The smart way to keep your email team in sync — Stripo.email

Imagine your email marketing team has started working on a new campaign. Or picture an email marketing agency with multiple teams preparing campaigns for completely different clients.

How do you ensure that every team member — copywriters, designers, and email marketers — understand the task the same way and can double-check their work against the original marketing inputs at any point? As with any collaborative project, the larger the team and the more complex the tasks, the more difficult it becomes to stay in sync.

A clear, centralized brief is one of the most effective tools for streamlining collaboration in email production. This article explains what to include in a team brief, where to place it so that it is accessible to everyone, and how to use it to track progress and quality throughout the email production process.

Key takeaways

1. A brief is essential for effective teamwork in email production, as it allows all members of the email marketing team to act in sync.
2. A good brief is based on a common marketing strategy and an understanding of the target audience, including customer personas.
3. While you can choose any format for the brief, the most important thing is that it is formalized and accessible to all team members at all times.

The heart of an email campaign: What your brief should include

The main purpose of a brief is to collect enough information for every team member to work efficiently without making it overly wordy or complicated to use later.

Here are the key elements that most teams include in an email campaign brief:

• campaign goals and connections with the overall marketing strategy;
• target audience info;
• technical specs and limitations of your ESP (e.g., image-to-text ratio and personalization options);
• content type (promo, newsletter, transactional, etc.);
• brand assets — get those logos, fonts, and color codes upfront;
• deadlines — when content needs to be ready, when the test should go out, and the actual send date.

Skipping any of these points in your brief can lead to confusion within the team, as people may interpret campaign details differently. If you’re working in an agency, missing information about the client’s business or email marketing goals can result in the campaign failing to solve the client’s problem, which would lead to long rounds of revisions and rework.

So no matter how time-consuming it may seem, it’s worth investing the effort upfront to gather all the essential information. It will save your team countless hours later.

Pro tip: Collect the information for the brief efficiently to avoid rounds of edits

1. Start with aligned concepts. Suppose the campaign is extensive (for example, a promo with multiple segments or localizations). In this case, email marketers prepare a detailed brief that includes the core idea and input for copywriters and designers.
2. Use what you already know. If you’re closely working with the product or marketing team, chances are you already have everything you need by the time you sit down to give the campaign brief — no need for endless follow-ups.
3. Adapt the concept for email yourself. Don’t wait for someone else to translate a marketing message into email format. As an email marketer, you’re shaping the general messaging and design into something that works in the inbox.
4. Take the lead on the brief. The email marketer’s job is to own the brief and coordinate across copy, design, and the overall messaging teams. Even though everyone has their responsibilities, someone (usually you!) needs to keep the big picture in mind and make sure everything fits together.

If stakeholders are involved, run the brief by them before handing it off — it will save a lot of back-and-forth later.

Depending on your workflow, you might create a brief or request the needed info from stakeholders. Once everything’s clear, and you’ve got the green light, go ahead and assign tasks to the copywriter and designer — or take the DIY route and do it all yourself (been there!). Either way, now’s the time to start working on your email content.

Go beyond tasks: Add customer personas and pain points

Understanding the task of a specific email is not enough to create effective email campaigns and achieve meaningful results. A crucial part of any brief is information about the target audience. Well-developed customer personas help you identify real challenges and pain points, allowing you to craft personalized email copy and design messages for and to the right audience for stronger engagement and higher conversion rates.

In email marketing, customer personas are the fictional generalized profiles of your ideal customers. They help you better understand your audience and tailor campaigns to meet their needs.

Personalization in email marketing relies on addressing customer pain points in a way that resonates with what matters most to them. Creating customer personas give your team a clear picture of who you’re writing for and how to motivate them.

Here’s why including customer personas in your campaign brief — or even for a whole email series — can make such a difference:

• mapping out customer journeys and segment subscriber lists effectively;
• sending personalized content tailored to each segment;
• developing unique, relevant subject lines and content ideas;
• using the right tone of voice and vocabulary for each persona;
• choosing visuals that resonate with the audience.

