Calling All Email Marketers - Approval Workflows with Smartsheet

Sarah Daily

Any email marketers use Smartsheet to manage their email campaigns?

I'm trying to create a workflow to gather approvals, lists, etc. and to stay organized!

Can anyone share examples (screenshots) of how you set up your sheet to stay organized with your email campaigns? Do you use forms and alerts/notifications?

Thanks!

Diane Condon

Hi Sarah,

I'm a Marketing Automation Manager here at Smartsheet and help run the email marketing team! As you can imagine, we use Smartsheet everyday to help manage our campaigns. 

We use a Smartsheet web form for new/update requests to our campaigns, and we manage all of our requests in a sheet. I created an example of our request sheet here for you: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/launch?lx=-LaMrJnQIcH3Gqh4ruHxTF2F3tjZfBYMXSEruozjq1E

Once someone fills out the form, we prioritize and assign the request to a team member, and use the priority and status columns to indicate where items are in our queue. Once the request has been assigned, an automated notification is sent to the business owner and the email marketing team member, so they know the item has been assigned. 

Our standard filter is for business owners to see all of their requests on the sheet and team members work off of unique reports, so they can look at all open requests that are assigned to them. 

We use a couple of formula fields on the sheet as well - one is the "Star" column that we use to roll-up higher priority items to our Marketing Automation Sight. We also use the Smartsheet Calendar (https://www.smartsheet.com/apps/calendar-application) to track when campaigns are sending. The "Calendar" column is a formula we use to only pull calendar-worthy requests (one-off emails, surveys, webinar invites, etc) into the Calendar App (attached is a screenshot), which is how we know what is coming up communication-wise. 

We also use conditional formatting and automated notifications to highlight required fields in our process that have not been filled out yet. Comments and attachments are used to track briefing documents, send lists, email performance reports, and email strings for business decisions and written approval (we recently started to use the Gmail Add-on to help track those). We send automated reminders a couple of days before the item is due.

Our Email QA Process is very similar to the sheet I mentioned above, and we are migrating it to use the Approval Request process under Alerts & Actions. A team member will fill out the QA Request form and assign it to another team member, which will kick off the approval request process. The QA Owner can either say "Feedback Given - Waiting" or "Complete". If it's "Feedback Given" another approval request will kick off back to the requester with comments on what needs to be fixed. The requester will say "Changes Made" to send back to the QA owner for final approval.

Hopefully this was a little helpful, feel free to ask questions and good luck!

Diane

J. Craig Williams

Very helpful Diane.

Craig

Andrée Starå

Diane,

Great and very thorough explanation of a real life example.

Thanks,

Best,

Andrée