When I begin working with clients, many of them are practicing what I call ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) marketing — creating and deploying campaigns at the last possible moment.
This makes me think of JIT manufacturing, which I studied in graduate school. While JIT manufacturing holds benefits for organizations, JIT marketing does not.
JIT manufacturing thrives on prevision and repeatability. JIT marketing, by contrast, tends to undercut the creative and strategic processes that make campaigns effective – like brainstorming, testing, and incorporating feedback.
A brief comparison:
As a consultant, there’s not much I recommend that will have a dramatic positive impact on campaign performance – and also be implemented in an hour or less. Sure, some subject line changes are possible. But the larger things — like a need to rewrite to focus on benefits and advantages, not just features — not possible on such short turnaround.
But that’s not the only reason to say ‘bye bye’ to JIT marketing. JIT marketing is stressful for your team. It’s a constant level of pressure that can lead to burnout, reduced quality, and impaired creativity – and staff turnover.
Yet many companies operating this way don’t see a way out.
But there is one. I help my clients shift from JIT marketing to a more traditional production schedule all the time. It takes discipline, but it can be done. Here are some 6 tips.
1. Commit as an organization
This is larger than the marketing team – your entire organization needs to commit to stopping JIT marketing. That means everyone who works on email, every stakeholder, and everyone who manages either of these groups. The production schedule will need to be followed — and enforced.
2. Define the new production schedule
There’s no one-size-fits-all production schedule – but if you’re operating on a JIT basis, here’s a good place to start:
This is a 26-work-day production schedule – just over 5 weeks from start to finish.
With my clients we usually start here; we can adjust as necessary.
Sometimes we find that we’re consistently getting to final after a round of review or two – so we can adjust the schedule for fewer rounds of review.
Sometimes we find that we need more than a single date to put together a creative brief, write copy, or put copy in design – so we increase the time allotted to these tasks.
This client goes right from copy to copy in design using a drag & drop interface. If you are custom coding your emails, requiring a designer and then a coder, you’ll need to add a week or so to accommodate that.
When we’re moving from JIT to a more standard production schedule, I always include a ‘round 0’ review – this is for me to share feedback one-on-one with the team member developing the creative brief, writing the copy, or putting the copy into design – then they can make the changes before it’s circulated to the rest of the team for review. There’s a knowledge transfer that’s important – it also helps us make the rounds that follow more productive.
3. Make ‘two-rounds-to-final’ standard on reviews
Speaking of reviews… this schedule relies on a ‘2-rounds-to-final’ methodology.
Here’s a brief overview:
This helps keep us on the new schedule.
Sometimes people won’t review creative in a timely manner, since ‘it doesn’t mail until next month.’ Other times you’ll see people spending too much time on reviews, adding and changing things repeatedly over multiple rounds, because they feel like they have the time to do so.
4. Have a campaign calendar looking forward 2 to 3 months
One challenge I often run up against – organizations that don’t have a plan. If you don’t know what you’re going to send more than a week, or a few days, in advance, that’s the first thing that needs to be addressed.
It’s not that you can’t add or remove something from the campaign calendar if things change. But if you can put together a calendar that you can follow even 80% of the time, that’s going to help your production process.
Once again, it’s not as difficult as it may seem – I suggest people start by looking at their past 2 to 3 months of sends and then using that as a template for coming 2 to 3 months.
5. Set a date when JIT marketing ends
Here’s where the rubber meets the road – you need to choose a future campaign that is far enough out to work with your new, not-JIT production schedule.
We put together the production schedule above for a client earlier this month (it’s late March). You can see that we chose a send scheduled for the week of April 21, which gave us enough lead time for the new production schedule.
From here on out, every send scheduled for April 21 or beyond will run on this new production schedule. It’s a rolling schedule –
- sends slated for April 21 started production the week of March 17.
- We’re beginning to work on campaigns scheduled for April 28 this week.
- And next week, March 31, we’ll start on the campaigns scheduled for the week of May 5.
During this period, I usually handle project management – someone needs to be making sure that team members know their roles and their deadlines. After the transition period, this will be turned over to someone on the client team.
6. Work in tandem and bring in outside help if needed
I know what you’re thinking – so if we’re working on emails that will send more than a month from now, what happens to the campaigns scheduled to go tomorrow or later this week that we haven’t started on yet.
The answer depends on how busy your team is.
This method of moving away from JIT marketing does require working in tandem on this week’s email as well as next month’s emails. Some creative teams can handle it. In other instances, we bring in temporary help during this period.
The best way to do this is to have the temporary creative team work on the ‘next month’ campaigns, following the new, not-JIT production schedule. This makes sense, as it would be difficult for these folks to work in a JIT environment without having the institutional knowledge of the brand, products, etc. Also, freelancers hate working in a JIT marketing environment – and will often charge rush fees, making this a more expensive way to go (and I don’t blame them).
The downside here is that the client creative team has to live for another 5 weeks in JIT mode. But at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Wrapping Up
If your creating team is practicing JIT marketing, now’s the time to stop. It will benefit not only your email marketing performance, but also your creative team.
Not sure where to start? Let’s chat. I can help you make it happen – and help boost the bottom-line performance of your email marketing at the same time.
Until next time,
jj
Photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash
Jeanne Jennings is a recognized industry expert, consultant, trainer, speaker, and author on email marketing strategy and tactics. In 2001 she founded Email Optimization Shop, a boutique email marketing consultancy; she is their lead strategist. Email Optimization Shop helps organizations make their email marketing more effective and more profitable. Learn more at www.EmailOpShop.com.
