The complete guide to best-in-class email and landing page creation

Emails and landing pages are two of the most crucial components of any marketing campaign.

They’re used in everything from drip campaigns, webinar registrations, demand generation, content marketing, product onboarding, account-based marketing, custom pages for search engine marketing (SEM), and so much more.

In many instances, these emails and landing pages are the MVPs of your campaigns. They’re where the rubber meets the road: often, they’re the customer-facing culmination of all of your behind-the-scenes hard work. Your emails and landing pages are the direct touchpoints that help to inform, engage, and guide prospects towards a conversion, meaning they have a vital role to play in the overall success of your marketing efforts.

But for enterprise companies, it can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming to create these essential assets, particularly at the volume you really need. Whether you’re working in-house, with agencies, or some combination of both, the lead time needed to create, approve, and execute on-brand emails and landing pages can significantly hinder your campaign timelines, stifling your ability to connect with prospects and customers in relevant, timely ways.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. With the right tech stack, you can remove bottlenecks and enable the entire marketing team to self-serve the campaign assets they need, making the process of email and landing page creation accessible to all — regardless of if your team is centralized, decentralized, or using a hybrid work model. This empowers your teams to work more efficiently, productively, and autonomously, so your business can drive better results in less time.

In this post, we cover everything you need to know to create a winning email and landing page creation tech stack in 2023: the challenges and opportunities facing enterprise businesses, how to choose the right tech stack to get the biggest ROI, tips from industry experts, and our guide to the top platforms on the market for every stage of your email and landing page creation process.

Read on to learn more, or skip to the part you’re most interested in:

The state of email and landing page creation in 2023
What are the benefits of an email and landing page creation tech stack?
What makes a good campaign creation tech stack for emails and landing pages?
Expert tips for building better campaign creation tech stacks
The anatomy of an email and landing page creation tech stack
13 tools and platforms to help you create better emails and landing pages
Bonus: what a campaign creation tech stack looks like in action
FAQs

The state of email and landing page creation in 2023

Today’s enterprise marketers face more challenges than ever before, such as:

Limited budgets and resources

In the aftermath of the pandemic and recent economic uncertainty, many enterprise marketing teams are under pressure to reduce costs. This means optimizing their existing resources and looking for multipurpose platforms to help their tech stack go further, as well as reducing their reliance on third-party resources like agencies.

Increased emphasis on efficiency

In addition to reducing costs, businesses want to get the most out of every dollar. To improve efficiency, enterprise marketing teams need to streamline core campaign creation processes such as email and landing page creation, even across decentralized teams. Accelerating time to market is crucial to making the most of every opportunity.

Sky-high customer expectations

Nowadays, there are a million demands for your customers’ attention. Customers have an insatiable appetite for content — and if you’re not creating it, there’s a good chance your competitors are. In order to succeed, marketers need to stand out in a more-crowded-than-ever inbox and deliver great customer experiences. Today’s marketing teams need to be able to quickly and responsively create engaging campaigns (such as targeted emails and landing pages) that meet customer expectations for personalization and capture their interest with timely, relevant messaging.

What are the benefits of an email and landing page creation tech stack?

In order to meet these challenges, enterprise marketing teams need the right tech stack to support their email and landing page creation process.

With the right platforms to support your workflow, you can turn your emails and landing pages into a competitive advantage, allowing you to:

What makes a good campaign creation tech stack for emails and landing pages?

With these benefits in mind, you can start to assess the tech that’s currently at your disposal — and figure out what’s missing. But with so many tools and platforms on the market, how do you choose the right ones for your enterprise business?

Here are six questions to help you curate your perfect campaign creation tech stack for emails and landing pages.

1. What exactly does it do?

Why use multiple tools when one will do? Look for multitasking platforms that can do double (or triple) duty by facilitating several stages of the email and landing page creation process. This helps to keep your campaign creation tech stack lean, and saves money by reducing the number of single-use tools you need.

2. How easy is it to use?

Your campaign creation tech stack should improve your workflow, not be another tool for your team to wrangle. The ideal software is intuitive for your team to use and will make their jobs simpler and more efficient, without the need for heaps of training just to get started.

