Email marketing from Kyivstar.Tech: How to speed up teamwork in email marketing

At Stripo, we work to simplify teamwork on each email as much as possible and make it convenient for all participants in the process. That is why we are interested in how work on emails goes in different companies.

In this material, we have collected team processes in email communications of Kyivstar.Tech IT company.

Olena Zhibul, Chief Email Marketing Expert of Kyivstar.Tech shared her accumulated experience with us.

Briefly about Kyivstar.Tech:

Kyivstar.Tech is a product IT company that was established in January 2023. The brand's parent company is Kyivstar mobile operator. Kyivstar.Tech works on mobile and web solutions, integrating and supporting complex, highly loaded IT systems. The experience of creating services for a client base of 25 million subscribers and thousands of businesses helps to combine a full stack of expertise — from UX and product approach to vendor management and creating your infrastructure. Currently, the team includes about 430 specialists in various fields.

Tasks of email marketers in working with Kyivstar

One of the areas of work of Kyivstar.Tech digital team within the framework of cooperation with Kyivstar is to support effective business operations. The team focuses on developing modern digital solutions for the operator's customers and works for the external market. The email marketing department includes 2 specialists and is part of the digital department. The task of the team is the preparation of emails in different directions.

Regular and strategic tasks

All tasks related to email marketing can be divided into regular tasks for preparing email marketing campaigns (typical and atypical) and strategic tasks.

Regular tasks of the team:

• sending promotional campaigns;
• sending segment campaigns;
• micro-segment campaigns in B2B are not only communication but also products (ATE and others);
• sending B2C campaigns;
• internal emails — Kyivstar is a large company, so it is an effective tool for communication with employees;
• email campaigns for the PR department;
• job postings for potential employees.

Non-typical tasks are those tasks in which they first need to decide on their expediency and the algorithm of how to implement it and distribute responsibilities internally.

There are different numbers of campaigns in a week — it can be 5 or 13, or 17 emails from different directions.

Strategic tasks:

• trigger emails;
• preparation of forms for the site;
• new initiatives;
• integration of various systems of work with customer bases, strategic planning.

Customers and performers in the email marketing workflow

At Kyivstar.Tech, all tasks related to email marketing as a channel of attraction and communication with B2B and B2C clients of Kyivstar are covered by two email marketers. But in reality, many more people are involved in preparing each email newsletter. There are separate specialists for everything, connected by tasks.

The following work together on each email:

• business customers from that division of Kyivstar, which needs to make regular emails or launch a promo according to the tasks;
• project marketing manager (PMM) from the digital department, who forms tasks for various promotion channels and coordinates their work;
• the head of the department — the Growth team, which includes PMMs and teams working in digital channels (PPC, SEO);
• a copywriter who writes or approves the text written by the customer;
• a designer who creates visual materials;
• an email marketer who creates emails, sends them through systems and collects analytics.

Email marketers are also initiators of activities that apply to all strategic tasks for the development of the channel. They form plans and ideas, create tasks for them, share them with executors, and therefore also become customers.

There is a well-established system of interaction between all of us, which helps us be effective.

Olena Zhibul

Chief Email Marketing Expert of Kyivstar.Tech

How teamwork processes are configured and what tools help in this

Customized teamwork processes are the main thing that allows you to simplify routine tasks and allocate at most 30% of your working time to them to avoid getting stuck in them for a long time. This is how it happens for each task.

Tasks allocation and load control

The entire team works through Jira, where there is a separate board on which all tasks relating exclusively to email marketing are written. It is a proven process with certain steps:

1. Once a week, all plans are discussed at the weekly meeting, and tasks for the week, what results we want to get, and what will happen during the week.
2. Urgent unplanned tasks are recorded in the Objectives and Key Results table, which keeps track of all the tasks done with links to Jira (with results, a mark, who put it, whether it was planned or not, etc.).

Key tasks of PMMs in the email marketing workflow

The project marketing manager is responsible for the load and for the whole process to work clearly, namely:

• for the formation of product tasks;
• evaluate their priority and possible result;
• decide whether it is worth assigning each task to work at all;
• carry out weekly planning with email marketers, which determines the tasks and priorities of the week;
• ensure the interaction of the email team with specialists from the digital department who deal with other promotion channels;
• monitor that tasks are not duplicated and that the team does not find itself working on several priority tasks simultaneously.

PMMs take on all the tasks, filter them, and only then share them with email marketers. Essentially, they are the line through which the task gets to the executor or not.

Stages of working out the task

All tasks must be added through Jira. All information on the task is collected there, so email marketers can see which tasks are waiting and can plan time, and analyze whether everything is in the task to start it:

• formulation of the task;
• execution — what exactly is happening with the task (displayed for all internal customers);
• approval – a separate stage, all customers agree or make corrections;
• task completed;
• collection of analytical data.

