Templating done right
While Marketing Automation is a lot about processes, engagement programming, segmentation, and the right messages, one aspect is overlooked often: the templates. At the beginning of a marketing automation project, templates are discussed, designed, and implemented but as soon as the users take over the machine, they tend to descend into chaos. They are applied and modified to fit the purpose of individual campaigns and sooner or later they reach a point of alteration, where the user - out of convenience - prefers to copy the copy of a copy of an original template instead of beginning with the source and changing it to suit the campaign. At this point, every experience is lost. If this sounds familiar, keep on reading. I got some ideas for you on how to prevent this.
The purpose templates
I do not want to discuss the technical nature of templates in marketing automation tools here. My point is the practical purpose of templating in email marketing.
The obvious reason why templates are created is to provide users with neatly designed shells to put their content into. You don't want to bother your marketeers with thinking about CI, uploading logos, picking the right colors and font sizes, or placing meta information like unsubscribe links. Templates provide an easy way to let marketing staff focus on the message, not on the packaging.
But all these fancy preset styles are just cosmetics for the deeper purpose of design: the function. A well-designed template is not about having your company colors in the header. It is about finding the perfect form to transport your message and provoke a reaction from the recipient. In a good email template, every element has a reason why it is built that way. Every text block, every call to action follows rules based on evidence and informed assumptions to make your email more successful.
Taking this from a different point of view makes templates your source and storage for all the expertise about delivering the perfect message. Everything you or your advisors have ever learned about the perfect layout for your messages should be aggregated into your templates. By just using them as a starting point and updating them with your learnings on the campaign level, you miss a great chance to leverage findings throughout your whole organization.
Reality hits you hard
"No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy" is a quote from a long-dead Prussian general but also true somehow for templates. While you can layout templates based on what you plan and what you know, sooner or later your marketing team will reach a point where it is no longer sufficient to transport the current message.
Simple examples for this are when your template is designed for presenting a single person as primary contact but suddenly you need to place two people side by side, or when your template is built for advertising three products and now you need to put four into the same spot. Another reason why template structure is often abandoned is the idea to present more than the originally intended calls to action.
If you don't have another template at hand fitting just this use case, you are forced to change the existing template and find a workaround to make it fit your needs.
While you might think, these examples are just minor changes and you can easily do it by just modifying your template, think twice! Probably there was a reason why only one contact was given, only three products were presented or only one call-to-action was placed. If you did your templating right from the start, the number of elements placed in your template was not picked randomly but based on experience or facts.
In a lot of cases, the better way would be to think about your message first.
Do you really need to place two people instead of one as contacts or is the fact that two people are responsible for the same project more a piece of news than just a convenient way for recipients to get in touch with your company? Then it would be better to introduce these people at the top of your story instead of seeing them just as means of contact.
Do you really need to put four instead of three products into your template even when analytics have proven in the past that three products are leading to the best interaction rates? Then it would be better to stick with the three best-selling products in the email and present the fourth on the corresponding landing page.
Do you really need to put another call to action into your email even when everybody knows that too many choices reduce the rate of action? Then it would be better to think about what the best call to action would be in the case and add other options in a follow-up email based on the click or open behavior or a landing page.
But don't get me wrong: you should never just use a template by the rules just because it was written somewhere. You should always challenge your past decisions, especially if you now had the chance to evaluate them. But you need to do this organized and not without context across various single campaigns. There are always good reasons for changes but these should be done informed and regarding all other aspects of your templates.
Freedom versus happiness in slavery
Email marketing is a lot about trial and error, or to put it more friendly: A/B testing. So you do not want to suffocate any new idea right from the start by too strict rules and style guides. The better way is to help your team to understand the impact of every change in the template and channel their ideas that often happen on the campaign level back towards template development.
In most cases, the new ideas of the marketing users are not destroying your good templates, but are in fact improvements that should not be short-lived by benefiting just one particular campaign. If you channel those innovations properly and use them to improve your templates, your whole organization will benefit from this.
Of course, this means your team needs insightfulness regarding the structure and purpose of your templates and emails in general. Education is always a good starting point. To counter the problem, that a quick modification can save time compared to channeling back to template development and waiting for a new version, you always should allow your team members to send out their modifications as long as they are reasonable and are communicated back to development.
Consider this as rapid prototyping but make sure you keep an eye on those modifications and either adjust your templates accordingly or stop further use. The worst thing that can happen is a good modification in a single campaign that is now unofficially used as the new template by copying the modified campaign email instead of starting from a template.
Managing templates
You should designate someone in your team to be responsible for the templates. Either it is someone who can also create and modify them or it is a person that manages your agency responsible for the coding. This Template Master is responsible for keeping track of changes, verifying decisions, and updating existing templates or generating new ones. Besides getting informed about modifications or the need for new elements by the marketing team, the Template Master should also actively review send out emails for minor modifications that could be improvements to templates.
Update cycles and versioning
You should version your Templates like all things code should be versioned. This makes it easier to keep track of changes. There are several good tools for that out there. IT can be a good partner in picking a versioning software. Additionally, it makes sense to place the version of the template somewhere in the footer, so everybody can easily access what version was used in a mailing.
Minor changes can quickly get a little out of control and just deploying a new version of a template for every single change might be a little overwhelming. So again, just look at how software updates are done and take it as an example. Collect minor changes and deploy them together in bigger updates. Track what changes are upcoming, what changes are under review, and what change requests have been denied or postponed.
Accessible Information
Last but not least, a rule that is good for any collaboration: make your information on changes in your templates accessible for everyone. Help people to become informed about reasons for changes. Not only will this help to quickly onboard new team members but it will also help to remember decisions in the future. Software development has plenty of tools for that. See how a modern marketer is already almost a coder?
tl;dr:
Actively use your templates as a single source of truth for the perfect message delivery. Allow team members to come up with new ideas, improvements, and changes, but collect them in one point, evaluate them and use them to update your templates regularly. Use tools of modern software development to keep track of these changes. Think about nominating a Template Master, responsible for managing and monitoring those changes.