Look for platforms that are truly no code and offer features that make creating emails and landing pages effortless, such as drag-and-drop editors. This will empower everyone to create beautiful, on-brand campaigns, with no coding experience, developers, or agency resources necessary (until it’s time for your marketing ops team to take over).

3. Does it integrate with the other platforms you use every day?

When it comes to creating a time-saving and efficient tech stack, integrations and automations are key. Integrating the platforms you use every day, such as your project management and collaboration software, your translation tools, and your marketing automation platform, can win back hours for your teams. It also reduces the need for manual data entry (and the errors that can creep in with it).

4. How will it improve processes and workflows?

What are the current pain points your team faces when creating emails and landing pages? Look for platforms that can address these blockers and unlock major efficiency improvements, such as:

• Removing the need for additional resources
• Accelerating time to market
• Reducing time spent on every email and landing page (and winning back hours for your creative and technical teams)
• Helping decentralized global teams to collaborate more efficiently
• Enabling marketers to self-serve and work autonomously when creating emails and landing pages
• Empowering creativity while protecting your brand

5. Does it safeguard your brand?

Enterprise teams need to strike the right balance between creativity and brand compliance, especially for high-visibility assets like emails and landing pages. But when you have comprehensive brand guidelines, as well as multiple sub-brands and product lines with their own additional requirements, it can be challenging and time-consuming to ensure you’re getting everything right.

When building your email and landing page creation tech stack, look for platforms that offer robust brand control, such as allowing you to set up pre-approved fonts, images, colours, and more. This means your marketing teams can work within these pre-approved guidelines without hindering their creativity or slowing down their process, so they can create with confidence and get it right every time.

6. Is it made for enterprises?

There’s lots of great software out there, but some will be better suited to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) rather than enterprise marketing teams.

Enterprises have different requirements to other businesses: you’re operating on a larger scale, working across global teams, and marketing to a greater number of prospects and customers. You may also have more complex processes to navigate or more comprehensive brand guidelines to adhere to. As such, you need an email and landing page creation platform that can meet your unique challenges, including scalability, personalization, translation, and enterprise-level security standards.

Expert tips for building better campaign creation tech stacks

When it comes to building world-class tech stacks for campaign creation, what’s top of mind for marketers this year?

We spoke to industry experts and asked them one simple question: “Any tips for creating a tech stack that helps marketing teams deliver better, more streamlined campaigns?”

Here’s what they had to say…

1. Adopt a user-centric mindset

This one is specifically for those in a position to procure or build new marketing tools for your company: adopt a user-centric mindset. I think as a marketing, marketing operations, or IT leader, one of the most effective things you can do now to improve the state of your martech stack is to spend some time with your marketing end users (that is, the actual marketers doing the work of building landing pages, sending emails, creating marketing automation campaigns, and so on) to understand their daily workflow and especially to learn what they struggle the most with day to day when using their tech tools.

That feedback from users should be the most salient information in making new roadmap or procurement decisions. Whenever you’re considering a new feature, or a new product, the decision should always come back to: how will this help our users succeed?

2. Minimize manual data entry

This one sounds simple but it’s absolutely crucial. Take the time to map out the journey a user (or team) has to go through when creating and executing a new marketing campaign. Count the number of times crucial information has to be entered by hand, or data created in one place has to be manually re-entered elsewhere.

Each manual data entry step is a failure point where users will have to slow down or stop working and may accidentally enter the wrong information — which can compound into massive data quality problems down the line. Every data entry step you can automate will pay for itself many times over in user satisfaction, campaign time-to-market, and data quality gains.

3. Take advantage of no-code solutions wherever possible

Marketing is a particularly time-sensitive endeavour, and the most successful marketing teams can put out socially-relevant marketing, informed by the events of the day, consistently and at a high level of quality. That’s very difficult to accomplish if you’re dependent on handwritten code and engineering sprint cycles for simple tasks like “create a new email template,” “import a new list of leads and contacts,” or “launch a new webpage.”

Between Adobe’s own low- and no-code product offerings and the robust and growing market of codeless and AI-driven point solutions on offer, it’s never been easier or more important to choose products that empower your marketers to work autonomously and with minimal engineering dependence.

1. Understand your process

A good campaign creation tech stack is about ease of use, ability to collaborate quickly, and alignment with team structure and goals. That last one can be tricky and really requires the team to understand their process. Stacks can look wildly different but be equally productive depending on the teams using them.

