A new campaign, a novel trigger, a rethought email type… Creating emails always excites marketing teams. Until that tricky moment: the feedback stage. Here’s a guide to ensure a smooth dialogue between marketing/CRM and creatives!
Because your offers are constantly evolving, the context in which your emails are viewed changes, and simply because your campaigns have limited lifespans, email creation and new campaign design appear regularly on a marketing director’s, CRM’s, or campaign manager’s calendar.
The brief has been sent, the writers and designers have worked hard, and they’ve delivered the first version of the email. Do you love it, like it, hate it? In any case, you need to provide feedback to the creative teams and improve what needs fixing. Here are 10 tips (and a bonus proofreading and validation process for your campaigns) to make this exercise as beneficial as possible.
1. Cover all aspects of the campaign before providing feedback
You first rejected the email subject line for lacking punch. Then you pointed out that the button colors did not harmonize with the photos. Finally, you noted that the featured product wasn’t the right one, in your opinion.
All valid feedback… but delivered in a scattered, piecemeal manner without hierarchy. Result? Your team is a bit lost and unsure if your feedback #3 applies to V2, V1, or V3 of the project submitted to you. Not only is this frustrating, but it’s likely counterproductive, resulting in a V4 that still doesn’t meet your expectations.
The solution? Review the entire email before formalizing your feedback. An overall review means looking at:
- Messages: Subject line, pre-header, text, call-to-actions, footer mentions… Are they consistent? Well-written? Compelling?
- Images, GIFs, and Other Visuals: Are they of good quality? Aligned with the email’s promise? Are fallbacks and alt texts in place?
- Links: Do they point to the right places? To landing pages that are consistent with the email?
- Responsive Email Behavior: Do font sizes and buttons, in particular, provide a comfortable reading experience and optimal user experience?
2. Refer back to the initial brief for email creation
Despite their skills, your art director and graphic designers probably don’t have telepathic abilities. To create an email that only partially satisfies you, they relied on a brief. Was it lacking elements to guide them?
A good opportunity to revisit your briefs.
If so, acknowledge it honestly. Your team will appreciate it (and incorporate your changes with much more enthusiasm), and you can use this partial failure to identify what’s missing in your briefs. Add these elements to future campaign briefs.
3. Intervene within your area of expertise
You’re neither an art director nor a copywriter. However, if your email marketing team is well-structured, you have experts in precise wording and effective layout. Micromanaging is not only demotivating for them but also a trap for you and the effectiveness of your future campaign.
No one is better placed than you to judge the overall coherence of the email in development or to determine if it meets the marketing objectives defined earlier. This is where you should focus, as your feedback will have the most impact on the campaign’s success.
4. Choose your battles in the email creation process
The 80-20 rule might be exaggerated, but it works: 20% of your efforts impact 80% of the results. This perfectly applies to the feedback you provide for email creation.
The key is to determine which aspects of the email creation are worth revisiting. The button labels? Probably. The style of alternative text? Certainly if most of your recipients use Gmail, but not if they use Outlook.
Distinguish essential from non-essential
In short, perfection can sometimes be the enemy of good. It’s better to ease up on certain aspects of a campaign rather than going through another round of corrections. You can always revisit these points in the next email creation.
5. Be clear and concise
Good feedback means a written response, in a document that serves as a basis for the entire team to work on a new version of the email. Resist the temptation to give a “quick point” over the phone or in passing: this guarantees that half of your comments will be forgotten.
Feedback should also be clear in form (specifically point out which element of the email your comments refer to) and concise. Telegraphic style, bullet points… Anything that helps creatives leave with a clear list of modifications is welcome.
6. Neither 100% positive nor 100% negative: Be 100% constructive!
Acknowledging what’s working is good! A bit of positivity doesn’t hurt, and your team will surely appreciate having their successes highlighted. However, numerous studies show that employees primarily expect… criticism. The more experienced and confident a team member is in their work, the more they will appreciate feedback that helps them improve.
The key? Be constructive, providing concrete and actionable feedback that allows your team to find solutions rather than posing new problems.
| Don’t say… | Say… |
| This photo is awful | How can we better highlight the product? |
| The button is poorly placed | I think the CTA could be more effective: any ideas for improvement? |
| This green isn’t in the color scheme | Why this shade choice? Can we achieve the same result with our color codes? |
| Never use “If you cannot read this email” in the pre-header! | Provide alternative pre-header suggestions along with the subject line. |
7. Consider your email creation constraints
If you’re a true #emailgeek, you know that iPhone and Gmail alone represent over half of email clients used in 2017. However, relying on these generic figures is as risky as judging an email creation based on Outlook because it’s the setup used in your office…
Do your recipients mainly read on mobile? Provide feedback on the responsive version of the email campaign.
The only indicator that matters is not the market average or the email client your boss uses to view your newsletter: it’s the composition of your campaign’s mailing list. Your email service provider should give you access to this data, and you should base your feedback on it.
If an email is only viewable by 2% of your subscribers, there’s no need to focus on the (beautiful) video integrated into your email. However, if most of your audience uses Apple Mail and iOS, make sure to internally communicate that the email in question isn’t “broken” at all…
8. Base your feedback on data to optimize your returns
One major pitfall when giving feedback is moving beyond mere “like/dislike”. Since subjective and intuitive judgments are involved, good feedback should also be based on real data—preferably your own.
Do you know if this button color (which you dislike) maximizes clicks? Have you measured if including emojis in the subject line (which you might like) affects open rates? If you haven’t measured yet, it might be time to run an A/B test on this aspect of the campaign where there’s no consensus…
9. Find the right tool for discussing your email creations
Good feedback is clear, precise, and actionable. Excellent feedback is collaborative. There are dozens of solutions to ensure marketers, graphic designers, copywriters, and developers can exchange, comment, and advance a campaign project:
- Slack or Trello for project management
- A simple shared text document (Google Drive or OneDrive with Word) for copy feedback
- And our favorite, InVision for purely graphic aspects
For users of our email builder Dartagnan, we recommend viewing the email in progress via a mirror link, then importing it into InVision. Each user with access to the campaign can then leave comments precisely where they want to intervene, respond to other remarks, close resolved issues, etc.
10. Bonus: adopt a clear and defined validation process throughout the email creation process
Are your feedbacks now effective and productive? Great! But the problem is only half-solved if these feedbacks are lost in an opaque and/or endless process.
A well-designed workflow for your future email creations? A circuit short enough not to waste your team’s (or your) energy but comprehensive enough to allow for essential tweaks. Here’s one to adapt to your needs:
| What? | Objectives | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The brief | A document shared by developers and integrators, copywriters, designers… |
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| 2. First review | Focused on copy and design |
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| 3. Second review | Evaluate proposed solutions (text/graphics) |
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| 4. Validation | Final tweaks before sending |
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If you consistently exceed 4 steps, your workflow is likely hindering your team’s efficiency—and thus your campaigns…
It’s not necessarily catastrophic. Feedback and the overall process don’t have to be set in stone. Better, your goal should be to capitalize on each piece of feedback received during each email creation.
Found a creative and effective way to handle CTAs or a product range presentation design that everyone loves? Save it for use in a similar context. In Dartagnan, this possibility exists through modules: one of the most appreciated features of our email builder.
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