LIONS’ experience: How to build a scalable email production system for growing marketing teams
Growing email teams don't struggle because they send too many emails. They struggle because more people become involved in producing them.
What once felt like a straightforward production process gradually turns into a series of bottlenecks. A simple footer update requires a developer’s help. Designers spend hours making repetitive edits instead of solving creative problems. Marketers wait days for approvals instead of launching campaigns. As more people join the workflow, maintaining consistent branding becomes harder with every email.
LIONS, the organization behind the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, faced this exact challenge. In less than two years, the company expanded its email production across 10 brands and more than 30 team members. The goal was not just to produce more campaigns but to build a workflow that could scale with the business without sacrificing quality and while maintaining efficiency and brand consistency.
During our webinar, Olly Browning, head of digital creative at LIONS, and Dmytro Kudrenko, founder and CEO of Stripo, discussed what it really takes to scale email production inside a large organization. In this article, we'll explore the principles behind that approach and how your team can apply them, whether you're managing one growing brand or an entire portfolio of them.
You can watch the full webinar on the Stripo YouTube channel:
Key takeaways
- Scalable email production is about empowering more people to create emails, not hiring more email specialists. The right workflow removes bottlenecks while allowing designers to focus on strategy and optimization.
- Brand consistency comes from systems, not documentation. Reusable templates, predefined styles, and built-in guardrails help growing teams stay on brand with less manual oversight.
- The most effective email workflows reduce friction at every stage. Simplifying collaboration, making onboarding intuitive, and standardizing routine tasks enable teams to produce high-quality campaigns faster as they grow.
What scaling email production actually means
Most conversations about scaling email production focus on how to organize the creation and delivery of more campaigns.
In practice, true scalability is achieved when you increase your team's capabilities without increasing complexity at the same rate. Rather than relying on a small group of email specialists to create every campaign or manually review every design decision, marketers, copywriters, and product teams can handle the routine production process themselves, leaving designers to focus on creative work that requires their expertise.
I haven't really scaled the number of email experts we have. What I've scaled is the number of people we've empowered to go in and create the emails they want for their audience. That gives our team the time to come in afterward, refine the experience, and bring everything together.
Olly Browning,
This mindset changes the way you think about growth. Instead of asking, "How do we produce more emails?" teams should ask, “How can we help more people create high-quality emails without introducing new bottlenecks?”
For LIONS, the answer was to give marketers greater ownership over email creation while enabling the creative team to focus on creative direction, optimization, and quality assurance.
Every organization has a different definition of “scaling”. For one company, it could mean supporting multiple brands. For another, it could mean localizing campaigns for dozens of markets, enabling regional marketing teams to work independently. For yet another, it may simply mean producing more personalized campaigns without increasing headcount.
Define what scaling means for your organization first. Is it about more teams creating emails? More brands? More campaigns? More email specialists aren't always the answer. Sometimes the real opportunity is giving existing teams better tools and processes so they can work independently.
Dmytro Kudrenko,
Clarifying what scaling means for your team or organization also avoids focusing on the wrong problem. Some teams hire additional designers when they actually need better templates. Others introduce additional approval stages or create additional documentation while leaving the unnecessarily complicated workflow unchanged.
Successful enterprise teams scale their system, not just their output.
Expert tip: Before changing your workflow, define what "scaling" means for your team. Once you understand the challenge you're solving, it becomes much easier to identify which parts of your workflow need to evolve and which are already working well.
Turn designers into system builders instead of email builders
Every email begins with the creative team. A marketer submits a request, a designer creates the layout, feedback is exchanged, revisions follow, and only then does production begin.
This approach works fine for a handful of campaigns a month. It breaks down when dozens of marketers across multiple brands all need emails at once.
LIONS intentionally abandoned this model. Rather than having designers create each campaign from scratch, the team built an email production system in Stripo that marketers could use independently.
Such a system may include the following elements:
- developing flexible, reusable templates;
- improving visual hierarchy;
- improving the client experience;
- testing campaigns before launch.