2. Map out your campaign

As mentioned above, it’s crucial to know your process. We learned this the hard way after having multiple tools in place for over a year that were shelfware. Map out your campaign, including all parties involved from ideation to reporting results. Use a tool like Miro to visualize what you think it looks like, then get stakeholder input. Most teams will uncover nuances and likely come out of it with a different process flow than what they started with. It’s at that point that you determine where tech can help bridge gaps and drive efficiency at scale.

3. Invest in efficiency

We’re investing in ways we can improve ROI, whether that be input based (production time, process improvement, saving hours, scaling experimentation) or output (ROAS, pipeline contribution). We’re also investing more time and money into customer marketing, which I’m seeing all over social as well.

1. Understand your team’s priorities

Start with a list of priorities that are important to your team. Some teams want to create entirely bespoke emails for every campaign. Others are fine with something templated. These needs will dictate your process and tech strategy.

2. Create repeatable templates and systems

Create repeatable templates and systems and enable your teams to use them. For example, if you use Marketo, you can create cloneable program templates that hugely streamline campaign production. Ensure you also provide the necessary support and training to use them well.

3. Decentralize your process — with guardrails

If you have a lot of less technical users and a high-volume of campaigns, it’s well worth investing in tech that provides a streamlined interface for those users to build and launch campaigns. This allows you to decentralize your process while leaving guardrails in place.

1. Do more with less

Like many others, we’re hyper focused on the concept of “do more with less.” For us at G2, this means evaluating our tech stack to ensure it builds efficiencies within our campaigns, but doesn’t require significant overhead maintenance.

2. Avoid the dreaded Frankenstack

Think through your investments. While it’s easy to be distracted by “shiny object syndrome” when it comes to all the new tech offerings available, it’s important to have tough conversations around impact and resources. This prevents the dreaded “Frankenstack” — a monster created from an over-bloated tech stack. The goal is to streamline and optimize, not overcomplicate. If you’re not seeing how a system will provide ROI for your business, and instead will increase confusion and complexity in your campaigns, drop it.

3. Understand your impact

A good campaign creation tech stack is one that allows you to hit your target market in a streamlined, organized way with custom messaging while maintaining your brand throughout. A great campaign creation stack also includes the ability to track your performance across each channel you’re using.

The anatomy of an email and landing page creation tech stack

We believe that behind every great email and landing page, there are five key stages: request, create, test, collaborate, and execute. Here’s what each stage looks like, as well as the types of tech to consider at each one.

1. Request

Before you get started, you need a plan. This stage involves defining your campaign objectives and identifying your target audience. You’ll also need to develop a campaign strategy and set a budget. Then, once you have all these details, you can kick off your email and landing page creation with an official request.

Platforms: Asana, Adobe Workfront, Wrike, Monday.com, Google Docs, Trello

2. Create

This stage is where the magic happens. Enable anyone on your team to create high-quality, on-brand emails and landing pages using images, text, dynamic content, and more. Gather inspiration from other businesses like yours or create your own templates that you can use again and again.

Platforms: Knak, Marketo, Stripo, Stensul, HubSpot, Braze, Constant Contact, Unbounce, GetResponse, Active Campaign, Leadpages

3. Test

The testing stage allows you to see exactly how your campaigns are experienced by all of your subscribers. It mitigates the risk that your design may look unexpectedly different on other operating systems, in a specific email client, or when viewed at different device sizes, so you can be confident that your emails and landing pages will be exactly as expected.

Platforms: Knak, Litmus, Email on Acid

4. Collaborate

This is where you bring together the expertise and perspectives of different team members and departments so you can get feedback from stakeholders and iterate on your work so far.

Platforms: Knak, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Microsoft Outlook, Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, Google Docs, Google Sheets

5. Execute

The execution stage involves launching the campaign using your chosen marketing automation platform (MAP), setting up tracking and analytics, and monitoring campaign performance.

Platforms: Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Active Campaign, Braze, Campaign Monitor, Salesforce Pardot

13 tools and platforms to help you create better emails and landing pages

Ready to start building your email and landing page creation tech stack? Here are 13 tools and platforms you should know about.