Most problems in an email programme have very little to do with the emails. By the second draft the copy is usually fine. What goes wrong is everything around it: a reviewer nobody told was a reviewer, feedback split between a chat thread, two PDFs and a reply-all, a legal check that starts the afternoon before the send. Then someone approves version three while the builder is already on version five.
This is the workflow we'd set up for a team of somewhere between three and fifteen people, sending to one market or to twenty. It runs fine in a spreadsheet. A tool built for it helps, but the tool is the smaller part of the fix.
The steps, from brief to send
Every campaign goes through the same nine steps, whether anyone writes them down or not. Writing them down is what lets you see where the time goes.
- 1. Brief. One page: audience, goal, offer, send date, markets, who approves. If the brief can't name the approvers, it isn't finished.
- 2. Copy. Written against the brief, in the source language.
- 3. Translation. Only once the source copy is approved. More on this below.
- 4. Build. The email assembled in your ESP or builder, with real links and real images.
- 5. QA. The builder's own technical checks: links, tracking, rendering, spam triggers, plain text.
- 6. Review rounds. The required approvers, in numbered rounds, until it's approved.
- 7. Schedule. Send date, time and time zone set in the ESP, and checked by a second person.
- 8. Send. And mark it sent in the plan the same day.
- 9. Archive. The approved version, with who approved it and when.
Steps 1 to 3 are where most of the delay is created, and step 6 is where most of it is noticed.
Decide who actually approves
Write down, for each type of campaign, the people whose approval is required. Not the people who would like to see it. The people who can stop it. For most teams that comes down to three roles:
- The owner. Usually the CRM or lifecycle manager who wrote the brief. They approve the email as a whole and own the send date.
- A brand or copy reviewer. Tone, claims, product names, anything that might end up screenshotted.
- Legal or compliance. Only for the campaign types that need it: prize draws, finance, health claims, regulated products, anything with terms attached.
Everyone else is FYI. They get a link, their comments are welcome, and the email does not wait for them. This one decision removes most of the delay in most teams. When six people "need to see it", the send waits for the busiest of six calendars.
Set the dates backwards from the send
Every campaign gets three dates, counted back from the send date rather than forward from today:
- Build by. A complete first version exists in your ESP.
- Approval due. The last required approval is in.
- Send. The day it goes, with a time and a time zone.
A sensible default is build five working days before the send and approval two working days before. Two days after approval sounds generous until you need it, usually for a broken link found on the test send or a market that wants to change its subject line. If a campaign can't make those dates, move the send. Squeezing the review is how mistakes reach customers.
Review in rounds, not as a rolling conversation
Treat review as numbered rounds. Round one goes to every required reviewer at the same time, with a deadline. Feedback comes back in one place. The builder makes the changes, then sends round two, which only needs the owner plus anyone whose comments changed something.
Two rules make rounds work:
- One version in circulation. When round two goes out, round one is closed. Nobody comments on an old screenshot.
- Comments are requests, not edits. Reviewers say what is wrong and why. The builder decides how to fix it. If a reviewer rewrites the headline in their comment, that's fine, but the change still goes through the builder.
If you regularly need more than three rounds, the problem is further up the line. Usually the brief was vague, or a senior person saw the email for the first time at round three. Tighten the brief template, or put that person in round one.
Give each reviewer a short list
Without a list, every reviewer checks the subject line and nobody clicks the links. Split the checks by role:
- Owner: the right segment, the right offer, dates in the copy match the real dates, send date and time zone, the main call to action goes where it should.
- Brand and copy: tone, any claim that needs evidence behind it, product and brand names spelled correctly, image alt text, the plain-text version.
- Legal: terms linked, prices and discount amounts correct, required disclosures present, the unsubscribe link and sender details in place.
The technical checks belong to the builder, at step 5, before round one. The pre-send email checklist covers them.
When you send to more than one market
This is where most workflows break. The single-market process gets copied once per country, and nobody owns the whole.
Keep one master campaign with one owner, and give each market an approver for its own version. The local approver checks language, the local offer, local legal lines and local dates. They don't re-review the global creative unless something changed for their market.
Agree these before the first campaign, not during it:
- Which version is the source. Usually one language is approved first and translated afterwards. Translating before the source is final means paying for translation twice and checking it twice.
- Local legal lines. Consent and disclosure rules differ by country. The EU and UK work under GDPR and their own electronic marketing rules, Canada has CASL, Australia has the Spam Act, Brazil has the LGPD and the US has CAN-SPAM plus a growing set of state privacy laws. Ask your legal team for a fixed footer per market and a short list of things that mean "this one goes to legal".
- Local send times. In January, nine in the morning in London is six in the evening in Tokyo and four in the morning in New York. If markets send on different days or at different times, record each market's date and time separately, not in a note on the master.
- What "approved" means. A campaign isn't approved until every market it's going to is approved. Track the markets individually or the late one gets forgotten until the day of the send.
Keep the record
After the send, keep the approved version together with who approved it and when. You'll need it more often than you'd expect: a customer complains about an offer, legal asks what went out in Germany in March, or you want to reuse last year's Black Friday structure. A shared folder works if someone is strict about naming. In most teams nobody is.
An approval tracker you can copy
If you're running this in a spreadsheet, use one row per campaign per market, with these columns:
- Campaign, market, language, owner, builder
- Build by, approval due, send date, send time and time zone
- Current round, and a status: drafting, in review, changes requested, approved, sent
- Required approvers, and the date each one approved
- A link to the current version and a link to the brief
For the planning side, there's a free email marketing calendar template for Excel and Google Sheets, built the same way: one row per campaign per market.
Where Mailfois fits
Mailfois is built around this workflow: a campaign planner with a stage and send date for every market, approval rounds with versions, comments and change requests, and a library that keeps every approved email with its approvers. It sits alongside your ESP, so you keep building and sending where you do today. If the spreadsheet above works for your team, keep using it. If it doesn't, create a free account and try the planner with your next campaign.
