Why Email Marketers Need Templatization

How Long Did Your Latest Email Take to Create?

An email may take a few seconds to read, but it’s taking most marketers two weeks to create. From industry demands to retaining customer attention, it’s abundantly clear that marketers need to not only move faster, but smarter. The solution to generating emails quickly without sacrificing quality? Templatization. Discover its advantages and how to use it effectively for efficient, first-class messaging.

The Three Benefits of Templatization

When emails use a universal template, all marketers need to adapt to are the modules within that wireframe. This new structure leads to three clear wins: increased efficiency, greater value from creative assets, and stronger customer interactions.

Efficiency Gains

Rather than relying on time-intensive coding to build an email from top to bottom for every deployment, templatization means that marketers only need to craft one version of every content module, greatly decreasing production time. 

This means that markets can shift and edit content far more quickly. Whether the brand has a new initiative to promote or an individual customer has made specific actions that need reinforcement, new information and creatives can be simply layered into the existing structure.

Reuse Creative Assets

The majority of brands invest heavily into their creatives, and many have accumulated an extensive library of assets. The problem is, many of those assets become one-and-done resources and are severely underused.

A modular approach mitigates this common issue by helping marketers easily reuse assets, deriving greater value from each investment while supporting an omni-channel approach. Whether the content lives on websites, in first-party APIs, or third-party vendors, marketers can lean on automated, real-time data solutions to deploy relevant content across devices.

HSN demonstrates this omni-channel benefit perfectly. During their 41st birthday, the brand launched a campaign to promote app downloads via email communications. Once the customer downloaded the app, the creative reappeared on mobile to promote exclusive app-only deals. By also looping in time-targeting, HSN’s “Appy Birthday” promotions always featured the most up-to-date information. 

Encourage High-Value Actions

Most customers don’t open the majority of their branded communications, which makes resurfacing key themes and next-best steps critical for customer engagement. Whether it’s reminding customers of an onboarding step, the product they left behind, or both, templatization allows marketers to mix and match modules and deliver the perfect messaging blend for each individual customer.

What Templatization Doesn’t Mean

When you hear “templatization,” do you immediately think of weak branding or repetitive, cookie-cutter content? With the right approach, templatization can lead to the exact opposite result, generating on-brand, ever-fresh content.

Just take a look at Pandora’s personalized engraving campaign, for example:

The jewelry brand deployed an email that featured gold and silver pendants, each engraved with the particular customer’s initials or full first name. To further its personalization prowess, Pandora also created an animation that paired customer’s initialed pendant with a matching zodiac charm—according to their birth month—and showed what they would look like on various metal bracelets. Customers would never guess that this unforgettable campaign was powered from a modular approach.

Ulta Beauty is another stellar example, as the beauty brand gives their template a makeover with every single send using different modules. On the left, new members receive a poll in their loyalty module so that Ulta can motivate first actions while collecting valuable zero-party data for future retargeting. In a different campaign, customers that are already loyalty members receive product recommendations coupled with the points they would gain from the purchase. Same brand, same template—completely different messaging.

Within one template, marketers can also drive incredibly diverse goals and guide customers towards different actions. Paired with varying personalization tactics—think of triggers, product recommendations, or UGC content, just to name a few—no email will ever look totally alike. Goodbye to a new build for every deployment. Marketers can reuse, recycle, and generate a fresh, on-brand message.

One Template, Infinite Options

By adding in key ingredients like real-time personalization, automation, and omni-channel strategies, templatization will streamline your processes and generate highly effective messaging every time.