Scaling email production: The biggest collaboration challenges in enterprise email marketing teams
An email marketing campaign that should take two days to develop and produce instead takes two weeks. You might try to find the reason in complexity, but it passes through multiple teams, tools, and approval rounds.
In enterprise email marketing teams, which can range from 30 to 300 members, the primary challenges affecting email production effectiveness are not technical. These teams typically include highly skilled specialists who know their craft. The challenges are organizational and span areas such as role governance, communication alignment, brand governance, workflow standardization, knowledge management, and change management.
We’ve prepared an article on the real-world challenges faced by enterprise email marketing teams based on practitioners’ opinions and case studies from our enterprise clients.
Key takeaways
- Enterprise email challenges are mostly organizational, not technical, with role management, communication alignment, and approvals causing the biggest delays.
- Fragmented workflows, multiple tools, and unclear ownership slow down production and create version control issues.
- Improving collaboration requires structured roles, centralized processes, and gradual workflow changes, not just new tools.
Why effective collaboration is crucial for enterprise email marketing teams
Creating email marketing campaigns requires coordinated work from multiple specialists: writers, designers, strategists, and others. However, these roles often focus only on their part of the task, leaving feedback in different tools, which leads to disjointed communication and inefficiencies.
Here are a few facts about how team organization impacts performance:
- 84% of marketing leaders and employees report high “collaboration drag” when collaborating cross-functionally;
- 53% of marketing team members perceive approval as burdensome, and 35% call feedback collection and approval management the main bottleneck in production;
- 61% of marketing ops professionals cite organizational silos as their primary barrier to strategic impact.
Confusion around communication and teamwork negatively impacts the quality of email campaigns, results in wasted resources, such as time and budget spent on tools and third-party specialists, and reduces overall email marketing performance.
How enterprise email marketing teams are structured
There is no perfect formula for the structure or size of an email marketing team. Team structure, like all teamwork processes, evolves over time as the business and its needs grow.
The choice of team structure depends on multiple factors, including the brand’s market presence and the overall marketing strategy. Instead of trying to replicate well-known companies, it is more effective to improve your own organizational and communication processes.
Here are some key characteristics of large email marketing teams.
A large number of people and a complex organizational structure
Stripo’s clients include companies with email marketing teams of up to 200 people. All of these specialists are involved in email production in one way or another: creating emails at various stages, localizing them, testing them, and coordinating them.
Here are some examples of smaller teams with similar processes and challenges:
Our in-house email crew is lean at 19 people, including three copywriters, four designers, a couple of devs for tricky automations, five growth strategists, two CRM folks, and a few part-time specialists who handle testing and analytics. But because we also embed with our bigger clients, the full circle of people who touch every campaign, including their own regional marketers and occasional agency partners, usually swells to about 60 folks across three continents.
Supporting multi-regional enterprise email campaigns, my cross-functional teams have sometimes grown to 20+ with copies, designers, devs, operations, compliance, and client-side brand and product managers from four different continents.
The size of enterprise email marketing teams typically ranges from 10 to 40 people, including marketers, copywriters, designers, developers, CRM experts, and regional localization experts. It could be even bigger for big players if you factor in all the agencies and external compliance specialists.
We are a direct-to-consumer jewelry company with a 30-person hybrid team for creative, production, martech, and customer experience. Our email operation involves interwoven in-house and agency teams that stretch well beyond campaign inception through code and compliance.
A wide range of enterprise tools and services
The larger the email marketing team and the more extensive the email marketing strategy, the more tools are used within the team, which impacts the efficiency of time and budget:
- marketers use more than 12 different tools on average;
- companies with 20+ martech tools spend 40% of their martech budget on integration issues.
Many regulated processes within the team
Enterprise email marketing teams manage dozens of campaigns simultaneously while handling multiple layers of internal review and approval for each email. In addition to the core email team, legal teams, regional localization teams, strategists, and stakeholders at different levels are also involved.
Now imagine all these people constantly, and often chaotically, communicating with each other during email production.
These are the key characteristics of enterprise teams. Below, you’ll see the challenges they face every day in email production.
Email production challenges that slow down the enterprise email team’s efficiency
We’ve previously written about the challenges of growing teams. This article focuses on the specifics of large enterprise teams. We’ll explore real cases and examples to understand which processes become bottlenecks and what exactly slows teams down.
Most requests from enterprise email production teams are related to how to set limitations in system roles and permissions so that people:
- have only the access they need to complete tasks;
- are less likely to accidentally delete important elements;
- cannot break design or complex email code.
Below, you’ll see why this matters.
