How To Cut Down Email Production Time To Half Using Modular Email Templates?

Did you know 62% of email marketers spend two weeks—or even longer—crafting a single email campaign? And 23% of teams manage up to five emails in production at any given time.

Said another way: email production is anything but quick.

Hence, when email marketers are faced with high email volumes and tight deadlines, they look to make cuts. The most obvious choice for any team in such situations is to adopt a bare-bone approach in terms of copywriting, design, and coding.

But it’s a risky trade-off that might hurt the engagement and performance of your email campaigns. Neglecting the latest email design trends in an effort to “streamline” your workflow might rob your brand of the standout features that give it an edge.

Thankfully, modular email templates exist.

Modular email architectures allow you to use pre-coded, stackable building blocks and speed up email creation without compromising quality.

In this blog, we will help you understand what a modular email template is and how it helps you manage multiple email builds at once, especially when time has become such a focus.

What Are Modular Email Templates?

Before understanding modular HTML email templates, let’s first understand an email module.

An email module is an independent, reusable content block. They have unique content, specific purposes, and brand-consistent design. Whether using a modular email template design service or getting it done in-house, you can easily assemble them in different ways based on the needs of the email that you are building. Like a LEGO block that can be stacked to create anything from a simple car to a complex transformer.

Each module, which could be HTML text or images, is dedicated to a specific purpose. For instance, you can have a module for primary content block, header, footer, CTA buttons, social media links, or any other content block.

You build them once, reuse them however you want, and modify them anytime.

A modular email template is a set of modules combined together to create an email campaign. Meaning that a modular email template designed for a newsletter includes all the necessary modules tailored for that type of email. Whereas you will have a separate template for transactional emails built with associated modules.

Before jumping into modular email templates, let’s get the basics right: what exactly is an email module?

An email module is a reusable, independent content block, kind of like a LEGO piece. Each module stands for a specific purpose and features brand-consistent content and design.

Like LEGO blocks that build anything from a simple car to a complex robot, email modules can be stacked and rearranged to create different types of email templates.

These modules can include HTML text, images, or functional elements like headers, footers, CTA buttons, social media links, and primary content blocks.

Once you’ve built them, reuse them, modify them, and combine them in different ways to fit the unique needs of each email template.

What about modular email templates?

Imagine them as a collection of pre-designed modules bundled together to build a specific type of email. So, a newsletter template is designed to include all the modules you’d need for a typical newsletter.  Or, a transactional email template will have modules required for order confirmations, shipping updates, or password resets.

Here’s the best way to make modular email templates even more time-saving.

Make all the email modules a part of your email design system. They serve as email brand guidelines so that anyone from your team can build brand-compliant emails.

So, we now know modular email templates. Let’s understand how to use them to enhance the efficiency of your email design workflow.

How Do Modular Email Templates Accelerate the Email Template Creation Process?

Modular email design is catching on as a big trend in email marketing today. Thanks to its ability to significantly reduce the time spent on email production.

Carin Slater, Email and Content Growth Marketing Manager, Litmus is all about modular email design:

“Switching to a modular design system has been a total game-changer for my email production process. What once took hours earlier can now be completed in half the time! Pairing the modules I’ve built with the Litmus Design Library has boosted my efficiency even further—some emails now take me as little as 10 minutes to create!”

And Carin’s story is not the only one.

A Stripo case study found that building an email digest with modular design cuts production time from 2 hours to just 27-30 minutes. It’s faster and more flexible than traditional pre-built templates.

Here’s how email marketers and designers can use email modules to optimize email building:

1. Create all the modules according to your brand design guidelines once and use them while building emails that maintain brand consistency. They are pre-coded and tested to ensure they have all the brand-specific elements like logo, fonts, colors, and content arrangement.
2. Save time by creating a library of all the necessary modules. Use them as many times as you like in different email newsletters. And save your team the effort of coding each email from scratch.
3. Even when you want to change the email template, there is no need to redesign it. That’s because modules let you customize the content very easily. Need to replace the entire module with another one? That’s quick, too. Just a matter of a couple of minutes.
4. You can lock the design so as to update or tweak the data within the module without disturbing the design.
5. A reverse is also possible. Lock the data inside the module and experiment with the design as much as you want without worrying about the data getting lost along the way.
6. Modular email templates are great for adding interactivity to your email campaigns without creating games from scratch every time. All you have to do is ask your developers to code the interactive elements you want and fit them into modules. They are good to be used at any time. 

Wrapping Up

It’s hardly surprising that modular email template design is one of the leading trends shaping the future of email marketing. Include these reusable building blocks in your arsenal, and you will be ready to build a seamless and efficient email production workflow.

And it’s not just streamlining the design process. You are also taking design flexibility a notch higher. Rearrange, update, or customize modules in no time, all while you deliver on-brand and polished email campaigns at a faster pace and lower costs.