Making the most of a limited budget: webinar recording + Q&A

Email marketers are routinely tempted by hundreds of tools promising to help them build more effective campaigns faster. But, now more than ever, budgets are immutable. To top it all off, stakeholders are asking for more emails and more results, leaving teams stressed and struggling to meet their goals.

That’s why we asked Wren Ludlow from Oracle to join us to talk about how teams can do more with a limited budget by implementing some key hacks, empowering others to help build emails, and looking for ways to get more out of their existing tools before dishing out for new ones.

Didn’t have a chance to watch the webinar live? Don’t worry. You can access the full recording at any time and read the Q&A below.

Q&A

Thank you to everyone who chimed in during the webinar with a question! Here’s a recap of our answers to the most popular questions, along with our take on some of the questions we didn’t get to during the live webinar.

For someone just getting started with automation, where should I start?

Wren: The easiest way is to set up some rudimentary nurture campaigns that consist of 3-4 emails over the course of a few weeks or maybe months. Pick an entry point for subscribers, look for content that would be helpful for those folks, and then build out a straightforward email series that delivers that content and tells your company’s story. Simpler, timed emails are a good way to start to understand what you can do with marketing automation before digging into automating more advanced campaigns and using personalization, complex segmentation, etc.

How can we maintain quality while working with a decentralized team?

Wren: One way is to try to build a strong hybrid model of work. One where, while the team is decentralized, there’s a central “center of excellence” that works to ensure everything is up to your brand standards, subscribers aren’t inundated with emails at any one time, and the strategy is properly set and communicated across that decentralized team. In today’s world, that center of excellence can still be remote, but it’s important to have it in place so that everyone, no matter where they are, are working from the same page.

Jason: Tooling is important here, too. Just like you’ll want that center of excellence for your team, you’ll want a single source of truth for your emails and all of your work. Keeping your templates, snippets, and partials—all of the assets needed to build emails—in one place, like Design Library in Litmus, can help reduce duplicated work, confusion, and errors in your emails. Keeping your communication in something like Slack, or feedback on campaigns in Litmus Proof, will likewise mean that everyone knows exactly where to look for that information, allowing decentralized teams to create and manage work without added stress.

What’s more important: the execution/delivery of emails or the actual content and design of a campaign?

Wren: Both are important but I will say that the first thing that people experience is the context in which you’re reaching out to them and the high-level messaging at that stage in their journey. That context goes beyond the single asset (the email itself) that they’re experiencing in your larger relationship. They’ll have a lot of touch points in their journey, which is why thinking through that journey, mapping out those flows, and getting the strategy right is so important.

Jason: On the flip side, the visual presentation of your message is how people make their first impression of your brand. And that first impression, and subsequent impressions, goes a long way towards building subscriber trust. If you’re sending broken emails, or poorly designed campaigns, your subscribers will start to lose interest and trust in your brand, and no strategy will save you from that. It’s two sides of the same coin.

Wren: My last bit of advice is to find the one where you’re weakest and focus on improving that first. If your email designs are amazing, then dig into your existing tools, audit your existing strategy, and figure out ways to improve that before investing more in the design aspect. Constantly building those different muscles is how you’ll be able to improve your overall email marketing program and deliver the results you want.