A slow start due to a chaotic campaign briefing
The first problems in email production for large teams begin during the email campaign planning stage. The more people on the team, the more opinions there are.
One of the most common slowdowns comes from uncontrolled stakeholder input. Different teams push their own priorities, from aggressive CTAs to feature promotion or deeper personalization. As a result, even simple campaigns can turn into long discussions instead of moving into production.
Another issue is overanalysis. Teams may delay launching the next campaign until they have fully reviewed the previous one’s performance. By the time decisions are made, the momentum is already lost.
It’s not about tools or compliance; it’s about too many stakeholders pulling in slightly different directions.
Kristiyan Yankov,
Role ambiguity and access conflicts across teams
In large teams, one person can perform multiple roles across different processes, but the access system and workflow do not align with the actual role structure. This creates confusion around responsibility and the complexity of managing large teams.
Case 1: Different roles in different projects
In one project, an employee works as a designer, creates emails, edits the structure, and works with modules; in another, they only have to review or approve campaigns without interfering with the content. For example, a person can be part of a global marketing team and have full access to creating emails but at the same time participate in local campaigns of another brand only as an approver.
This is a typical enterprise scenario: different teams have different roles, but access to the tool is via a single email.
In such a case, companies are forced to either restrict access more than necessary, slowing down work, or, conversely, give broader rights and risk that the person will change something that they should not, for example, branded blocks or key elements of the email.
In large teams with dozens of users, this quickly becomes a systemic problem: the burden on administrators increases, processes become more complex, and control shifts from the system to manual rules. Such a case clearly shows that the complexity arises not from the tool itself but from the gap between how teams actually work and how these processes are reflected in the system.
Case 2: Restricting the editing parts of an email
A continuation of the same problem is an even more precise level of control: what exactly can be changed in the email. In the same teams, where roles depend on the context, there is a need to allow, for example, a proofreader or a local marketer to edit text or buttons but, at the same time, completely block access to elements such as header, footer, or legal blocks, which are changed only during rebranding or with the participation of individual responsible teams.
Important note: Using Stripo’s Custom Roles and Permissions, you can fully customize roles with unique names and descriptions, giving you complete control over who has access to what features. This increased flexibility lets you create customized member roles that perfectly fit your team’s needs.
To explore these features, go to the Settings → Team → Roles tab → Create new role:
Sequential workflows that block parallel work
In many enterprise teams, email production follows a strict sequence. Strategy comes first, followed by copywriting, editing, design, development, CRM setup, launch, and optimization. This linear approach makes it difficult to work in parallel. There are too many people involved, and each stage depends on the previous one, which slows down the overall process.
The problem with this setup is that it takes too long to build a sequence of 10–15 emails for nurturing. The biggest issue is when one person is delayed. If the content creator is busy with something else, or developers are working on the website, everything stops. The whole process waits for that one step, and email usually ends up being pushed to the back of the pipeline, something teams only get to after everything else is done.
Lexi Petersen’s case (Cords Club): Too many handoffs between specialized roles
At Cords Club, our email campaigns usually require creative (copy, design, motion), technical (segmentation, deliverability), and stakeholder (legal, partnerships, operations) touch from about 14 people directly involved in each campaign, as well as from everyone in the regions we support. As much as we found creative friction to be the barrier to scaling our eight-figure annual DTC email revenue campaign, the more significant friction was the hours spent ping-ponging between specialized roles.
For instance, a designer’s version needs to go through a copy check, the copy will need to wait another day to get synced with the CRM go-ahead, etc. Each specialized silo your campaign touches will be hit with assets and context 3–6 times per campaign and ask to be ‘re-explained’ to each new person, which causes issues when pushing out localized versions due to ‘decision rot,’ lost creative urgency, and translation errors.
We made the handoff between specialized roles and the waits in between go away by compressing these separate roles into tri- and cross-functional ‘pod’ teams (where all members of the team touch most aspects of the campaign, like design, copy, hand-coded tweaks, sending customer-facing announcements, etc.). We recruited marketers with hybrid competencies and upskilled team members to perform their own QA, implement design fixes, and conduct general testing in the CRM. What it did was cut our multi-language campaign approval speed and creative turnaround time in half (from 10 days to 5) and reduced our design/inbox rendering error rate by half.
Approval workflow bottlenecks and communication silos between tools and teams
Issues related to communication and approval include slow reviewers, unclear ownership, and queues.
The following aspects of the approval process slow down work:
- Everybody comments in other locations: Teams use different tools, and communication breaks down between them
One of the stakeholders responds via email, another leaves notes in Slack, and the other leaves comments directly within the design document, and none of it is reconciled until the next round of revision. As a result, information is duplicated, context is lost, errors increase, and processes slow down.
