Master Marketing Email Template
There are several steps that go into creating an email campaign. The last thing you need is for the email creation process to slow you down. This is what precisely was happening to our email marketing team members. An email template upgrade was in our plans and it would be our 3rd installment for rolling out global templates. We wanted to take advantages of newer features offered in the email automation platform to make building emails more efficient and scalable.
Problem 1:
Our marketers were faced with a cumbersome and time consuming process for creating marketing emails using the templates available. The layouts in the templates were fixed. To make modifications, users would often have to edit the HTML of the email. This carried the risk of creating emails that were inconsistent, non-brand compliant, or had errors. The resulting email would also often require additional reviews before being sent out to catch errors and inconsistencies.
Problem 2:
Our Global Demand Generation team, which I was part of during this time, was responsible for developing and managing the email templates in our marketing automation platform. We also developed any custom versions that were requested by our global and regional marketing teams. Our email templates started to increase in numbers and became more difficult and time consuming to maintain.
User feedback:
- We have limited HTML editing knowledge on the team and need to be able to build the layout we want within the visual editor
- Would like to have several layout options available to easily mix and match
- Add the ability to easily co-brand emails
- Reduce steps and time it takes to customize email layout and content
- Improve responsive design on small screens
- Maintaining multiple custom templates is time consuming.
The solution:
"One template to rule them all".
Developed a single master email marketing template.
Features/Benefits
- Responsively designed master email template included improvements for mobile compared to previous template designs.
- The template included modular drag/drop features. It contained several modules that users could choose from to build out their email content. Users no longer needed to edit the HTML of the email to achieve the desired layout. User productivity increased.
- We used snippets for headers which allowed users to easily swap out our standard brand header for co-brand header.
- The master template replaced all previous templates. This significantly reduced time our team spent for template maintenance, troubleshooting errors, and custom email development requests.
