September 2024
By Kimberly Stratton
On June 3, 2024, an email marketing team based in New York, working for a large financial services company, began testing a new email marketing creative platform called Denada.
The team adopted the tool and used it over two months across 13 email projects. On August 13, 2024, the time-tracking data was exported from Adobe Workfront, analyzed, and compared to the previous process to prepare the following findings.
Denada is a AI-enhanced platform that streamlines email marketing by automating initial copywriting, image selection/editing, and HTML coding.
The Findings
About the Team
"We're a pretty important group" proudly declared the digital marketing manager for this email team. "Our efforts to stir new leads and retain customers are recognized company wide. But it has also resulted in a lot of pressure on us to keep delivering. We're at a mature point in our email marketing efforts, so now we must find small wins through testing."
The challenge is that testing unique emails targeted to small customers segments takes significant time. Many of the segments identified are less than 1000 people. But the email creative timeline is about two weeks.
The team aimed to determine if using Denada would eliminate bottlenecks and increase their email output. Specifically, they wanted to see if Denada could reduce the total time spent per email, allowing them to apply the saved time toward creative exploration. Their hypothesis was that by creating emails faster, they could produce more targeted versions for specific audiences.
The email marketing team consisted of:
Digital Marketing Director
Account Manager
Designer
Copywriter
Developer / ESP Producer
Art Director
Average Email Creative Timeline
BEFORE DENADA • 60 hours • 8 days • 36 steps
The Email Creative Process Before
The team typically kicked off two new projects per week, each consisting of a package of emails. On average, each project included 1-3 original emails plus 2-4 versions of those emails. Although the team also worked on banner ads and social media posts, these outputs were excluded from this study.
The entire process involved 36 unique steps divided into 4 main phases:
Briefing
Creative
Revisions
Coding
Briefing
When a new email was requested, the project manager scheduled it and Creative Briefs were filled by Marketing Managers or other people within the organization.
Creative Kickoff
It all starts with a 1-hour kickoff and the Marketing Manager explained the creative brief, covering the goals, content, audience, and more. After the kickoff meeting, the creative team would huddle, discussing the overall approach and sketching ideas.
Creative - Copywriting
Next, the copywriter crafted the subject lines and all email copy. The copywriter was allotted about a half-day or up to four hours for this task.
Creative - Design & Image Selection
The copy was then handed over to the designer, who used Photoshop or Figma to place it into pre-designed template modules. However, 3 out of 5 times, the copy didn’t fit within the modules, leading to back-and-forth revisions between the designer and copywriter to "get it just right."
Then designer then spent significant time browsing images in the company’s DAM or stock image libraries such as Getty and Adobe. Selected images often required editing, including cropping, background removal, or composing new images.
Creative - Internal Review
Once two suitable comps were created, the Art Director or Creative Director reviewed the designs and provided revisions. The Account Manager also proofread the email, cross-checking it against the brief, resulting in additional edits.
The Creative phase, taking an average of 28 hours (or at least four working days), consisted of 13 major steps.
Revisions
PDFs of two possible email layouts (comps) were shared with the Marketing Manager and others. After 2-3 days, the Marketing Manager collected all revisions for the creative team to act on.
Coding
With the email comp selected and approved, the Designer cleaned up the final Figma files, saved them to a shared folder, and notified the email developer.
Transforming the email from pixels to code was a significant step for the developer, usually taking 4-6 hours and done entirely by hand.
Summary
Overall, the average time to create one email project involved 36 steps, taking 60 total hours spread over eight working days, but typically took two weeks to complete.
Average Email Creative Timeline
AFTER DENADA • 27.5 hours • 3 days • 30 steps
The Process After Denada
Creative
Now the copywriter entirely skipped writing copy and simply pasted the brief into Denada.
Denada writes the copy, selects the images and selects the available pre-coded template modules to compose an email based on the brief.
Creative - Design
Once the copywriter is done, she saves and notifies the designer, who edits the layout in Denada.