For example, teams use Jira, Slack, Adobe, or other messengers to communicate when creating an email. All of this happens outside the email editor where the email they are working on is located. In some teams’ workflows, even if comments on an email are left and processed in the email editor, they need to be duplicated in Adobe or within a task in Jira. This leads to double work and carries the risk of being out of sync.
And this is what happened to us when a client campaign stalled two days before the actual send date and three different variants of the copy were circulating across various threads, with no one able to confirm which copy was sent.
Tyler Desjardins,
- The lack of ownership occurs when it is unclear who makes the final decision
The first issue that could easily slow your team down is the lack of ownership and ambiguous version control when several team members work on different pieces of copy, design, and segmentation in parallel, yet there is no single version that everybody follows.
The worst-case scenario is when the entire campaign gets delayed, not because of any creative problems but because people have to reconcile different versions.
Dario Ferrai,
The greatest drag, in my opinion, in big email teams is not a tool issue. It’s an ownership problem. When five individuals are allowed to edit a file, no one really owns it, and that is where version chaos begins. Everyone is reviewing. Nobody is deciding. And the email is stalled for days.
Mushfiq Sarker,
- Unclear feedback from multiple stakeholders
A major problem is maintaining the identity (distinct voice) of each member of the team. Without a single person responsible for content direction, it can take longer to produce content.
Delays are common when designers must wait for input from numerous managers before they can begin the design phase. Designers typically require only 2–3 days to complete their portion of a project; however, if most or all of the managers providing feedback need additional time to review their work before submitting comments to the designer, the overall project timeline could extend beyond 14 days.
By establishing a limit of no more than three reviewers per draft, we will see a significant reduction in the amount of time spent internally revising drafts.
- Complexity of approval processes due to the fragmentation of tools and responsibility areas
In this case, not only is feedback located in different places but different stages of email processing take place in different tools.
For instance, designers will use their own set of applications to edit emails, copywriters will write copy in their favorite tools, and marketing teams will approve materials via email and chat apps. As a result, email marketers will spend too much time understanding the approval workflow rather than implementing it.
- Communications siloed by function and across different geos
For example, the engineering and creative wing gets last-minute feedback from the legal team, or the marketing team launching the same email campaign starts a localization thread that the dev team doesn’t see until 1–2 days before send. This causes an email project that could take one week to balloon into a 2–3-week slugfest as the changes ping-pong between Slack, email, spreadsheets, and project management tools, leading to version issues and ‘I thought this was already approved’ scenarios.
Scott Davis,
Important note: Share links with options allow external reviewers to preview or comment without needing Stripo accounts. Stripo’s Share presets include “Live collaborative preview,” which shows live updates plus commenting. Anonymous commenting allows viewers without Stripo accounts to leave comments after entering their name and email directly in that preview.
Version control chaos
The complexity of managing all created email versions grows proportionally with the number of team members involved in their creation and the tools they use. Key questions teams ask themselves are which draft is final and how to avoid losing important edits.
Several individuals may edit the same marketing materials in different applications, leading to versioning issues during the approval process. At the end of the day, teams struggle to identify the exact version of the approved asset in use.
Mark Voronov,
When several individuals collaborate on the same email with no source of truth, the send tends to reflect changes made in the two iterations prior. This is aggravated by the fact that approval workflows within email threads exist because approvals are lost, and one can always find themselves approving something that has been reworked.
Cal Singh,
Lack of a standardized email storage system across teams
The problem arises in large companies where several email marketing teams operate, each storing the created emails and campaign results in its own way. They lack standard email storage structures and uniform rules.
Case 1: Non-standardized email folders
The company created the same folder structure across projects but failed to standardize it. As a result, the same folders have different names, differ in case or wording, or sometimes duplicate each other in content, yet appear to be different entities. The team has taken the right step toward systematization but did not consider that everyone can name and structure things in their own way.
In such a storage system, finding things is difficult, and navigation is often handled by other tools, such as Jira, which only complicates the overall workflow.
Case 2: The need to preserve master templates
Another case concerns working with master templates in large teams, where it is critical to maintain uniform guidelines. Companies are forced to create multiple copies of the same template and even archive them in separate projects so that no one accidentally changes the original.
In fact, this is not structuring but a workaround: instead of a controlled master template, many duplicates arise, making them difficult to keep up to date. As a result, any change to the template requires manual updates to each copy, which creates a risk of desynchronization and an additional burden on the team.
