Rock Your Inbox: It's Not Your Email That's Off-Key; It's Your Process

What actually makes email production faster? It might not be AI, team size, experience, or the number of tools in your marketing stack. In this session, Mike Nelson, co-founder of Really Good Emails, breaks down findings from more than 1,800 survey responses to uncover what really affects how long it takes marketing teams to create an email. You'll learn: ✦ Why using AI correlates with faster email production, but isn't necessarily the cause ✦ How team size, experience, automation, and the number of tools in your stack affect production time ✦ Why design flexibility within your email service provider (ESP) can make a difference ✦ How team coordination, handoffs, revisions, and approval processes can slow email production ✦ Why working with departments like legal, merchandising, and external design teams can add days to the production process ✦ How simpler approval workflows, including Slack or Microsoft Teams, compare with more formal approval processes ✦ Why working on too many emails simultaneously can dramatically increase production time ✦ How to reduce scope creep and give each email a clear, accountable owner ✦ Which email tooling features can help speed up QA, design, and copy optimization ✦ Why forcing teams to use a specific AI tool can actually make production slower One of the biggest findings: email production isn't only a tooling problem. Coordination can be a major source of friction. More handoffs, revisions, departments, approvals, and concurrent projects can compound the time it takes to get an email out the door. The takeaway: AI can help, but it isn't a silver bullet for email production. The teams seeing the biggest efficiency gains are also building better processes around coordination, approvals, workload, design flexibility, and how AI is actually used. 00:00 Introduction 01:07 Email Production Research & Methodology 02:05 What Impacts Email Production Time? 02:51 Why Email Production Is Getting Faster 03:29 The Real Cost of Producing an Email 04:12 Does AI Actually Make Email Production Faster? 05:18 Team Structure, Experience & Email Tools 07:32 How Your ESP Impacts Production 09:03 The Hidden Cost of Coordination 10:51 How Approval Workflows Slow Teams Down 11:50 The Cost of Working on Too Many Emails 13:23 How to Speed Up Email Production 15:48 Managing Email Workloads 17:55 Reducing Departments, Handoffs & Scope Creep 20:07 Design Flexibility & Email Tooling 22:53 What the Data Really Says About AI 25:47 Key Takeaways & Wrap-Up