwork processes

The main goal for growing and large organizations is to optimize teamwork processes to minimize delays and preserve critical knowledge at every workflow stage. Effective solutions should reduce task complexity and execution time while ensuring that all stakeholders maintain alignment and clarity.

A more efficient model could involve providing task owners with intuitive tools and the autonomy to create emails themselves. Using a convenient editor, they can craft professional emails with the necessary content aligned with branding guidelines. Once completed, these emails can be handed over to the email marketing team for final approval and distribution.

Real-world example

Consider a university with multiple faculties and campuses. Each unit is responsible for sending emails to its students. However, all emails must adhere to the university’s overarching style and messaging.

Each department can efficiently create emails without straying from the university’s identity by using a streamlined solution — such as a user-friendly email editor equipped with pre-designed templates and brand guidelines. This approach balances decentralization with consistency, allowing teams to scale without sacrificing quality or efficiency.

Simplifying processes: Strategies for large teams

Here’s how you can do this:

1. Streamline collaboration: Enable simultaneous co-editing with real-time updates and commenting features. This allows team members to provide feedback instantly, ensuring that everyone stays on the same page and minimizing delays caused by miscommunication.
2. Avoid intermediate tools: For example, create an email and coordinate it with all team members at once in the email builder so that you do not need to send files to each other.
3. Integrate translation and design tools: Combine translation and design processes into one seamless workflow. This reduces handoffs between teams and ensures consistency in both messaging and design.
4. Reduce dependency on coders and designers: Set up processes that minimize the need to involve coders or designers. A user-friendly drag-n-drop editor can empower email marketers to handle these tasks independently, saving time and resources.
5. Leverage pre-built modules: Provide email marketers with coding assistance by providing pre-designed and saved modules where only the content needs to be updated. Ready-made interactive modules and games, for example, can simplify the creation process while enhancing engagement.
6. Centralize role management for enhanced security: Use custom role assignments to centralize user access. This approach not only simplifies access control but also strengthens system security.
7. Design an organizational structure that works for your team: Tailor your processes and workflows to fit your specific units and divisions. By considering each team’s unique needs, you can create an organizational structure that supports efficiency and collaboration.

Large teams can regain efficiency and focus on delivering high-quality, impactful email campaigns by simplifying processes and reducing unnecessary complexity.

Wrapping up

At Stripo, we understand large email marketing teams’ challenges — from streamlining collaboration to maintaining brand consistency across global units. That’s why we’ve developed a comprehensive suite of teamwork tools designed to simplify processes, enhance efficiency, and empower your team to focus on creativity and strategy. Explore our solutions today, put them to the test, and let us know your thoughts — your feedback helps us continue to innovate for your success.