15 wasted hours every single week revalidating which copy of a given template is the master. Production speed drops because developers are pulling assets from disconnected silos. No centralized approval workflows lead to legal corrections of changes made to out-of-date drafts! That friction forces the entire cycle to start anew; those technical depravities turn simple edits into multi-hour recovery events that drain manpower.
Brand consistency when multiple people touch an email
When dozens of people across departments work on email communications simultaneously, the problem of a lack of centralized brand control quickly arises. Each team creates emails for its own tasks or uses its own approaches to design, colors, or typography, and over time, this leads to desynchronization: emails look different, the style “floats,” and the brand loses its integrity.
Therefore, it is important for enterprise teams to set a single “theme,” that is, create a set of branded parameters (colors, fonts, and logos) that can be applied immediately to a group of emails. This will allow the team to overcome a large number of templates with chaotic styles and quickly bring them to a single standard without manually editing each individual email.
Localization and multilingual workflow complexity
When one campaign expands into multiple localized versions, coordination becomes significantly more complex.
Another issue that might make things difficult for email teams is a lack of coordination between localization efforts when one campaign suddenly becomes many regionally adjusted campaigns. It is really important to establish clear workflows to avoid getting lost in multiple copies and inconsistent changes.
Dario Ferrai,
Slow onboarding and knowledge transfer
In large enterprise teams, onboarding new employees is hampered by the complexity of processes and the lack of a single source of knowledge. New people do not understand the project structure, the tools’ logic, or the rules for creating letters, so they make mistakes or spend much more time adapting.
In parallel, another symptom arises: the lack of a centralized knowledge hub. Instead of a single knowledge base, teams create archives, make copies of templates “for backup,” and store examples across different projects. As a result, knowledge is dispersed, onboarding slows, and a set of non-obvious practices forms, transmitted not through the process but through the experience of individual people.
Fragmented testing workflows
In large enterprise teams, email campaign testing rarely happens within a single tool. Usually, this process is scattered across different systems, stages, and approaches, which makes it difficult to control and standardize. For example, companies often use their own accounts in Email on Acid, even if testing is available in the editor, or export emails and test them “in combat conditions” with real data.
The reason is pragmatic: merge tags can return values much longer than in the template, which can break the layout, so teams want to see the final look of the email with real content. As a result, testing becomes a fragmented process without a single script: some checks occur in one place, others occur in a different place, and the final confirmation often occurs outside the main workflow altogether.
Similar gaps appear in other types of testing:
- dark mode is often treated as a design task, but coordination between reviewers is frequently overlooked. One stakeholder may approve a version tested in dark mode, while another reviews a different version, resulting in inconsistencies in the final email;
- accessibility is another unclear area. In many teams, there is no defined owner responsible for accessibility checks, leading to inconsistent QA and missed issues.
Resource bottlenecks and uncontrolled usage
In large teams, shared resources can quickly become bottlenecks if not properly managed. When tools or features are available to everyone without limits, they may be used up faster than expected.
For example, in a team of around 200 users, access to additional testing resources may be exhausted within days. As a result, teams introduce manual restrictions, limit access to selected users, or avoid communicating available capabilities altogether. This creates a lack of transparency, increases reliance on manual control, and disrupts balanced collaboration.
Security and compliance-driven workflow complexity
In large enterprises, the processes for working with tools are often complicated not by the tasks themselves but by security and compliance requirements that must be considered at each stage. Access, authorization, and user management must comply with internal standards, and any deviation can block the tool’s implementation.
Therefore, it is important to consider the availability of all necessary certificates when choosing tools for email production and marketing.
Resistance to workflow change in large organizations
In large organizations, even obvious improvements in tools do not guarantee process changes because workflows are already deeply embedded in the company’s internal infrastructure. Even if a new solution simplifies or speeds up work, teams often continue to work within familiar scenarios because these are fixed by policies, roles, and multi-level approval processes.
For example, teams may understand that feedback when creating emails is convenient to give right away in the editor, but their final workflow is already built inside another tool where all official approvals take place, so any comments from another system have to be duplicated manually, and the new tool does not actually change the team’s behavior.
Wrapping up
The main challenges that enterprise teams face are not technical; they are organizational. The most critical ones are tied to role management, communication alignment, and workflow coordination across multiple teams.
Another growing challenge is change management. Large organizations often recognize the value of improving their processes, but established workflows are difficult to change. Even when the benefits are clear, such as reducing the time and effort spent on each email, teams tend to stick to familiar systems and structures.
In our next article, we will explore practical ways to address these challenges. We’ll look at how tools such as Stripo and others help optimize workflows, improve collaboration, and make email production more efficient in enterprise teams.
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