This is what a worked-out flow for performing tasks looks like. The key to speeding up execution is an established process of information transfer for tasks with its own rules.

Rules for setting typical tasks that speed up work on them

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

1. Ready text read by internal digital copywriters.
2. Images — with clear parameters that email marketers pre-prescribe for different types of email newsletters for different templates.
3. Ready links.
4. All necessary approvals.

These components are necessary for the task to be started. After that, email marketers complete the email and send it to the desired audience segment.

Email marketers always have the final word. Even if, after all the proofreading and approvals, the email marketer sees that the email will not be effective, he can ask it to be reworked.

Stages of implementation of a non-typical task or a new project

1. A separate meeting is conducted to plan and determine what will be in the email newsletters.
2. A plan for promoting a new service or product in terms of omnichannel — in a complex of all channels. How will email overlap with push, SMS, and Viber, what will be the stages, how and at what time will different segments be connected so that promotion is most effective, etc.
3. Meetings with the product owner.
4. Email marketers prepare recommendations on how to prepare an email better to convey information to the user, how many emails should be, when to send them, and more.
5. Based on the recommendations, a task is set for designers and copywriters.

These can be long-term campaigns for a product or service that needs to be revealed to provide an understanding of how they can help this target audience. For example, it can be a series of emails about a specific service that shows it from different angles: a digest, an email with benefits, and a detailed description.

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Processes of work on strategic tasks of email marketing

It is easy to work out a routine, so it should first be done to free up time and resources for strategic tasks. These tasks take up about 70% of working time and require deep immersion.

1. Integration processes. When a company has many complex internal systems, integration processes are required that require a lot of people and resources. For example, integration of Yespo with internal procedures and unloading in Big Value, thanks to which it is possible to configure campaigns in other channels automatically.
2. Trigger emails. Email marketers become customers for copywriters and designers. They describe and coordinate the process but on the same board. People are selected, meetings are held, possible results are calculated, and tasks are accepted.

A/B testing as part of processes

Sometimes, the product owner and the email marketer have different views on what the email should be to work effectively. In such cases, the best solution is A/B testing.

I often initiate such tests to see in numbers and show the customer which version of the email, subject line, or CTA will work better. Especially if there is a controversial situation where the customer and I have a different opinion about the effectiveness, I suggest making bets so that it does not look like a fight but takes place as an interesting experiment with an element of excitement.

Olena Zhybul

Email Marketing Manager

For example, if they launch some trigger, the A/B test is provided as a segmented mailing before the trigger is launched. They do so to provide results and prove that it is needed and will be effective. And after that, you can launch a full-scale campaign.

Planning, management, and email marketing automation tools

The right people and proven processes are good, but keeping everything in your head is impossible. Therefore, the third component is tools that help in the work of an email marketer. Of course, this is a non-exhaustive tools list that an email marketer can use, but for Kyivstar.Tech team they are the basis.

Planning and communication tools

We are talking about task managers and everything that helps with planning and communication in the team:

• Jira for tasks (all comments and setting tasks);
• Teams — for scheduling meetings;
• Asana — used to be used together with Jira, but now everything is moving to Jira;
• AnyDo — a personal task manager;
• Google Calendar — scheduling meetings;
• Slack for team communication;
• Miro — visualization of team processes: how it will be, what is the board sequence by individual teams, by email.

Email marketing tools

• Figma — designers work, email marketers only comment;
• Google Doc — preparation and coordination of texts;
• Yespo — for email marketing automation;
• internal systems of sending emails.

We have written about the best tools for email marketers to increase your productivity and the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Analytics in email marketing

An obligatory part of the work is the collection of analytics for each email and product. Product data is also collected in several stages:

• an email marketer collects analytics for a specific task and publishes it in Jira in the same task;
• final conversion figures are added after a few days;
• cross-channel analytics;
• dashboards with analytics on how emails affect further marketing processes, and internal analytics in Yespo — historical data, for example, user behavior.

Further, all metrics are analyzed and considered when planning the next actions for the product and in strategic planning as a whole.

What should be added to work processes

During our conversation, Olena Zhybul mentioned that there are two key points that she would like to add to the team's workflows:

1. The first one is the ability to work simultaneously on an email at the stage of preparation and approval. They need the possibility to make corrections, comment, send it to everyone for approval, and see clearly who and what comments wrote because sometimes there are many customer comments.
2. The second one is the ability to see the email direction in the omnichannel nature of the processes in order to understand the volume of activities across all channels and to focus on this information in your planning.

Wrapping up

Email marketing for a large product company is a significant layer of multifaceted work, and many specialists are involved in the processes at the same time. The team of email marketers works as an internal agency for other departments according to pre-written regulations and rules of interaction. It is what helps to structure the work clearly and to do email marketing quickly and efficiently.