Ultimate guide on building team collaboration in email production

This guide provides best practices and insights for creating effective email marketing teams, structuring workflows, and speeding up email production.

What’s inside

How email production workflows are structured in growing teams
Common collaboration bottlenecks and how to eliminate them
Best practices for organizing teams in terms of roles, responsibilities, and communication
Building efficient email production process without unnecessary steps and handoffs
Tools for and approaches to helping teams collaborate in one workspace and move faster
How modules, templates, and automation can be used to reduce production time
How processes, campaigns, and decisions should be documented to bolster long-term team efficiency
Ways to maintain brand consistency across teams, departments, and markets
How access, roles, and security should be managed in large email marketing teams
A step-by-step approach to adopting collaborative workflows without disrupting your current processes

We talked to 40+ different companies and teams and gathered perspectives and ideas from various enterprises, eCommerce, product companies, SaaS projects, agencies, universities, and nonprofits.

Expert insights

One common approach is to decentralize communication by shifting responsibility. This empowers teams closest to the audience’s needs and encourages them to take the initiative. However, in practice, this often leads to disorganization. Without clear guidelines and oversight, the process can quickly devolve into chaos.

Dmytro Kudrenko, Founder and CEO of Stripo

Different people use different channels and tools, so conversations often become fragmented. This leads to multiple review steps and our not knowing where to best share previews for approval.

Stefanie Mainstone, Head of CRM at Exclaimer

I hate having to go back and forth between marked-up PDFs without the ability to discuss or respond directly, but I do see the value of keeping a historical record, especially since I'm in a regulated industry.

Grace Morales, Senior Copywriter & Creative Lead at CVS Health

It's great that you're introducing this new feature, which has its advantages, notably the ability to streamline the process by reducing the need to switch between platforms for feedback and revisions.

Aishwarya Ragavendiran, Member of Customer Marketing Alliance, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Credible

Without a modular system, even something simple, such as sending a survey, could become difficult for product or research teams. Introducing a modular approach changed this completely.

Justin Williames, Senior Manager, Lifecycle & Retention at Sophiie AI, Founder of JSTN Consulting

The teams that collaborate most effectively will be the ones that proactively secure access. Preemptive security, least-privilege access, and automation help organizations stay ahead of AI-enabled phishing, account compromise, and unauthorized changes - protecting both productivity and customer data.

Brad LaPorte, CMO at Morphisec

Read this guide to learn about the best ways to build effective email teams, structure effective collaboration, and implement best practices for email production.