[From Wrike] 📩 Need to Plan an Email Campaign That Will Deliver? Here’s how to do it with Lead and Lag time.

Planning is core in Project Management. Introducing Leads and Lags functionality is one step further to seamless Projects scheduling for Wrike users. And, of course, a highly anticipated feature among Community members 😉

Today, we’d like to show you how Marketing teams can use Lead and Lag time on the Gantt Chart to plan an Email Campaign.

It all begins with an “Email Campaign” Request Form, of course (read about how our own marketing operations team manages Request Forms in Wrike). The form is set to create a Project from Blueprints/Templates and has all tasks and assignees already there. For example, when a new release is announced, a Product Marketing manager creates this Request to let the word out about this release. He or she then submits a Request and all the details (Audience, Content, Visuals) go into the Project’s description.

And now, the most interesting part - Email Campaign Project structure and dependencies:

1. The first task is “Content Approval”, assigned to the Content Team, duration: two days. This and the following tasks all have Finish to Start dependency types between them.
2. Next stage is Design, and here’s where Lag time will come in handy, because designing emails will take three days, but there also should be time for design approval. On the Gantt Chart’s table the next task “Quality Assurance” will show 3FS + 1d (one day for approval).
3. The third task is QA (Quality Assurance) which usually takes three days. By the time it starts, Localization team can also start the first stage of their work - translating the emails to other languages. So, the Gantt Chart will show Localization 4FS − 1d (Localization team can start their work one day after QA begins).
4. Now we need to test localized versions of the email, that will take another two days.
5. The next thing that needs to be done is Campaign creation using an Automation tool, duration: one day.
6. There’s also a planned task for Peer review + Email sending. Duraton: four days.
7. Statistics - starts three days after we start to send out ready emails. (Lead time)

That’s it! You can see how easy it is to plan and manage an Email Campaign with overlap time (Lead) for tasks that can be processed at the same time and wait periods (Lags) for overlaps between different stages.

Of course, this is just one example of how to use Leads and Lags. The question is, how are you using Leads and Lags today? 🙂 Post your comments and questions below, we’ll be happy to discuss 🙌

We’d also love to hear what you think of Leads and Lags in Gantt. Visit this post to provide feedback to our Product Team.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover