If done right, email marketing can produce phenomenal results with ROIs (return on investments) as high as $44 for every invested dollar! This makes email marketing one of the most profitable channels for marketing.
Sadly, the potential of these high returns is also known to drive marketers insane.
The sheer number of emails necessary to achieve success (cue in the hassle of managing complex drip campaigns designed to drive consumers from awareness to purchase) creates unprecedented bottlenecks. In fact, Litmus reports that as many as 55% of companies have 6 or more different email messages in production at once!
The big problem with traditional email templates
Marketers dread simultaneous deployment and management of multiple email campaigns because most of them experience immense pressure to quickly roll out such campaigns while struggling with the limited capabilities of their email management team.
A long-term email marketing strategy (or rather a dream) for all marketers involves a dedicated email template for every specific need. But achieving this dream isn’t always possible, especially when the typical edit-scenarios of common templates, such as Mailchimp templates, looks like:
- Adding or deleting specific sections from templates
- Tweaking the layout with respect to the location of content and images
- Making niche template designs for one-off emailers or announcements in addition to all the messages comprising your drip campaign
More often than not, tweaking campaigns beyond a certain point isn’t feasible. The result? Messy emailers that dilute brand consistency, increase the probability of errors, and may require expensive third-party interventions.
Alternatively, with this handy guide, you can learn how to create an HTML email with their drag-and-drop editor.
How modular email templates help?
To best understand the concept of modular email templates, take a moment to imagine yourself as a kid playing with lego bricks.
What would limit the quality of your playtime? Your imagination, of course. Given enough bricks of the right type, you can build a model of anything in the world that you can visualize.
Modular email templates work in the same way.
Modular email templates build on a rich library of pre-design modules, each acting as a building block for the final email design. Your template provider or designer selects the right modules and weaves them together for a finished product that’s highly consistent with your brand guidelines.
This quickly turns into a picture-perfect solution that scales your email designs.
For instance, consider a situation where you need to send out three email campaigns, each with a different goal and design philosophy:
- Two images and accompanying text
- One image, description, and CTA
- Zero images, text and CTAs
Let’s say that you had initially planned to use a Mailchimp email template or a psd to an email template (a complete email designed in Adobe Photoshop) for this purpose. But what if you had an alternative?
With a modular email template, your email developer selects the most appropriate modules designed to achieve your goals without compromising on brand consistency or experience. An ideal modular email template allows you to mix and match the modules, easily distinguishing each campaign from one another while also linking them with a similar theme.
Each module is viewed as pre-tested snippets of code that are stacked on top of each other (just like lego bricks). But, unlike other email templates, coding and testing the modules every time you use them isn’t required.
Why use modular email templates?
Modular email templates provide several benefits to the organization. If you are not leveraging them in your marketing strategy yet, these are a few of the benefits they offer:
- Simplified Design Process: You don’t plan and design new emails every time you decide to launch a new campaign. In this way, modular email templates reduce the time and anxiety involved thus reducing the resistance to developing a new campaign. Templates within a campaign are reused over and again for various needs, simplifying the entire experience for email marketers, especially ones who struggle with the technical side of the trade.
- Flexibility In Designs: Since designs are now much more accessible than before, this also provides a much-needed advantage – flexibility. Templates are rehashed and modified to your heart’s content, empowering you to run multiple campaigns at once without having to compromise on quality or resources. Simply stack the required modules in the right layout, patch the design with the content and you’re good to go.
- Lower Costs: As you can guess by now, having a single module-based email template is much more economical than creating or buying a single template for specific email campaigns. Costs further decrease as the number of available modules increases, giving you more flexibility to create fresh templates.
- Consistency In Communication: Marketing at scale is all about brand consistency and modular email templates check all the right boxes in this regard. Templates are built with brand assets in place, helping you create impeccable campaigns from the ground up. All that’s required is to add the relevant content and, even though every campaign packs a unique message, all emails retain the same design/branding elements.
- Email Marketing Automation: Modular templates pave the way for quicker email automation. You easily create a host of emails, each tied to a specific trigger. Use cases here can range from birthday emails and blog updates to onboarding and thank you emails.
- Higher Productivity: You no longer tie down your email marketing team with menial tasks that eat away at their productivity. They no longer need to fix line breaks, resolve cross-platform rendering issues, or recalibrate designs. Instead, they can focus on more revenue-oriented tactics such as marketing strategy, email copy, and design guidelines.
When should you use modular email templates?
So you invested substantial time and energy into launching your email marketing campaigns. But how do you know if it’s the right time to introduce modular email templates to the mix?
As it turns out, you’re probably facing the following challenges with your email templates. What’s interesting is that they also double up as valid trigger points for using modular email templates:
- Critical last moment campaign requirements from clients or upper management, throwing your productivity off track.
- Urgent edits required for campaign templates such as the addition of sections or omission of sections to meet changing goals.
- Template rendering errors when migrating from one email client to another.
- Inability to make changes to email templates without depending on the design team.
- Inability to reuse an email template beyond its specific use case or scope.
If you can relate to any of these situations or have consistently found yourself in a similar boat, it might be the perfect time to step out of your comfort zone. Modular email templates come to your rescue here, providing you with a framework to scale your email marketing efforts.
At Email Uplers, we understand the nuances of navigating through such challenges. As an email marketing agency, we help you create modular templates with editable modules that cut down on your email production time by at least 50%!
Need marketing help to support business growth?
We welcome the opportunity to show you how we can make your marketing SIZZLE with our data-driven, results-oriented marketing strategies. Sign up for our FREE newsletter, get our FREE guide to creating an awesome website, or contact us for more information on hiring us.
Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