Creative - Internal Review
The Designer then shares one or many email designs with the internal creative team via Denadas sharing tools. Revisions are provided and acted upon in Denada.
With Denada, the Designer does not need to use Figma or Photoshop at all. The Designer handles all design tasks within Denada. All emails created in Denada are fully coded in HTML.
Using Denada the team was able to reduce copy and design time from 28 hours, on average before, to 11 hours after.
This was a 61% reduction in creative time alone.
The creative phase went from 4 days on average to 1 days, a reduction of 3 whole working days.
On average the creative cost per email was $2240 before and reduced to $880 after.
This was a saving of $1360 per email which equates to a whopping $11,520 per month or over $138,000 per year.
Coding
In the past, the developer had to turn the email design from pixels to code. Using Denada, this significant step is completely eliminated.
The developer simply downloads the coded HTML, TXT and Images from Denada. She then uploads them to the ESP (Salesforce). She then stages the email to Litmus inbox QA tool.
Since Denada does not change or alter the template code at all, the Litmus QA steps became very standardized and required no hand coding or “fine tuning”.
On average, before Denada, the developer would average 15 hours.
After Denada the developer averaged 5.5 hours.
This represented a 63% reduction in developer time alone.
The average developer cost per email project was $1,200 before and reduced to $440 after, realizing a cost savings of $760 per email, $6,080 per month or $72,960 per year.
"No photoshop, no Figma, no coding, no back-n-forth. Now, if anyone on the team has an idea - they can make it themselves. This has given focus back on why we're here in the first place - to get results."
Ann M.
Director of Marketing Operations
Increased Output and A/B Testing
Exploration
Since the team was able to create emails faster, a campaign strategist requested additional email versions targeting specific audience personas. In the past the team would create one default main version and a second VIP version targeting their best customers. However now, with the additional time, they could still make those two versions but began to create 8 additional personas versions for testing.
Discovery
One particular test proved very successful. A persona email targeting a group called “retiring-soon” for pre-tax bond and equity transfers enjoyed a 12% increase in conversion, as compared to the default version. Because of this discovery, a new “retiring-soon” version is now created with each campaign.
The strategist believes the combination of audience data analysis along with increased message versioning A/B testing will result in increased campaign effectiveness.
"I've had so many ideas for how to reach different segments on our customer file, but we never had the bandwidth or resources to try it. Now with the bottlenecks removed, I know there's email gold out there and we're going after it" said Ben L. Director of Email Marketing Strategy.
Summary
Email process needs improvement
Email creative process remains slow and inefficient. Particularly creative and coding make up a considerable amount of the overall time.
Made for teams, not to replace them
Denada was able to cut creative and coding times in half and reduce the overall time by more. While the tool relies on AI, it cannot replace the roles needed on a email marketing team. Instead it allows those roles to focus on exploration and results instead of time-consuming laborious steps.
Findings:
Overall Time - Significant reduction in Creative and Developer times per email
Overall Cost - Significant cost reduction in Creative and Developer fees
Productivity - Over 400% increase in possible total output for the same team in an average week
Creative Copy - Copywriter times are greatly reduced. Copy fits the template the first time. Ability to explore many different copy themes with barely any increase in copy times is useful
Creative Design - Designers times are significantly reduced. Designer no longer needs to work in PSD / Figma / XD. Designer no longer needs to spend time selecting and editing photos
Idea Exploration - With the reduction in time, Creative can now iterate more. They can create many more versions for testing and A/B optimization. This should lead to learnings that lead to more effecitive and profitable email marketing
Developer Time - Developer / ESP production - Time consuming steps of turning pixels (psd, figma) into code (html) is eliminated. This is a significant reduction of one of the most time consuming steps.
Developer QA - Inbox-QA with Litmus like tools will be significantly reduced because the template code, output from Denada, never changes. This should yeild predictable QA outcomes. In other words, the email will look perfect each time and require no fine tuning, as was needed before.
