Most Email Service Providers come equipped with templates which offer limited design flexibility. As an in-house agency, you might consider an Email Creation Platform that brings increased creative control along with efficiency and agility to your overall email marketing process.

There’s an excellent chance your in-house agency is drowning in email requests. Stensul recently surveyed hundreds of marketers on their email creation processes and found that 64% receive email requests from six or more people, with nearly a quarter getting requests from as many as 20 to 50 people across their organizations. What’s more, nearly half of these teams have three or fewer people managing email creation along with a host of other tasks.

That’s a staggering amount of work being performed by a small number of people, especially when you consider that 45% of email marketing teams are still hand-coding every email they create. Which begs the question: why are so many teams creating emails from scratch? The likely answer: their Email Service Providers (ESPs) and Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) come with limited creation tools which lack any real design flexibility.

If you’re looking to add efficiency and agility to your email marketing efforts, an Email Creation Platform can help raise your team’s email marketing maturity. Before you invest, it’s important to know which Email Creation Platforms best serve your needs. That’s why stensul put together this list of must-have platform features.

Email Creation Platforms: 5 Key Features to Advance Email Creation

Feature #1: A mix of modular design capabilities and templates. A sophisticated Email Creation Platform comes with both templates and modular design capabilities via email modules. Templates are good for routine communications (e.g., discount offers, event invites, etc.) while modules give users the ability to build emails using “blocks” that can be moved around for greater design flexibility.

Feature #2: Drag and drop, no-code functions. To make email creation available to everyone on the team, platforms must include drag and drop, no-code features that democratize the production process by eliminating the need to hand-code everything. These functions empower non-technical team members to play a bigger role in email creation, resulting in greater efficiency while freeing up time for other higher-value activities.

Feature #3: Review and approval features. A truly agile solution streamlines the email approval process by allowing different stakeholders to review and provide feedback within a single platform. This capability makes the review process faster and less prone to errors.

Feature #4: Brand and compliance guardrails. Sharing email creation duties across the team can speed up the process, but it also opens the door to potential branding errors and compliance concerns. Email Creation Platforms can mitigate these issues through brand and compliance guardrails that allow admins to define specific guidelines for brand standards and other regulatory rules.

Feature #5: Integration and email export services. Your creation platform tool should also integrate with your ESP and MAP so final HTML assets can be effortlessly passed via secure API connection directly into your email deployment platform. Integration with your digital asset management (DAM) platform is also ideal for easy access of brand logos and approved images used in email campaigns.

Without a dedicated Email Creation Platform, in-house agencies are very much in a dilemma. They’re either stuck using the generic templates built into their ESP or they have to rely on an excruciatingly slow process involving graphic designers, copywriters and developers, all working on different platforms.

To gain true design flexibility, accelerate campaign launches, and streamline the overall email creation process, your in-house agency needs an Email Creation Platform that easily integrates into your email marketing tech stack. The right one can dramatically impact your overall efforts, streamlining workflows without sacrificing quality.

If you're thinking of evaluating Email Creation Platforms, be sure to check out stensul’s eBook, An Intro to Email Creation Platforms. In it you’ll find an in-depth look at these features along with a 10-question checklist to help you audit your current email development process.