Last week, I went on a diatribe about the “excuses” many small business owners have for not starting an email marketing program. The #1 reason? “I don’t have enough time.”
Today, I’m going to share my BEST hack to save you time creating email campaigns. Ready?
ESTABLISH AN EMAIL MARKETING TEMPLATE
Make the guiding decisions for your email campaigns ONE TIME, and lock them in.
This means fonts and colors, how your logo can and should be used, and any other design elements you want to incorporate. It also means embedding social media links and website navigation, if appropriate. It can even mean considering how you want your content to display depending on the theme: informational, promotional, etc.
The benefits of an established email marketing template are many, with time-savings being the big one. HOWEVER, you can also benefit from the simple and beautiful fact that your email will be consistent with your other customer touch points, like your website, social media feeds, packaging, etc. If your emails look nothing like your other customer-facing material, it creates dissonance that directly impacts engagement.
NO DISSONANCE.
So, how do I create an email marketing template, ERICA?
I’m so glad you asked.
For my clients, it starts by establishing an Email Design Brand Guide. Basically, we transfer the key brand design elements from your website or other guiding forces into the email marketing world.
Are your website calls to action RED? Don’t have blue buttons in your emails! Are your website headlines a sans serif font? Why are your email campaigns going out with TIMES NEW ROMAN for the headlines?
A lot of businesses I talk to didn’t start out making these kinds of decisions intentionally. When it came time to build an email, they couldn’t figure out why they didn’t love how an email was coming together. The ultimate time suck then becomes the time spent tweaking the fonts and colors of a basic template in an Email Service Provider. Boo, time sucks!
You might not be a graphic designer (I certainly am not!), but odds are some thought went into your brand identity when you created your website. Take those elements, and make sure they live and breath in your email marketing template.
What should I decide for my email design brand guide?
I love rhyming. Here are the key decisions you should lock in.
- Headline & Body Text Styles
Think about the font you want to use for headlines and body text, as well as the size and color of said elements.
- Calls to action
Do you want buttons for your calls to action, or hyperlinked text instead? What color do you want your calls to action to be? If you go with buttons, do you want rounded corners, or square? What font do you want the button text to be? Make these decisions once, lock ‘em in, and move on!
- Logo Usage
Your logo is one of the most important elements of your visual identity: make sure it gets prominent placement in your email marketing template. Keep your logo in the same place, at the same size, and in the same color (if you have multiple iterations), whenever possible.
- Social media incorporation
Do you want your email subscribers to engage with you on all of the socials? Incorporate your social media links to your email template, and you’ll always have a passive way of directing your raving fans to other places they can engage with you. One & DONE! Lock it in!
- Site navigation
Sometimes, your customer doesn’t want to buy what you’re selling in a particular email. This doesn’t mean they don’t want to engage with you further. You can meet THEIR needs by incorporating a simple website navigation to your email template. I don’t recommend completely recreating your website navigation, but taking a few highlights can help your subscribers accomplish their goals, especially when THEIR goals aren’t necessarily YOUR specific campaign goal. Consider linking to your online store, login page, or event calendar.
- Other design considerations
Have the hex codes of your brand colors saved in your email template so you can easily apply them. And if you have flourishes, icons or other images that can be used to support or separate content in your email campaigns, make sure those are loaded into your ESP content gallery and/or template for easy incorporation!
Love this stuff? Download my email design brand guide worksheet!
GET THE GUIDEAfter you’ve filled in the brand guide worksheet, you’ll want to lock those elements into your email service provider by establishing your email marketing template.
Any ESP worth its salt will have template creation capabilities at even the most basic level. If not, make a MOVE, because your ESP is ripping you off (I’m looking at you, Emma!).
If your ESP doesn’t make template creation super intuitive for those of you out there without extensive experience with HTML (again, me!)… simply build an email campaign that incorporates your brand guide elements, and duplicate from that email draft any time you start creating a campaign.
Yes, I just said to commit the cardinal sin of duplicating an email! In my agency days, this was considered an affront to our team’s abilities and one of the ultimate no-nos. Oftentimes, we had coded in tracking or other elements that made duplication pretty messy, so we did have a sort of valid excuse. Duplicating off a draft email with your brand standards locked into it is a template-creation hack that will make your life easier. And if you have a few tiny little messes in tracking, that’s not as bad as just not sending email because it takes too much time.
What if I don’t have a website, Erica? How can I get inspo for my email marketing template then?
No website? NO PROBLEM! Do you have a past email that you LOVE? Or is there a brand you follow that is crushing it at email?
Use that as a guide, or inspiration, then stick with it.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be consistent. Please, for the love all things good and holy, do not switch around from a black background template with bold fonts to a peachy pale thing with delicate design elements. Work with a template for at least a quarter to get the benefits of the time savings as well as the customer recognition when they open email from your business!
If all else fails, pay a professional to make you an email marketing template
Now, this is not a sales pitch. Email template creation is foundational to my work, but it doesn’t set my soul afire. What does set my soul afire is seeing businesses succeed. And you should know that your time may very well be worth MORE than what you’d pay a professional to create a beautiful and on-brand email marketing template for you.
What next?
The process of creating your email design brand guide should take you about 2 hours. Locking those elements into an email marketing template may take an additional 1-2 hours. If you look at your calendar for the next two weeks and can’t find four hours to dedicate to creating an email marketing template that will save you HOURS of work down the road… HIRE A PRO.
Whatever you do, please STOP starting from scratch every time you create an email for your business. Copy a campaign you love from before, if you can’t squeeze in the time to create a template.
As always, I’ve got your back. Save yourself the guesswork of what you should lock in for your email design brand guide – download the worksheet! I’ve done the thinkin’ for ya!
GET THE WORKSHEET!Summin’ it up
Establishing your email marketing template is the #1 email creation time saving hack! I cannot recommend it enough, and in today’s post I’ve given you a process to follow in establishing your own. Investing a few hours here (or a few hundred dollars, if you decide to outsource) will save you hours and headaches in the future.
I’m curious: would you like to see step-by-step template creation tutorials by email service provider? If so, hit me in the comments below with your ESP and I’ll do my best to schedule this content for next quarter!