This week we’ve talked about what’s changing with email opens in Apple Mail this fall and the impact that could have on strategy. Then we dug into how newsletters could be the beneficiary of the strategy pivots that result.

But I want to circle back on something I touched on only briefly yesterday:

“…when you consider how long it takes to create such a block of content in a way that renders well across dozens of inboxes and also looks nice within the constraints of email-specific HTML…”

For years we’ve been trying to take everything we have on our website and put it into an emails. To that end, mail developers have found ways to solve everything from background images and countdown timers to sorta-live video and interactive navigation menu.

It’s impressive stuff, but it begs the question: if email is so good at getting folks from Point A to Point B, why do we try to recreate everything from Point B in an email?

Workflows

I have loved and relied on email for more than 15 years. Despite a huge surge in interest and innovation in this space, I’ve been really concerned for a few years now about how complex email workflows have become.

Instead of just testing rendering on a few key inboxes, it’s become a multi-page list of everything under the sun:

• Dark mode
• Inbox-specific tags
• Accessibility
• Preview text
• Etc, etc, etc

Those are all great things, but doing them for every email AND including everything that’s on your website every time you do? We’re at a point where we’re essentially creating a new website on the fly – complete with writing code, cross-browser testing, copywriting, and proofing – every time you send an email.

No wonder folks get overwhelmed when they get started with email marketing.

A Simpler Email, A Simpler Workflow

My hope is that if we can design a little bit more around the click, if we can keep content where it is – website, booking engine, etc – and focus our efforts on using email to move people there, that email workflows will become not just a little bit simpler, but many times simpler.

Instead of an email being an all-week thing, it could be as quick and simple as a social post.

That kind of workflow would make email not only something more smaller ski areas could use more fully, but something that larger players could benefit from as they send more emails, more frequently, about more things, to more targeted and thoughtful lists thanks to the time they save not trying to cram everything from their website into their emails.

That’s my hope.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.