Don't change a thing in your email process

Email Marketing Processes Are Complex

In my two decades of email marketing, one thing I know for certain is that email marketing processes are time-consuming and complex. I've witnessed the behind-the-scenes operations of large hotel chains, massive retailers, and global hospitality brands — and one thing is always true: expect long, detailed processes and numerous steps from start to finish.

But that's because email marketing is crucial. It generates revenue and fosters powerful branding and awareness. It's also easy to make mistakes, and when you do, your process only gets longer (with more approvals).

I once observed the email marketing team of a large financial services firm review their process steps at a company marketing summit. Members of the social media team were also present, and their jaws dropped. "You have to do that many things just to get one email campaign out?" one team member asked.

You Don't Have to Change a Thing

If you're considering using Denada for your email marketing campaigns, there's one important thing to know – you don't have to change anything! Instead, we recommend adding Denada as a separate, supplemental channel.

Denada is simple to learn, inexpensive, and allows for unlimited output and users. This means you can add it as a separate, "double-barrel" approach to tackling your entire email marketing workflow.

Denada can be set up in about a week. The first thing to consider is "which campaigns can I move to Denada?" The perfect candidates are the emails you and your teams simply don't want to do, or last-minute requests like internal company-wide emails or those pesky email requests from HR.

Twice the Capacity

Imagine running a factory that can't produce enough widgets in a day. The solution is to open an entirely separate product line, but that can be expensive. That's where Denada is different. You can open an entire email marketing creative product line in a week for a fraction of the cost.

Case Study: How One Email Marketing Team Added Denada as Its "Swiss Army Knife"

One large quick service restaurant company, based on the East Coast of the US, had spent years reducing its dependence on agencies and building its own internal agency.

This internal agency was a success, recognized for its original design, content marketing, and profitability.

But with that success came strong demand. They were fielding requests from all divisions of the business. Even though they were responsible for driving nearly 10% of total company revenue, they still had to create internal emails as requested by HR!

They also faced extreme demands from franchisees, who felt like their local marketing needs weren't being met and that revenue opportunities were being missed.

This put the leadership of this internal agency under extreme pressure. They first tried to meet this demand by hiring. However, three years later, they realized that the demand kept growing and that more people wasn't the answer. Furthermore, they were budgetarily constrained. As successful as they were, leadership simply wouldn't allow them to add more headcount.

Enter Denada

When this team first learned about Denada and its fast workflows, they were skeptical. But after a series of demos and a proof of concept, they adopted Denada as a second channel for email marketing creation.

One of the first things they did was to identify all the different email marketing demands. In an all-hands marketing team meeting, they circled 6 out of 11 email marketing types that they could move onto Denada.

Their templates were inserted into Denada, and Denada was trained on all aspects of their company and email marketing program. In May 2024, they began to move one email program per month onto Denada. By January 2025, they had moved five of the seven identified programs entirely.

This meant that their team of designers and copywriters no longer had to work on emails that were important but didn't directly generate revenue — things like company announcements, HR emails, credit card emails, franchisee emails, bonus program emails, and regulatory & privacy updates.

In six months, they had moved five email programs to an entirely different email marketing creation track. This track required 16 total steps compared to the 48 total steps of their traditional methods.

This track required no developers. This track wrote the copy and created the layouts instead of an entire team. And here's the biggest thing of all - one skilled copywriter handled all of the email creation for this track.

Let's state that again - 5 out of 11 email campaigns were moved to Denada, and one person was able to create all the emails required. Let that sink in.

Freeing the Team to Focus

This had an enormous effect on the team. With the backlogs and distracting non-revenue emails out of the way, the main team shifted its focus to improving their core email program.

Instead of being overwhelmed by all the demands, leadership offloaded almost half of their emails to Denada and allowed the rest of the team to focus on what mattered — making money and retaining and acquiring customers.

Franchisees Serve Themselves

Denada has distinct guardrails built into it. Since it uses your templates, you can be sure it's graphically on-brand. If a user tells Denada to change the fonts or button colors, it simply won't do it. What's more, it's trained on your copywriting style and only chooses images from your image gallery. This means you can confidently deploy Denada to others in your organization, knowing that the output will always be on-brand.

This was the last piece that this agency implemented - franchisee emails. Their franchisees utilized 90% of their national email marketing efforts, but they felt that more could be done on a local marketing level. They wanted to be able to increase lunchtime visits or spur more demand during downtimes.

They brought these requests to the marketing team, but creating emails for specific regions was too time-consuming and expensive. Not anymore.

Marketing set up a simple video training that allowed franchisees to get certified and then create their own emails using Denada.

Once the emails were created, the franchisees could submit them to the central email marketing team for approval. With a few changes from that group, they simply moved the email directly into the ESP and sent it at the appropriate time.

This took nearly all of the local marketing franchisee requirements off of the central email marketing team and put it into the hands of the people who knew it and wanted it most - the franchisees themselves.

Amazingly, by letting the franchisees create on-demand, on-brand emails, an entirely new revenue stream was realized. At the time of this writing, it's still early, but there's great excitement and energy that this new franchisee email self-service model could create additional revenue growth.

Summary

Most would agree that with AI, we are entering a paradigm shift. But that doesn't mean everything in our day-to-day lives has to be altered. Instead, we can use AI tools as supplemental aids. Use AI to do the things you don't want to do. Use AI to drain the backlog and allow your team to focus on what's most important - driving results.