Tools we love for managing email chaos

Managing email marketing can feel like juggling flaming swords, especially when you’re balancing creative briefs, campaign calendars, copy drafts, approvals, and reporting. Whether you’re running emails for a single brand or coordinating dozens across a portfolio, you need systems that simplify, not complicate your process.

That’s where project and workflow tools come in. In this post, we’ll walk through our favorite tools for taming email chaos: what they’re best at, how teams actually use them, and when to use what.

Why you need a system for email operations

Email is deceptively complex. One campaign touches content, design, product, legal, strategy, and analytics. Multiply that by weekly sends, transactional flows, A/B tests, and segmented audiences, and you’ve got a recipe for disarray.

Having the right tools in place helps your team:

• Stay aligned on deadlines and priorities

• Eliminate approval bottlenecks

• Track changes and historical versions

• Manage multi-brand or multi-list complexity

• Scale your marketing operations with confidence

According to Litmus, 47% of email teams say inefficient workflows are their biggest barrier to success.

Our favorite tools to keep email marketing organized

1. Notion is best for modular, collaborative systems

We use Notion to run internal processes, build shared knowledge, and plan cross-functional campaigns. Its flexibility makes it ideal for growing teams that need a system that can evolve with them.

Why we love it:

• Build interconnected databases for content calendars, briefs, asset libraries, QA checklists, and team docs

• Assign owners, due dates, and approval stages in one place

• Embed previews, campaign mockups, and Figma links directly into task cards

• Use templates to standardize workflows across clients or brands

Pro tip: Use filtered views for each team (for example, content vs. design vs. development) to reduce noise and keep everyone focused on their own deliverables

2. Asana is best for timeline-driven execution

For teams that thrive on Gantt charts, due dates, and milestone tracking, Asana delivers clean timelines and a familiar project management interface.

Why we love it:

• Set dependencies between campaign phases: content → design → review → development → QA

• Visualize campaign workload in calendar, timeline, or kanban views

• Keep stakeholders aligned via task comments, @mentions, and subtasks

• Integrates with Slack, Google Drive, and Adobe

Especially useful for agencies or enterprise teams managing overlapping email calendars across regions or business units

3. Trello is best for visual pipelines and smaller teams

Simple, intuitive, and drag-and-drop friendly, Trello is perfect for smaller email teams or startups looking for clarity without overhead.

Why we love it:

• Set up email workflows with clear columns: Brief → Design → QA → Scheduled → Sent

• Use labels to organize by brand, audience, campaign type, or priority

• Easy to onboard new collaborators or freelancers

• Power-ups like calendar views and automation rules extend its value

Trello is a great entry point for teams just starting to formalize their email processes

4. Airtable is best for managing email assets and complex metadata

If your email team handles multi-brand, multi-segment campaigns or maintains a large content database, Airtable is a game-changer.

Why we love it:

• Organize campaign briefs, copy blocks, subject lines, UTM links, and creative assets in structured tables

• Track localization status or approvals using rich field types

• Link tables (for example, campaigns ↔ assets ↔ performance data) to build scalable, searchable archives

• Use filters and views to surface what’s relevant to each collaborator

Airtable turns chaos into clarity, especially for teams working across 5 or more brands or juggling lots of recurring emails

Bonus: how we combine these tools

Many teams use Notion for planning and Asana or Trello for execution, while leveraging Airtable for asset tracking or analytics.

Here’s an example workflow:

• Notion: Shared campaign calendar, campaign templates, SOPs

• Airtable: Email asset library, copy archive, UTM builder

• Asana or Trello: Task execution, team-level workflows, reminders

This modular approach ensures each tool plays to its strengths without forcing one tool to do everything.

Comparison snapshot

Final thoughts

Email marketing doesn’t have to be chaotic. With the right mix of planning, execution, and collaboration tools, your team can scale with clarity = and send better emails, faster.

Whether you’re juggling five campaigns or fifty, tools like Notion, Asana, Trello, and Airtable give you the structure to stay on track and the flexibility to move fast.

Want to see how we set up Notion systems for multi-brand campaign planning or Airtable templates for email copy workflows?

Let’s talk