Why delegating makes you a stronger email marketer

“How are summer vacations like email marketing?”

“Both are more enjoyable when you delegate duties.”

My body is back home where it belongs, but my heart is still on the beach, where I spent a wonderful 10-day vacation. It’s hard to have a bad time when the sun is shining, the drinks are flowing and the ocean is just a few steps away. 

But an idyllic setting and a congenial group of friends aren’t enough to make a vacation successful. My go-to strategy is to give everyone a job and not try to do all the work.

I usually book the vacation rental and plan the logistics, but I don’t want to be the one making all the daily arrangements. 

That’s why I delegate. Dinner is a big event with this group of friends. We’re all great home chefs, and we know everyone’s preferences. Everyone takes a night to make dinner for the whole gang. We delegate other responsibilities, too. The result is that everyone does something, nobody does everything and everything runs like clockwork. 

Delegation shows trust, not shirking

This delegation of authority — empowering the people you work with or who report to you — is also how I run my company. It’s not about being the smartest person in a company. It’s about surrounding yourself with people smarter than you. That’s how a successful email team works, too. Even an email team of one! (If that’s you, don’t think this doesn’t apply to you. Keep reading because there are ideas for you, too.)

It’s easy to tell people to delegate, but it doesn’t happen as much as it should. People worry that they won’t be taken seriously if they don’t make all the big decisions. Or somebody will come along and take their jobs. Or they don’t trust the people they work with to make the right decisions or hit their deadlines. 

Whatever the reason, it leads to burnout, distrust and a team that spends more time putting out fires than creating great email marketing that benefits the company.

Let’s do something about that now during this relatively quiet period before it’s time to jump back on the hamster wheel of email production. Take a little time to think about how you or your team assess your responsibilities and delegate authority inside the channel, who’s in charge of what and what your dependencies are within your team and beyond it.

The timing is right because you’re in the middle of a cycle. You aren’t doing it for a performance review or pay raise, so there are no distractions. Also, starting with assessment is essential before you start delegating because you must know who’s doing what, what’s working and what isn’t before you can change things.

Dig deeper: Email marketers: What’s on your vacation to-do list?

3 questions to help you assess and delegate

If you aren’t the team leader, pretend you are for a few minutes. Answer these questions to assess if delegation is working and where to improve it.

1. Are your people doing what they’re good at?

Corporate America is famous for piling work on people they weren’t hired to do but must get done to keep the company going. Do you know how widespread this is? There are a bunch of short videos on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube by Canadian business speaker Laura Whaley that riff on this problem. 

They’re hilarious because they’re true, like this one. Watch it after you finish my column. I guarantee you won’t be able to stop with one.

“Piling on” happens to email often because of our reputation as the Swiss Army Knife of marketing. Everybody assumes we can do a whole bunch of jobs under the moniker of “email marketer.”

In my company, I put people in roles based on what they love to do. When you put people in roles they aren’t suited for or pile on jobs beyond their work skills, their work suffers. That slows things down and increases the opportunity for error.

As the email team leader, look at what people are doing. List everyone on your team and name the jobs they are good at, then the jobs they are marginally good at and then the jobs you don’t want them to do because they aren’t good at them. 

This analysis will reveal a couple of findings to create or refine your delegation plan:

• Whether you have people in the right positions. Are they doing what they’re supposed to be doing? Or did they pick up work because somebody left and you opted to redistribute the work instead of hiring a replacement?

Summer can be your time to rebalance the workload, especially if you find several people who are good at one job but work on something else.

• How you could help team members build their skills. Can you offer training, one-on-one consults or professional memberships? These aren’t formal performance-improvement programs, just additional resources they could use in their downtime now.

2. Are you doing the right thing?

This analysis is a self-examination of what you do regularly. Are you using your time wisely? Or are you the utility player, the one who gets plugged into any open spot and does the work nobody else can or wants to do? 

I have to watch myself as well. I don’t want to take on work I’m not suited for just because nobody else is doing it. 

As a leader during our company’s growth, I’ve been on a slow migration to offload some duties because now there are better, smarter people to do them. 

Spending time on jobs that don’t tap your strengths takes away from what you should be doing. If there is too much tactical work on your plate — the day-to-day work of getting things done — you don’t have time to work on strategy and as a leader, your work is strategy.

If you aren’t the team leader, this is a good place for you to take what you learn to your boss and say, “We need to hire a utility player to come in and take these things off our plates so we can do the jobs you hired us to do.”

Yes, you will have to defend the labor cost, show the upside and create a presentation on what that new person’s value would be to the company. But consider your work and what your hours and responsibilities are. You will likely discover an imbalance in your own work life. 

If you find that to be the case, maybe you can have some work reassigned to others. Or you could do what I will talk about next — bring in outside help. 

3. Review your external support teams

No company runs email in a vacuum. There are data people, coders, programmers and analysts. They might be on your team, in other departments within your company or working for the vendors you use to run your program. There’s some dependency beyond your team but still within your company for what you do. 

Many times, we email marketers take it on the chin when someone dumps a load of new work on us. We assume we must do it all because we think nobody else can do it or do it as well or nobody is answering our calls for help. 

That’s why you need to assess what you get from external stakeholders. They must take responsibility for the work they are assigned for your program. 

This could be a big battle, especially if you work with other teams that routinely move your help requests to the bottom of the pile. But you must list those work responsibilities and draw those boundaries.

Besides these stakeholders, consider whether you could call on others in your company or even outside sources like contractors or agencies that could take over some work. That would let you concentrate on what you’re being paid to do. 

You aren’t outsourcing your entire email marketing program. Instead, you’re carving off a slice of work you don’t excel at and giving it to someone who does.

Dig deeper: How to effectively delegate tasks and manage projects

Help for one-person email teams

As promised, here’s my advice for marketers stuck doing everything under the sun and more, especially when the boss goes to an email conference, learns about a shiny new thing (hello, ChatGPT!) and adds it to your workload. 

Think about whom you could bring in to help you and calculate the costs versus the benefits to the company. Look at others in your organization who could take on the work or pitch to help you with your critical work needs.

The power of delegation in email marketing

Yes, I’m still on the beach sipping on rosé. I didn’t take a laptop, but I gave my team a specific time window where they could reach me. Drawing that boundary was important for my time and for my team’s back home. 

It is hard to set that boundary if your boss doesn’t respect it and emails, texts or calls you constantly. (Tip: For help coming up with a company-friendly way to say, “Leave me alone on my vacation!” I recommend Laura Whaley again because her short videos give you plenty of real-world examples to copy.)

My last piece of advice: Take the damn vacation. Americans are notorious for taking the fewest vacation days (once again, Whaley’s short videos also address the corporate attitude that vacation equals shirking duty, so watch a few for a laugh) and for going on vacations that trade one workplace for another. 

While on vacation, divorce yourself from work and let that part of your mind be fully present in whatever you’re doing. This has a bonus: Inspiration can show up just when you take your foot off the gas. How do you think I came up with the idea for this post?

When you read my ideas here, you might think “That will never work in my world, Ryan.” That’s possible. But Yoda tells us, “Do or Do Not. There is no try.” Meaning, don’t predict a behavior that you’ve not participated in. You won’t always win, but give yourself a chance first.

Work will be there waiting for you when you return to the office. Why don’t you start writing your out-of-office email right now?