This saved the team from wasting hours replacing images, adjusting intervals, or updating copy. Now, marketers can create campaigns without waiting in production queues, making their role significantly more strategic.
Olly described his ideal workflow as one where marketers confidently create the first version of an email because the system already keeps them within brand guidelines. Designers then step in to make meaningful improvements rather than handle routine production work.
I want people to feel empowered enough to lay out the kind of emails they want because they know their audience better than I do. Then I can come in, apply my email design experience, improve the hierarchy, make suggestions, and make sure everything works together.
Olly Browning,
This approach creates a significant multiplier effect: one designer enables dozens of marketers to produce consistently high-quality campaigns. As organizations grow, that's often what separates a creative team that constantly expands from building a workflow that scales naturally.
Expert tip: Review the types of requests your design team handles every week. If designers regularly spend time updating copy, replacing images, or adjusting layouts, ask whether those repetitive production tasks could be standardized. Building reusable templates, predefined content blocks, and clear design systems allows marketers to handle routine production independently.
Build guardrails, not more brand guidelines
Brand consistency often becomes a greater concern as companies grow. The typical response is to create more documentation: longer brand guidelines, additional PDFs, detailed design specifications, or checklists outlining which fonts, colors, or spacing to use.
Documentation works only if people remember to consult it and apply it consistently. Scalable workflows are built on systems that make the right choices as simple as possible, completely transforming how large teams approach brand consistency.
Marketers no longer need to memorize design standards like which button style belongs to which brand or whether they're using the latest footer because the system already provides approved assets, predefined styles, and reusable modules.
If you only give people your brand font and colors, the fear that things are off-brand goes way down. They don't have to look up a hex code or even know what one is. Just give them the color. Give them the tools they need.
Olly Browning,
Traditional brand guidelines, including PDF brand books, are becoming less practical for digital production. Digital marketing evolves much faster than static documentation. Campaigns change, components evolve, accessibility standards improve, and new layouts emerge. In such a dynamic environment, keeping a PDF brand guide perfectly up to date can quickly become a full-time job in itself.
I used to think, “Give me a PDF brand guide, and I can run with it.” But digital moves differently now. Instead of trying to keep a document updated, I'd rather point people to the emails we've created over the past six months.
Olly Browning,
Your email design system should become your living brand guide. Reusable templates, synchronized content blocks, approved typography, brand colors, and recent examples teach people how to build emails far more effectively than pages of written instructions.
Expert tip: Review your current brand documentation and ask yourself, “Which rules could be incorporated into the workflow rather than remain as written instructions?” The fewer design decisions contributors have to make manually, the easier it becomes to maintain brand consistency as your team grows.
Make onboarding almost effortless
People often think scaling means hiring more specialists. But sometimes it's about enabling more people to produce quality emails.
Dmytro Kudrenko,
Most organizations treat onboarding as a separate project. They schedule lengthy training sessions, create detailed documentation, record tutorials, and hope that new employees will remember everything once they begin creating campaigns.
But as teams grow, this approach becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
Every new hire requires additional training. Documentation quickly becomes outdated. People forget what they learned weeks ago, especially if they haven't used it since.
LIONS took a noticeably different approach. Rather than explaining every feature upfront, Olly focused on making the production environment intuitive enough that people could explore it themselves.
I usually tell people, “Just go have a play around.” You can't accidentally send something to a million people. Explore it, edit something, and get comfortable with it. It's much more intuitive than writing HTML.
Olly Browning,
That confidence comes from designing a safe environment for experimentation. When templates are already in place, brand styles are predefined, and contributors know they can't accidentally break the entire system, learning becomes much less intimidating.
People learn by creating real emails. That said, onboarding shouldn’t be completely unstructured. Formal onboarding is still evolving as more teams adopt the workflow.
