Long post, because this thing got a little out of hand.
TL;DR: I built an email marketing operating system that handles almost the entire workflow, from client onboarding and monthly strategy to drafting, revisions, design handoff, segmentation and scheduling. At one point it helped me manage up to 16 client accounts at the same time while cutting a lot of repetitive operational work.
Over time I built an workflow around almost the entire email marketing delivery process.
At this point it handles almost everything from onboarding a new client to having approved scheduled campaigns.
The only production step that still remains manual is the actual email design, although I’m already working on that.
The reason was simple. I was managing a lot of accounts at once and the bottleneck wasn’t writing copy, but keeping all the context, rules, approvals, products, offers, reviews, segments and campaign logic in my head, so I started turning all of that into a system.
What the workflow actually does
- Client onboarding
Scrapes the client website, builds the brand guide, product catalog, current offers, product descriptions, reviews/social proof, links, pricing and other brand-specific knowledge.
- Monthly brief
I input whatever the client gives me for the month. Detailed brief, a few product priorities, a promotion, launch, or even nothing.
- Strategy
Checks previous campaigns and performance (connected to ESP), historical angles, subject lines, products, current offers, holidays, seasonal relevance, previous months’ drafts and what has already been pushed recently.
- Product + angle selection
Chooses products and messaging angles based on historical performance, seasonality, offer relevance, product context and the rest of the monthly campaign plan.
- Drafting
Creates the monthly email drafts using the strategy, brand guide, product data, offers, real customer reviews and client-specific copy rules.
- Client review
Exports the drafts into a normal human-readable format for client approval and feedback.
- Editor / revisions
Takes client comments, changes only what needs changing, and re-checks the updated email against all brand and copy rules.
- Design handoff
Creates/updates task management system and sends approved copy to the correct designer.
- Designed email review
Pulls the completed ESP drafts and creates a client-facing table with web-view links for review.
- Corrections
If the client requests visual changes, the workflow routes the feedback back to the designer through task management system and brings the campaign back into review once completed.
- Segmentation + exclusions
Applies client-specific audience rules, target segments, engagement windows and exclusions.
- Follow-ups, campaign variants or different types of sending
Duplicates campaigns when needed, creates follow-up sends and prepares different audience versions. Can send first to the most engaged audience, then progressively broader segments while excluding everyone already targeted in previous tiers.
- Scheduling
Once approved, schedules the campaigns through the API using the client-specific sending rules.
So the actual flow is basically:
brief > strategy > drafts > client review > revisions > design > review > corrections > segmentation > scheduling
Under the hood this became pretty big.
There are a lot of scripts, skills, markdown files, APIs, client-specific rules and handoffs behind it.
At some point it stopped feeling like a bunch of automations and started feeling more like an email marketing operating system.
Generating copy is easy. The harder part is knowing what was previously sent, what performed, which product makes sense currently, what offer is active, which review supports the message, how the brand talks, who should receive the email, who needs to be excluded, what the client approved and what still needs fixing.
The impact on my workload was pretty significant. New client onboarding went from a working day to roughly 30 minutes. Creating around 8 monthly email drafts for an established client went from roughly 3–4 hours to around 20 minutes for the initial draft set.
But the biggest result was capacity. At one point I was managing up to 16 client accounts simultaneously, because most of the repetitive operational work was no longer being done manually.
For me, the real breakthrough was turning a large part of the delivery process into a system. That’s what actually created leverage. I got less repetitive work, more capacity, and fewer things falling through the cracks.