With the holiday season approaching, email marketers are under pressure to send more emails, and to make each send even more relevant than the last. When you’re trying to personalize emails for millions of customers, standardizing your email templates makes the workload manageable.
Templates are a necessity for sending dynamic and personalized emails. Standardization of your templates decreases the labor invested in building new emails while simplifying the design process.
Standardized email templates are essential if you aim to enhance your email program’s personalization capabilities.
A common misconception surrounding the standardization of email templates is the content will be the same, the emails will look dull, and KPIs will consequently suffer.
Standardizing the templates of an email does not mean standardized content. It opens the door to new possibilities for personalization and more detailed reporting. Using a standardized template allows you to swap content out based on the customer’s interests and behavior, rather than building out an entire email from scratch, you can instead build the template and then feed in creative assets depending on the customer data.
Most brands don’t rely on a single template but instead have several they can pick from depending on the segment or type of campaign that they’re sending. Even with 5-10 templates, the email development process becomes much more manageable than building each email in HTML from scratch.
Standardizing email templates dramatically reduces the time spent during the configuration process for each email campaign. Instead of clients spending time determining the pattern of each email and what the template should look like, they can focus on selecting the best content for each customer experience.
On the configuration side, you don’t have to waste time creating templates that may only be used once. These templates then collect virtual dust in the cavern of useless templates clogging your database. It is important to keep email template databases as clean and organized as possible. The more templates, the less likely you can keep things organized.
Standardizing your templates also improves customer engagement by providing you with better data.
It is easier to collect and interpret valuable data from consumers receiving your promotional emails by simplifying your templates. Standardization makes it simpler to account for and compare results across different templates and at the single creative level.
Personalization works best when there is a massive amount of data in your customer base. By standardizing your email templates, you gain the necessary information to enable your personalization to perform and select the best piece of content for a given customer.
Keep in mind that personalized content only makes sense if it is coupled with the standardization of templates. If those elements of your email program aren’t working together, the workload increases, and the customer experience is contaminated, which results in less than accurate data.