7 Challenges A Product Manager Might Face With Email Marketing

There's a very rare breed of Product Managers that are able to systematically manage their product's email footprint.

It's very easy to lose track of all the emails your product is spewing it out to re-engage & retain users.

There are several types that are generated over time:

• Authentication emails (OTP, reset password, magic links etc.)
• Onboarding emails (welcome emails, educational series etc.)
• Automated digests (updates to followed items, alerts etc.)
• Transactional emails (invoices, receipts etc.)

Not only does your email content get dated & inconsistent over time, it's also the least capitalized surface area to promote new features.

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Some challenges with emails

1. Unwieldy Organization

Email content often gets initially specified deep inside separate PRD documents. The problem is less intense when you have a platform like SendGrid or Mandrill handling all your emails but that's only if all the email templates are specified there.

Moreover, without a process and system to update email content across the board, the messaging is bound to fragment.

2. Delivery monitoring

As the product scales, deliverability becomes important but also comes under threat as some users start marking your periodic emails as spam. Luckily, tools like Sendgrid will flag this reactively but turnaround times for fixes can be significant.

And when your product is dishing out emails in the millions (not too far-fetched), then small percentages account for big numbers.

3. Application-wide updates

Let's say you change your brand name. OR update the support address. OR your support hours. OR you're trying to update your G2 badges in your email signature. If you're not applying liquid placeholders, then your transactional emails will likely turn into a sticky mess sooner than later.

4. Broken triggers

As the product evolves, regression effects might inadvertently affect email triggers. This means something like an alert has stopped firing for a while and it's largely gone unnoticed since your send volume is massive.

5. Forgetting to sunset emails

A feature get unplugged or a seasonal offer comes to an end but untracked cron jobs keep sending those emails out to confused users.

6. Multi-lingual considerations

Matters get far more complex if you're sending out emails in multiple languages. This is particularly true for organizations that don't use in-house content writers and do the translation work as one-off projects.

7. Reporting - open rates, click rates

Very little analysis is done on the open rates and click rates making it difficult to converse on how these emails should evolve over time. Conducting A/B tests would be overkill but if certain emails are registering trivial open rates, it should come to attention.

Tips

• Use a modern comm platform
• Have a unified repo for all emails for easy review
• Ticket whenever there is a need to bulk revise emails
• Work with content teams to keep email base up-to-date