What’s so great about email templates?

If you enter email templates into your preferred search engine, you’ll see multiple results pop up. If you’re new to email marketing or a seasoned email marketer, email templates are something you’ve come to expect from your email sending platform, but what’s so great about using an email template to start building your campaign?

What are email templates?

First off, let’s define what email templates are. An email template is a preformatted email that you use as a foundation to build your campaign. Your email template is a set design that you fill out with your own content to enable you to easily create email marketing campaigns.

In Mail Blaze you are able to choose from 3 distinct starting points when it comes to using templates to create your campaign:

• Layouts
• Themes
• Saved Templates
• Code

Layouts:

Our layouts are meant to give you a good starting point to develop your own template. In essence, layouts have predesigned content blocks set up for you, all you need to do is select the layout you like and fill out your unique copy and imagery.

Current layouts include:

One-Column: This is a great starting point if you would like to market one hero product, or if your email has one central focus point/theme. This is a perfect template to use for behind the scenes content or announcements.
One-Two Column: The one-two column layout is perfect for a line of products, or announcement, or even a great template if you’d like to introduce members of your team or send a message to your subscribers from your CEO.
One-Two-One Column: Have some big news you want to share? Adding some new product lines? Try our One-Two-One Column layout.
One-Three Column: This is a wonderful template to do a product focussed email, promotional content or a general newsletter.
Simple Text: If you aren’t looking to add lots of imagery into your email, this simple text layout could be the template for you.

Themes:

Mail Blaze offers all our clients access to more than 100 templates to use as they need. You can scroll through our list of themes when you are logged into the platform or see them on our dedicated Templates Page. The templates page allows you to pick a template and play around with our drag and drop editor before you sign up to use our platform.
Our email templates/themes are categorized according to Type, Industry, Season and Feature to make it easy to find an email template to suit your needs.

Saved Templates:

Saved Template in Mail Blaze is a space for you to create and save different templates that you may need. Often we find our clients have specific email designs that they use for sales, announcements, newsletters or team profiles. This dedicated area in the platform is your space to create and save templates for you and your team to use to ensure every email campaign you send is on brand and easy to recognize by your audience.

Code:

If you have premade templates that you’ve designed (or have had designed before) you’ll be able to import them into the Mail Blaze platform easily. You can paste your own code, import your email template from a zip file or import your template from a URL.

If at any point you are having trouble with your templates, you can reach out to our friendly support team to assist.

Why would you want to use an email template?

There are so many wonderful benefits to using a predesigned email template for your email marketing campaigns.

1. It saves you time.

Using an email template can save you a lot of time. Once you are happy with the template design, all you will need to do in the future is replace the content blocks you’ve created with new content to create new campaigns. If you opt not to use email templates you’ll also be spending more time briefing in new campaign templates which can be cumbersome and time consuming if you’re not happy with the end result. Reducing time spent designing your campaigns means you’ll have more time to optimise and improve your campaign performance.

2. It saves you money

Having custom templates designed every time you need to send out an email campaign can lead to increased production costs and therefore actually decrease the ROI you get from your campaigns. Mail Blaze has 100s of templates built into the system at no additional fee.

3. Create a consistent experience

It may be tempting to create different exciting email designs for every email campaign you send out, but this can be damaging to your subscribers’ overall experience. A consistent email template can help you strengthen your message and brand by giving your subscribers a consistent email design experience.

4. Easier to run tests

When you are using email templates, you will find that you can run more effective email tests. The reason why is because you’ll have less variables in your campaigns.

What do you need to keep in mind when creating your email templates:

• Balance the ratio of copy vs images to ensure you’re not creating an image-heavy email. Try to stick to 60% copy and 40% imagery.
• Make sure you leave space to include relevant links.
• Always leave room for Call to Actions (CTAs).
• Don’t overcrowd your template, use enough white space to make your content stand out.
• Use a hierarchy for your content. I.e. make sure you have headings, subheading and body copy at different font sizes so you can clearly define sections in your emails.
• Pay attention to how your copy is formatted. Use contrast if you use light colours as part of your branding.
• Don’t go crazy with multiple colours in your background - stick to your brand guidelines.

Need help with your email template?

Still not sure whether you want to create your own templates? We offer a template design service at a fee to help clients who would like to have their own templates created. Let us know what you need and we’ll come back to you with a quote on how we can bring your design to life.