I'm still figuring out the best onboarding process. I don't want people sitting through an hour of training explaining where the Export button is. I'd rather create simple checklists and learning resources they can use while they're actually working.
Olly Browning,
People retain knowledge more effectively when they solve real problems rather than passively consume information. Short checklists and contextual guidance often deliver better results than long presentations because they support employees exactly when they need help.
An intuitive workflow also reduces one of the biggest barriers to scaling: fear. Many marketers hesitate to edit emails because they're worried about breaking layouts, damaging the brand, or making technical mistakes. But when the system itself provides clear guardrails, contributors become much more confident in taking ownership of production.
The easier it feels to create a compliant email, the faster new team members become productive.
Expert tip: Review your current onboarding process from a new employee's perspective. The goal is to reduce the amount of information people need to remember by making the workflow itself intuitive. When your production system guides contributors toward the right decisions, onboarding becomes faster, less stressful, and much easier to scale.
What happens after you fix the workflow
The biggest benefit of improving your email workflow is changing how your team spends its time.
In growing organizations, creative teams become trapped in production work. Their days fill up with updating copy, replacing images, adjusting layouts, fixing formatting issues, and reviewing small revisions. This work is necessary, but it leaves little room for experimentation, creative thinking, or long-term improvements.
Once routine work is standardized and more contributors can create emails independently, the creative team's role evolves naturally.
At LIONS, this shift allowed designers to move away from being the people who create every email and become the experts who shape the overall quality of the email experience.
This change benefits everyone involved:
- marketers no longer wait in line for every campaign update and can move projects forward independently while still knowing they'll receive expert feedback before launch.
- designers spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on solving problems that genuinely require their expertise, from improving clients’ experience and accessibility to refining layouts and testing new ideas.
As a result, email production becomes both faster and higher quality.
Interestingly, Olly admitted that this transition initially created more work for him. Supporting additional brands, reviewing more campaigns, and helping new teams required significant effort. But the nature of that work changed dramatically.
At the moment, it's more work, but it's better work. It's more on brand than we've ever been before. More people can jump in and create emails, and together we can help each other produce better work.
Olly Browning,
As production becomes more efficient, organizations gain the capacity to focus on activities that often get postponed when teams are overloaded, such as A/B testing, accessibility improvements, design optimization, and strategic planning.
Expert tip: Look at how your creative team spends its time over a typical week. If most of their time goes toward repetitive production work rather than creative problem-solving, your workflow is probably limiting your team's potential.
Wrapping up
As organizations grow, scaling email production shifts from creating more campaigns to building better systems. LIONS’ experience demonstrates that instead of hiring more email specialists or introducing additional approval layers, sustainable growth comes from building workflows that allow more people to contribute confidently while maintaining brand consistency and production standards.
The most successful teams focus on designing reusable systems rather than individual emails. Replacing lengthy documentation with practical guardrails, they make onboarding intuitive, giving marketers the confidence to build campaigns independently.
FAQ
1. How do you know when your email production process no longer scales?
The first signs usually appear long before campaign volume becomes a problem. Look for recurring bottlenecks, such as marketers waiting for designers to make minor updates, lengthy approval cycles, inconsistent branding across campaigns, or increased production time despite more team members. If adding people doesn't make your workflow faster, the issue may be the process itself rather than team capacity.
2. What's the difference between an email template library and an email design system?
A template library is a collection of reusable email layouts that teams can use as a starting point. An email design system goes further by defining reusable components, brand styles, typography, colors, content modules, and design rules that work together across every campaign. Templates help teams work faster, but a design system helps them work even faster while also maintaining brand consistency as the organization grows.
3. Should every marketer be able to build emails independently?
Not necessarily. The goal isn't to turn every marketer into an email designer. Instead, organizations should empower contributors to handle routine email creation within clearly defined brand guardrails while designers focus on tasks that require creative expertise, such as improving clients’ experience, evolving the design system, reviewing complex campaigns, and driving innovation. The right balance depends on your team's size, skills, and workflow.
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