The need to streamline your email workflow has become more important than ever, as our working lives have shifted dramatically over the past year.

During this period, we have seen email marketers not just undertake more work due to increased demand, but also see their working styles changed as strategy, communication style and pressure to increase email marketing's contribution to the business ROI takes a front seat.

These changes have meant having a consolidated email marketing operation is more important than ever to achieve these objectives. Those that are siloed and decentralised will be working against the email team, making these changes harder than it needs to be - restricting growth and maturity levels.

What is a decentralised team, and do I have one?

A decentralised team is one that is not set up to work in an optimised, unified way to achieve the desired outcomes of the email objectives - in the vast majority of cases this is entirely unintentional. This may also apply to multiple teams or departments within the larger unit - usually as a result of being based in different geographical areas or teams. This can lead these 'separate' teams to take on different working processes to one another to achieve the same goals - which makes it tricky to work closely with one another when needed. For a larger operation, this can cause issues and delays, and errors and inconsistencies can be harder to correct.

Signs you might have a decentralised team:

You spend too much time on: back and forth communication, receiving conflicting amends, approvals and requests coming from different sources on different platforms.

You use lots of different systems, and processes possibly across regions/countries.

=> You struggle with communication across different time zones/languages.

Your team is not able to progress with more advanced objectives such as personalisation, segmentation and dynamic content.

Here's why we think centralising your email marketing is a great step towards a better email workflow, and how you can do it.

The benefits of centralising.

The overall main benefit is improved project and time management for your team.

If everyone is working in the same tools, with the same processes, and are transparent in their working, this means that project managers (and team members) can easily see what everyone in the team is doing - which leads to quicker and more informed decisions.

Because of this increased visibility, managing projects is a lot simpler and delays are more often avoided. This also moves your team away from repetitive manual processes and frees up more time for your team to do more.

By centralising your email process, you are giving your team the opportunity to have their own email stack in one place. This means you can all share the same resource, whether bringing in something new that works to this end or being more clever about how you use your existing tools. This might be concentrating their uses in specific parts of the workflow, or saving money by getting rid of one/some altogether (especially if there is another equivalent being used already).

Ensuring your email marketing is organised to be streamlined and agile provides the foundation to do greater things. You can then tackle things like advanced segmentation, personalisation and behavioural targeting that you might not have had time for, and without incurring the extra headaches from a messy, decentralised workflow. They will make real differences to your subscriber's lifetime value (LTV) & ROI.

How to start centralising your email process.

Before starting this process, it's important to remember that you're looking for a solution that supports a better process, not trying to plug the gaps on the current one.

Here are some great starting points:

• Give your team a common space to share ideas - what are the key frustrations at the moment? Where do your team suffer most in your current process? Where are the bottlenecks that are stopping you from moving quickly? Build out a list that you can use to start building a better process that addresses these.

• Map out your current workflow, specifically around the action points and the timelines needed to complete each stage in the process. What information needs to be provided to start? How long does it take to create a first proof? Who needs to approve and when? This is a great first step for creating an understanding between email operations and the rest of marketing and the wider business.

• Look at what systems and workflow tools your organisation already has in place. You may find there are already tools being used elsewhere that will help you achieve your new goal. Is there a champion user or administrator that can help you use the tool and help you automate some of the repetitive manual day-to-day tasks?

• A good QA process helps you spot mistakes when they happen — but a good Email Design System prevents you from making them in the first place because you can set controls you couldn't do before. Sound out this idea to your email coders and developers. You can read our article on creating a great Email Design System if you need a place to start that conversation.

These are just some of the steps you can take to a more progressive and sustainable email marketing operation that's focused towards making better email, that's quicker to produce and at a larger scale. This will lead to a better experience for all involved in the process and, of course, better results from your email channel.

That's why Taxi for Email was created.

Taxi for Email is a workflow and editing platform that enables everyone involved in the email process to achieve stronger results - by creating better quality email more quickly and at a larger scale. Taxi helps teams to collaborate on email production (wherever they are), be more agile, make fewer mistakes and help you stay on brand. It's great for centralising your email process!

If you're keen to know how Taxi can help in these situations, drop us a demo request to find out more.