Email Approval Process When Hiring an Email Agency

You’ve met your Account Manager, the person who’s going to be the face of the agency during your engagement. They are here to listen to your complaints, showcase our work, and make tiny edits whenever and wherever it’s necessary. You’ve also met our charming Director of Client Services, who’ll be monitoring the entire process, ready for any problems that might escalate. The people you didn’t meet, however, are the ones who’ll take the main load of the work – the Account Associate (AA) in charge of tech stuff, the Creative team (Designer and Copywriter), and the Quality Assurance (QA) Lead. They are the ones that create, check, edit, and generally give birth to the emails you’ll eventually see.

The process starts with creating a Content Brief, based on your Brand Guidelines, and the resources you provide during the onboarding process. This Content Brief will serve as a general creative guideline to the team in terms of how you want your emails to look like, and for which purposes you need them (nurture, sale, special event…).

Once they receive the Content Brief, the Account Associate (AA) begins with the email creation process. They use the tools provided by your chosen email service provider, along with a little bit of their own coding magic, and presto! – an email is born. Now it needs a personality, an identity, which is what the Creative team provides. It’s possible, though it rarely happens, that all the resources are already available, and the AA just needs to align them all together in the email template they just created, but in most cases, the Creative team dives right in, editing the pictures and photos, finding just the right places for your branding items, and writing that beautiful copy that captivated the attention of customers of over 200 happy clients who worked with us so far.

Any of the many different types of mistakes (logical, grammar, alignment…) that might make their way by the AA and the Creative team, will surely get caught by the Quality Assurance (QA) Lead, who’s ready to root them out and make them disappear forever. This so-called “QA Checkpoint” will stay unresolved as long as any mistakes keep appearing, after which the email moves back up to the Account Manager, who makes sure the final draft is ready.

We’re halfway through the email approval process, and this is where you take a first look at your new baby email. If you like it, moving over to finishing touches is as easy as a short “I approve” comment on the email draft. If not, you can return it back to your Account Manager with your suggestions, and the process repeats until you’re happy with the draft.

But, not before it goes through another QA Checkpoint. Once your Account Manager notifies the AA that you approved the draft, the AA creates the necessary setup and gives the email to the QA Lead for final inspection. This is what ensures that there are absolutely no mistakes or problems with your email. Once the QA process is done and the Account Manager approved it, the AA activates the setup, and your email can start its adult life.

As a matter of fact, you do! Once the email goes live and starts generating metrics, you’ll receive a weekly Metrics Report from your Account Manager, showing exactly how well the email is performing and what is the next thing we can do to improve the performance further.

Your Account Manager will also provide a detailed summary of the activities and hours necessary for your email to come to life.

Usually, it takes between 8 and 9 working hours to finish an email. This is the aggregate number of hours invested by each individual member of the team, from when the Content Brief is created, until the setup goes live. We’ve even tried to account for certain smaller delays that inevitably happen in any engagement. Ultimately, our only goal is to get the email to work for you as soon as possible.

And, that’s it! By showcasing our full email approval process, we intended to give you an insight into how you are a key part of the equation that results in the emails getting created faster, but nevertheless with a high level of quality.