When you have 100+ people touching email and you're covering a dozen different languages, how can you ensure a consistently great brand experience? The right tools can help you master this challenge. The team at Genesys→ shares how Taxi for Email helped their team re-think their workflow so they could send on-brand email at scale.

Thanks for chatting with us! What are your current roles at Genesys?

My name is Tammi St Angelo. I'm a Senior Manager for Global Marketing Automation and Email Strategy at Genesys. I manage the Marketing Automation Platform, Eloqua, and focus on global automation projects in coordination with our Digital Demand Gen and Marketing Operations teams. 

I'm Rob Kaczanowski and I work with Tammi on the Global Marketing Automation team at Genesys. I did the initial setup of our Taxi for Email instance, including the build-out of our email design system. Day-to-day, I'm responsible for closing the loop with our marketers and providing strategies to improve their programs.

How big is email at Genesys?

Pretty big! Email is one of the top sources of attribution to our sales. We have teams of regional marketers dispersed across the globe responsible for creating email campaigns and two global teams -- QA and Deployment and Marketing Automation -- responsible for enabling our marketers and helping them create the best possible emails. 

Historically, how had email been created at Genesys?

There was never one singular team working on email at Genesys; we have always had a mix of designers, marketers, copywriters, translators and developers all working on different projects. This means the team is large and often dispersed - sometimes even working in different timezones. 

Although we could build branded templates for our team to use in our ESP, it didn't have the ability to lock down brand palettes or sections (e.g. footers) for teams. This meant there was a risk of emails going out off-brand. As we were limited in locking down fundamental design elements, it placed a lot of stress on our QA and Deployment team.

What does the email creation process look like now?

In the past, automation took so much bandwidth for our small team of 2 or 3 people. It took 6 months to automate one regional nurture stream. Now, with Taxi, we can enable more marketers globally to help us build automations and speed up the process for everyone. In 3 months, we've knocked out 4 times the work by enabling the less technical teams to help on email production.

This is helping our campaign team go to market faster without requiring everyone in marketing to learn HTML coding for email. We now have just over 110 marketers at Genesys using Taxi, which is amazing to have such a large and dispersed team all in one place creating email. 

Genesys sends email in 10+ languages, we have more than 100 stakeholders we work with that are based around the world, which means if someone joins a team we want to ensure they have everything they need to do their best work. With all the different global teams and audiences, we generally send between 10-15 different emails a week, not including all the automated work our team is responsible for. Taxi has enabled us to do this easily and at a much larger scale.

Before using Taxi for Email

  • Large and dispersed email team, often across different timezones
  • No "one" team creating email at Genesys
  • High risk for emails to go out off-brand as ESP did not support locked down brand palettes
  • A lot of stress placed on QA teams to ensure each email sent was on-brand

After using Taxi for Email

  • 110 marketers across Genesys building email in Taxi using a branded Email Design System anyone can build from
  • Able to knock out 4 times the work by enabling the less technical teams to help on email production
  • Confident every email sent is on-brand with locked down brand palettes
  • Send out around 10-15 emails per week (not including automated emails)
  • Taxi doesn't change any code so we can be confident every emails renders the way we want
  • Improved team workflow using teams and project groups

Now, with Taxi, we can enable more marketers globally to help us build automations and speed up the process for everyone. In 3 months, we've knocked out 4 times the work by enabling the less technical teams to help on email production.

Tammi St Angelo Global Marketing Automation and Email Strategy

What successes have you seen from the new ways of working with Taxi?

Taxi's ability to lock down areas of our email design system has been invaluable to us. It has enabled consistency for every email we send. This has also freed up time from our QA process as we know every email going out the door will be on-brand, so we can concentrate on the content and design side.

Here's just a few ways Taxi has helped us:

=L Supporting our ESP migration

In December we moved to a new ESP, which was a massive project for us. Our goal in the transition was to enable more global marketers to build their own emails and lessen the bottleneck from the email deployment team. Taxi has allowed us to optimize the email creation process across timezones, and minimize meeting times to execute on the growing number of digital campaigns right now.

Building our own Email Design System

We have a custom Email Design System (modular HTML template) set up in Taxi , which includes all the branded modules we need for each team to build their emails from. The design system is locked down to ensure the marketers creating emails don't produce something off-brand, but provide some flexibility with the ability to drag & drop the pre-designed modules that will best fit their content. The best part is that Taxi doesn't change our underlying code, so we have peace-of-mind that our emails will render as intended when they deploy.

Streamlining quality checks

Using Taxi's expectations feature, we've been able to speed up our quality process by alerting marketers as they build their email when something isn't quite right -- like placeholder text in an email or missing image heights. We are able to bake these rules directly into our design system and prevent the email from exporting to our ESP until all issues are fixed, avoiding embarrassing mistakes down the line!

Better ways of working

Using Taxi's team and project structures we have been able to set permissions for projects, to ensure the right teams have access to the right projects. Taxi's team feature has been fundamental in aiding teams to work better together and project groups have meant you can ensure the right translators, editors and copywriters have the right to edit the correct project in Taxi.

How has using Taxi helped you in sending in multiple languages?

It's been a huge advantage for us that Taxi is able to support integrations with different platforms. From moving ESPs and migrating all of our data, it has meant that all the other little worries have been handled in Taxi.

Using Taxi we are able to support translators within the Email Design System - we have an area in document setting which supports different languages. This means Marketers building the email only need to switch this on to enable translators to add their copy for the template to support localised content.

Direct exports from Taxi to Eloqua means we can seamlessly build our emails and the 10+ versions for each language we send in, and then export to Eloqua in just a few clicks. This means instead of building 10 versions of the same email every time for translators to go in and change the copy, we can now use the SDL translation tool which is supported by Eloqua.

In addition, Taxi's live preview tool has been critical for us to render-check how the email looks, especially when we have translators adding content once the emails have been exported. The live preview tool means you can build your emails in desktop view, but switch between mobile and iPad view directly in the editor instead of exporting and sending tests of the email to yourself to check. Little wins like this have really saved our team time.

What does the future hold for your marketing team?

With the new tools, we are expanding our Marketing Automation playbook. This means adding more email touches at different stages of the buying cycle for all regions.

Reach out to book your demo for Taxi for Email today and get started creating awesome email.

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