Best practice for email lifecycle workflows when content needs ongoing marketing compliance checks?

[LTrov]

I work on the marketing ops side at a large CPG company and we run fairly complex email lifecycle programs through HubSpot. We manage multiple brands, multiple regions, and a lot of content that stays live for long periods of time. 

Our current process is fairly standard. Emails are created and approved in HubSpot, legal and brand teams sign off before launch, and then the emails run automatically across different lifecycle stages. Over time, content gets updated as claims change, regulations evolve, etc.

We recently integrated a tool called PunttAI to help with post publish brand and compliance checks, and it surfaced a bigger workflow question for us.

Pre send approval is not the hard part. The challenge is everything that happens after an email is already live and running inside automation.

Teams tend lose track of what is still active. Old versions keep firing long after they should have been updated.

I am trying to think through the cleanest way to structure this inside HubSpot without creating friction for the marketing team.

Should compliance checks live outside of HubSpot and only feed alerts back in?

Has anyone tied post publish checks to lifecycle stages or re enrollment logic?

Another concern is how to fix issues without breaking active workflows. Pausing or unenrolling contacts is not always an option at scale.

If you are managing long running lifecycle emails with regulatory or brand constraints, I would love to hear how you structure this in HubSpot without slowing everything down.

Thanks in advance.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LTrov,

If the question is how a process can be implemented that forces the marketing team to regularly review workflows, entry criteria, lifecycle stage logic, then I don't think this can be done with creating friction for the marketing team. By definition, it's extra work and unfortunately simply needs to become part of the marketing person's regular tasks.

Ideally, of course, you find a setup that has all of this in mind and you build your workflows in a way that either makes it unnecessary to review them regularly or forces marketers to review them occasionally. What that could look like depends on what exactly has been built so far, which workflow actions are being executed etc - but I doubt that it has such a high level of complexity that it can't be built keeping this in mind.

Generally, HubSpot tracks create dates, modify dates etc automatically for automated emails, segments, workflows. So you could easily build filtered views in those tools, based on the responsible marketing user, which they have to review on a regular basis.

If you share a bit more content about the challenges you're expecting when reviewing old workflows, that would help me in providing more help. For example, the concern that reviewing old workflows might break active automations and pausing/unenrolling contacts is not always an option suggests that they're not built correctly.

Best regards!