Email approval workflows in large teams: who signs off on what

Approvals are where campaigns slow down. In a 2020 survey by Litmus, 60% of companies needed at least four people to review an email before it went out. Errors still get through: in the same article, Litmus reports that 96% of the emails it tested had content issues.

The teams that approve quickly and safely don't add reviewers. They give reviewers less to check.

Who signs off

Who needs to approve depends on the kind of campaign, not on who built it. In the large teams we work with, these are the usual approvers:

• Brand, mostly for new formats and special campaigns. When the design system is in good shape, brand doesn't need to look at everyday campaigns.
• Legal, for certain kinds of campaigns: offers, competitions, claims, and anything unusual.
• Local markets, when a campaign goes out in several languages and each language version needs someone who knows the market.
• Partners, when a campaign is a collaboration with another company that wants to see what goes out in its name.
• The client, when an agency builds the campaigns.
• A colleague in marketing, as a second pair of eyes. This doesn't have to be a specific person.

Where approvals break down

The same problems come up in almost every team:

• Feedback is scattered. Comments arrive by email, in Slack, and as annotated screenshots, and someone has to collect them.
• Nobody knows which version was approved. There is no version history, so when legal says yes, it isn't clear what they said yes to.
• Changes slip in after sign-off. A last-minute fix goes in after the approval and nobody looks at it again.
• Reviewers check what a machine should. Broken links, a missing unsubscribe link, the wrong preheader. These are hard to catch by eye, and they still get past people who are looking.
• Approvers get forgotten. The person building the campaign has to remember to ask legal, and on a busy day they don't.

Take the checklist away from the reviewers

The first step is to remove everything from human review that a system can check.

The design system takes care of the design. Campaigns built from approved modules are on brand, and the modules have already been tested in email clients. Nobody needs to check the layout or the colours again.

In most teams, there is also a checklist. One person keeps it, goes through it on every campaign, and tries to get everyone else to do the same. Pre-flight checks turn that list into checks that run on every campaign: links, alt text, the subject line and preheader, the size of the HTML. With custom AI rules, a team can add its own rules too, such as "never promise free delivery" or "every offer needs its terms". The person building the campaign works through the issues with Betty, our AI agent, until the checks pass.

What is left for the approver is the part only a person can judge: is this the right message, is the offer right, can we stand behind it. The approval should take minutes.

Decide the approvers once, per type of campaign

Approvals shouldn't depend on someone remembering who to ask. Decide once which approvers each kind of campaign needs, and set it up so they are added automatically.

In Better Email, this is set on each campaign type. Every campaign of that type starts with its approvers in place, and only an admin can remove a required approver that came from the type. An editor in a hurry can't quietly drop legal.

Tie each approval to a version

An approval only means something if you know what was approved. In Better Email, approvals belong to a revision of the campaign. When someone makes a new revision, earlier approvals stop counting, and the approvers have to approve the new revision. Approvers also can't approve while their own comments are still open, so feedback gets resolved before sign-off, not after.

Make approval a gate

A reminder to get approval is easy to ignore. A gate is not. With the approvals policy set to block, a campaign can't be exported to the ESP until every required approver has approved the latest revision and there are no open comments.

Bring in people outside the company

Partners and agency clients shouldn't need an account, and their feedback shouldn't arrive by email. External reviewers get a private link, comment on the campaign itself, and approve it there. They only see their own comment threads.

What the workflow looks like

1. The editor creates a campaign from a campaign type, and the approvers are already in place.
2. They build it from the design system, alone or with Betty.
3. Pre-flight checks run, and the editor fixes what they flag.
4. They create a revision and request approval.
5. Approvers comment on the campaign itself and approve that revision.
6. The campaign is exported to the ESP once every required approval is in.

See how comments and approvals work in collaboration.