Email is easy to run when it's one person and one market. It changes when the team grows: a builder and a copywriter, a designer who sometimes helps, legal who needs to see anything with a price in it, and local teams in Germany and Japan who need their own versions on their own dates. The emails don't get harder. Keeping track of them does.
Mailfois is the workspace for that stage. A plan for every market, brand checks before anyone approves, sign-off from the right people, and a record of everything that went out. It sits above the ESP you already use.
Signs you've outgrown the spreadsheet
- The calendar has a tab per market, and the tabs disagree with each other.
- "Who approved this?" takes a search through three inboxes to answer.
- Legal sees emails the day before they send, because nobody remembered which ones needed them.
- Translations arrive after the build, because the translation deadline only lives in someone's head.
- A campaign's send date passed and nobody is sure whether it went out in every market.
- New starters learn the process by asking, because it isn't written down anywhere they'd look.
Two or three of these is normal. Five or six means the process is now costing you more time than the emails.
How to structure an email marketing team
Titles vary, but almost every in-house email team of three to fifteen people ends up with the same roles. One person can hold several of them. What matters is that each one has a name against it.
| Role | Owns | In the approval workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Email or CRM lead | The programme, the calendar, the send dates and the numbers | Final approver for most campaigns; owns the brief |
| Email developer or builder | Building in the ESP, QA, links and tracking | Makes changes between review rounds; runs the technical checks |
| Copywriter | Subject lines, preview text and body copy | Writes the source copy that gets approved before translation |
| Designer | Templates, modules and imagery | Approves new layouts; maintains the brand kit |
| Local market leads or translators | Language versions, local offers and local dates | Approve their market's version |
| Legal or compliance | Claims, prices, terms and required wording | Approve only the campaign types that need them |
| Stakeholders | The product, offer or event being promoted | Informed and able to comment; not a required approver |
The most common mistake is making stakeholders required approvers. Every extra required approver adds their busiest week to your timeline. Keep the required list short and give everyone else a view.
A marketing approval process that doesn't stall
- Dates run backwards from the send. Build five working days before, approval two working days before.
- Review in numbered rounds, with one version in circulation at a time.
- Only named approvers can approve. Everyone else comments.
- Each market approves its own version, after the source version is approved, not before.
- Keep the record: the approved version, who approved it and when.
The full version, step by step, is in our guide to the email campaign workflow.
Running email across several markets
Most of the friction in a growing team comes from sending one campaign to several countries. Four things make it manageable:
- Track each market separately. A campaign going to six countries is six things to get right, each with its own stage: copy in, translated, built, approved, sent.
- Give each market its own send date and time, in its own time zone. Germany may send a day after the UK; Australia is in a different season.
- Approve the source before translating it, so you never pay to translate a version that changes.
- Let local teams see the plan for their market without asking for a spreadsheet. A read-only link filtered to their country does it.
For the dates that differ by country, see the email marketing calendar for 2027, and start your plan from the free calendar template.
What each approver should check
- The email lead: the right audience, the right offer, dates in the copy that match the real dates, and the send date and time zone.
- Brand and copy: tone, claims that need evidence, product names, alt text and the plain-text version.
- Legal: terms linked, prices and discounts correct, required wording present, unsubscribe and sender details in place.
- Each market: the language, the local offer and local legal lines.
The technical checks (links, tracking, spam triggers, preview text) belong to the builder before the first round. Brand Guard and the free pre-send checker cover most of them.
What Mailfois gives an in-house team
- A campaign planner built for email. Campaigns on boards, each market with its own stage and send date, warnings when something is past its send date, and a calendar that works on a phone.
- Brand Guard and a brand kit. Your colours, fonts, buttons and footer rules, checked automatically on every email, plus the basics like alt text, unsubscribe links and CSS that Outlook ignores. Set a minimum score before anything can be approved.
- Approvals with a record. Versioned review rounds, comments and change requests. Only people tagged as approvers can approve.
- Read-only links for local teams and translators. They see the plan, filtered to their market, without an account.
- A library of everything sent, with who approved it. Searchable by board, month and campaign.
- Insights on volume, approval turnaround and workload per builder.
- Showcase for the quarterly review: your best emails as a short video with their results alongside, shared as a link or downloaded as an MP4 for the deck.
Email governance without the bureaucracy
Governance usually means a document nobody reads. In Mailfois the rules live in the brand kit and are checked on every email, approval is limited to the people who should give it, and every decision is recorded. When someone asks how an email got through, the answer is on the email itself.
It fits the stack you have
You keep building and sending in Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Bloomreach, Mailchimp or whatever you use. Mailfois replaces the spreadsheet calendar, the approval threads and the shared drive of old emails. There's nothing to migrate.
Ready for IT, security and procurement
Larger businesses usually need a security review before a new tool is approved, and Mailfois is ready for one: ready answers to security questionnaires you can copy or download as a spreadsheet, a data processing agreement in every contract, data stored in the UK, two-factor sign-in that owners can require for everyone, and a printable record of every approval. Because Mailfois never holds your subscriber lists or connects to your ESP, there's much less for your security team to review.
Pricing
Start on the free plan. The Team plan is €28 per seat a month at the founder price, minimum three seats, and includes the planner, approvals, Brand Centre and Brand Guard, the library and insights. See the pricing page, or watch the 1-minute demo.