Different teams, different briefs: Finding the proper format

Don’t rely on memory — write it all down. A well-documented brief keeps you focused, and if you’re working as part of a team, it ensures everyone is aligned and knows precisely what to do. No guessing, no surprises.

An email marketing brief can have different formats. Let’s take a look at a few popular approaches.

For agencies: A brief with detailed questions

In this format, the email marketer shares a file with the stakeholder or client, who then fills in all the information needed to prepare the campaign. This type of brief can be reused for each campaign: you simply update the fields that change and keep the parts that stay the same for that client or segment.

It’s efficient — you invest the time once to set it up thoroughly, and afterward, you only adjust what’s specific to each campaign.

For product teams: When the brief foundation stays the same

In product companies, email briefs are usually tied to broader marketing initiatives. For example, the overall concept, messaging, and design direction have already been developed and documented during an extensive promo campaign across multiple channels.

The email marketing team relies on this foundation and briefs stakeholders only on tasks specific to the email channel. In this case, the brief serves as the starting point for copywriters, designers, and email marketers: the copywriter adapts the messaging, the designer translates the visual style, and the email marketer brings all the pieces together.

Unlike agencies, which often need to chase missing details, email teams in product companies typically already have access to key information. Marketing isn’t siloed from product development, so email marketers stay updated through demos and regular syncs. 

When a campaign reaches the briefing stage, much of the context — such as upcoming product updates or feature launches — is already well known. Specific points may need clarification, but generally, the brief is about organizing information the team already has, not gathering it from scratch. By the time execution begins, the role of the brief is to keep ideas structured and ensure the overarching campaign concept is effectively adapted to the email channel.

Example structure of a product team email brief

Not brief but rules — experience by Kyivstar.Tech

The email marketing team at Kyivstar.Tech shared their approach to collecting information for campaigns. Since the team works with a variety of internal and external stakeholders — making their workflow somewhat similar to that of an agency — they created a strict set of rules that must be followed for an email campaign to move into production.

Some rules must be submitted in the task for it to go to production:

1. Ready the text to be read by internal digital copywriters.
2. Images should follow clear parameters that email marketers pre-prescribe for different types of email newsletters for different templates.
3. All links should be ready and tested.
4. All necessary approvals should be obtained.

Once these elements are in place, the email marketers complete the email and send it to the intended audience segment.

Working with a brief: Keep the strategy intact from outline to send

Where should a brief be placed so that it is convenient for everyone? How can it be made accessible to all team members at each stage? These questions are important to answer since a brief only works when it is convenient to use throughout the work, preserving the meaning and keeping the team in sync.

Where should your brief be located so that it is convenient for everyone?

1. Place the brief where your team already works — Google Docs, Notion, or the notes section in your ESP.
2. Pin links to all active briefs in a place where the entire team will look for them first — in your team chat and project tools, Jira, Slack chat, Wiki, or something else.
3. A great option is to have the brief in a single system, with production always being at hand during assembly and quality control.
4. Use clear names for each brief (YYYY-MM-DD Campaign — Product — Market) and clear access rights (R / A / C / I). Everyone should know where to find it — no personal documents, no private-message-only files.
5. Add a visible status field to the top of the brief and update it as work progresses — draft, pending, approved, in build, in QA, scheduled, sent, archived.

Before you send an email campaign, open the brief and scan it from top to bottom. If the email in your ESP doesn’t match what’s in that document, fix the gaps before you press the send button.

After you send the email and get the results, go back to the brief and close it. Compare the results with the brief’s success metrics. Note what worked (topic, module, segment) and what needs to be removed for the next time.

Move the brief to the Archive section, save links to resources and reports, and tag it for easy searching.

Wrapping up

The most common mistake we’ve seen in email marketing teams is creating a brief and forgetting about it during email production. Please don’t make it; use the brief as a single source of information for all team members. Your work will be even more coordinated, and the results will be predictable.