Tips to Design your Own Master Template

Are you inspired to create your own Master Template?

Master templates are bare-bone email templates, in which different sections can be edited or removed to adapt according the type of email to be sent. Designing a Master Template can be really helpful when you wish to ensure that your branding is consistent across different emails and don’t want to design a new email template design every time a new email campaign is planned.

Main Template (above) sections can be edited to create 3 different email layout as shown below…

Welcome Email Email Newsletter Product & Video Emails

Mastering the Master Templates

While designing a Master Template, the process involves inclusion of sections that depends on:

Follow brand guideline and plan out common sections: Header footer will mostly stay the same in the email template design; so design it to keep it consistent for all campaigns. Social media can be designed prior with multiple options having all possible variation that are supposed to be used in different campaigns.

Types of Campaigns upcoming in 6 months or 3 months: Of all the emails sent along this duration to ensure consistent communication with your subscribers, categorize which kind of emails you wish to send to your subscribers:

• Promotional Emails
• Transactional emails and their frequency
• Educational or Notification emails
• How much of content would be pulled from the database for personalization
• Are you going to use dynamic content? If so, plan of how they would appear.

Plan out sections that would help you build email design for all the above you might have planned during the course.

Sections or layouts are the most important part of building any master template. So thinking about those and giving more time on it would really help you save time on building individual campaigns.

Every section or layout needs to be thought about while building Master Template. Apart from their variations, as in mirror section, with image or without image, with or without CTA, text alignment, etc. This means you don’t have to build them individually when needed; just pick the right one and set up in your campaign.

Think of Seasonal Events: Seasonal email marketing templates usually have more design elements than live text. So having those included in Master Template might be difficult. However, some design elements like images for your holiday email template can already be included; and would serve the purpose by reusing any of the section from the other.

Set it up for ESPs: Some ESPs provide a beautiful editor based custom-made HTML email templates to be edited and reused or repurposed. Using the advance feature of their HTML email template language can help you set up the entire template into the editor as your source template for one time.

Create different email campaigns selecting different layouts/sections from master template that would help you built beautiful email marketing templates from same master template without much hassle of designing and coding HTMLs for each email template.

Our email experts can help you with ESP integration and migration across 50+ ESPs.

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What goes behind the scene?

Everything associated with email marketing is all about analysis. Planning an email marketing campaign begins more than a month earlier and a rule of thumb is to analyze the performance of the previous campaigns. Some may contain good email content and some dazzle subscribers with the rich interactivity, while some went dud. The most amount of time is spent in understanding the perfect balance of different elements like

• List segmentation
• Personalization
• Which campaigns to plan
• What kind of CTAs to be used
• Image to Text Ratio

However, this leaves very less time for the development of email templates. This is when creating a Master Template while formulating your marketing the strategy proves helpful.

Advantages of Building a Master Template

1. Design once, code once. Makes it quick and efficient.
2. Branding shall remain consistent.
3. Unified email layout helps in defining content.
4. No frills of designing each email individually.
5. Avoid surprises, delays or redesigns – especially last-minute ones.
6. Companies don’t need much bandwidth to spend behind every email campaigns.

Worth Noting

One thing to note is that a Master Template needs to be planned correctly during the marketing strategy building. Otherwise you would spend whole day editing the Master Template to set up new campaign. So make sure you spend enough time and thought and go through ample free email templates before generating a master template.

Uplers offer you Master templates for Mailchimp, ExactTarget and Campaign Monitor. Checkout the adaptations in email in case you wish to have a functionality similar to a master template.