5 ways email templates can improve your email marketing strategy

If you’re wondering how to write a marketing email template (canned response), first you need to ask yourself an important question: How will this benefit my business?

Email marketing is a powerful tool, and it’s incredibly widespread — in fact, 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters. - According to Hubspot.

However, creating email marketing campaigns can be a time-consuming and difficult process, especially when targeting multiple customer segments with similar marketing messages.

To make this process easier, many marketers will create email campaign templates known as canned responses.

While many marketing campaigns will have marketing message templates of various sorts, email marketing campaigns especially can benefit from a template, in five different ways (at least!).

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Templates accelerate your marketing efforts

When people ask us how to make a marketing email template, we often redirect them to the why — why should you make an email marketing canned response in the first place?

The answer is simple: email campaign templates can accelerate your marketing efforts. Email marketing is powerful, but it’s also time-consuming.

Many marketers spend enormous amounts of time writing personalized campaigns for a small segment of their email list.

While personalization is always good, it takes time - time that might be better spent on other marketing efforts, or time that you simply don’t have. If you’re just marketing to an entire list, then you can get away with a single, personalized email.

But if you’re sending to multiple segments within that list, you need a way to replicate your efforts quickly.

An email marketing template does just that. You create a marketing email template that allows you to plug in different marketing messages for different segments of your email list.

The content of an email is what matters most. Without a high-quality subject line, your email won’t even get opened. Without intriguing or valuable content, you won’t get clicks.

If you’re strapped for time (and who isn’t in the modern world?), then you need to spend that time working on your content instead of messing with a design.

For example, if you’re a roofing company, and you sell roofs to both homeowners and businesses, you’re going to have different marketing messages for different types of homeowners and different businesses.

Rather than create unique emails for each one, you create a canned response template that allows you to quickly swap out content.

You’re able to create marketing emails for each type of customer much faster than you’d be able to otherwise.

Templates ensure consistency in messaging

One of the biggest problems that many businesses run into with their marketing messaging is that, over time, it starts to become inconsistent.

This can be damaging to your brand. The problem gets even worse for large organizations. Different departments can put out wildly different emails, with different tones and styles.

Customers will become confused with the differences.

You always want to have a consistent message so that your customers know what you have to offer and how it benefits them.

Branding is critical to the success of any business. Customers will begin to assign different attributes to your brand based on their interactions with you.

At first, they don’t know you, and they won’t be sure if your brand is trustworthy or worth buying from. However, over time, a bond will grow between you and the customer.

They’ll begin to associate different attributes with your brand — trustworthy, cutting-edge, reliable, affordable, etc.

The brand becomes unique in their minds. A relationship is built and maintained.

When you use a template, you ensure that your main marketing message doesn’t change or alter from one email to the next, especially when you’re sending out dozens or hundreds of emails to many different segments.

If you’re using a different marketing message for each segment, it allows you to stay on message for that segment, ensuring that they don’t get a message that doesn’t make sense to them.

This also helps you with consistency in general. From a design standpoint, you’re always going to want to use your brand colors in a template, and you’re always going to want to have your logo in the same spot every time.

A canned response ensures your branding is consistent from one email marketing campaign to the next. This is especially important if you have a large marketing team. You don’t want someone to send out a campaign that doesn’t look and feel exactly how your branding team wants it to.

Consistency might not seem as important to a small business that is just putting out a small number of marketing emails a year, but the bigger the business becomes, the more important it is to stay consistent with branding, and start off with excellent branding while your business is still small will hope you out in the long run.

Email message templates solve this problem.

They allow a single manager of the brand to create a company-wide tone. Messaging stays consistent, and customers don’t get conflicting, confusing signals.

Templates make automation easier

Email marketing automation is one of the most powerful methods of saving time while still being able to send a large number of emails to many different consumer or commercial segments.

In many cases, when automating emails, especially when you have a large marketing team, you want to ensure that everyone can easily and quickly write emails without having to worry about designing the email each time.

What’s especially useful is having spaces within each template where specific blocks of text or imagery can be inserted.

For example, you might have a space where product images always go, a space where features go, a space for benefits, etc.

This is also useful when you have a large audience with many different segments. You might want to reuse certain blocks of text or certain images for parts of each campaign.

A template ensures you can take that reusable content and drop it right in, saving time in the creation of each automation.

Templates help you scale your email marketing efforts

For small businesses, email lists can take a while to build up, but over time, they will grow, and so will your business.

As you grow, especially if you bring on new employees to run your marketing, you want your email marketing efforts to be able to grow as well.

Having canned responses set up that you know are effective saves time. Your new employees can continue to market to your different customer segments the way you want them to, and your branding stays consistent.

Templates help you easily deliver personalized content

“Emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.” Personalization doesn’t just matter in subject lines — it matters in the body of the email as well.

When you have a template response created and ready to send, you’ll want to add as much personalization as you can to make your email campaign more effective.

Fortunately, many email marketing tools allow you to use merge tags that automatically insert personal information that people on your email list have shared with you.

In an email message template, you can easily add these tags. You won’t have to enter the name of each person you’re emailing or use an impersonal greeting like “dear customer.”

This not only makes your emails more likely to be opened, but it also makes your customers more likely to take the action you want them to take, like visiting your website or making a purchase.

Templates serve as an internal knowledge base and help with onboarding

Another huge benefit of creating company-wide canned response templates is that they create an internal knowledge base that anyone can access and use.

Each response you create can be filled with boilerplate content that can be used in a variety of situations. You can easily use that content to write other emails, blog posts, landing pages, etc.

Instead of having to rewrite messaging and ideas every single time a team member goes to create some new piece of content, they can instead access the email templates.

This makes onboarding a lot easier as well. New employees will have immediate access to on-brand content that they can use to learn more about your business. Once they start producing content, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel — they can use what’s already been done and build on it.

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Mailbutler allows you to create beautiful email templates that you and your team can use for all your email marketing efforts.

Canned responses for email marketing FAQs

What are the benefits of using templates for email marketing?

Using email templates provides numerous benefits, but the three most significant ones are:

• Email templates save time and boost productivity. Every entrepreneur and business owner has had to send the same email more than once. Having email templates for your follow-up messages, quotes, invoices, and meeting/appointment reminders in place mean you and your teammates don’t have to compose the same email over and over again. This will save you quite a few hours every week, which you can spend working on other important tasks.
• Email templates ensure brand consistency. If your email marketing team consists of more than one person, maintaining brand consistency can be extremely challenging. Someone might forget to include the business logo or use the right color palette in one of their emails. Inconsistency, of course, doesn’t look professional and can negatively impact your business. You can easily avoid this scenario by creating email templates that represent your brand. This way, you’ll be sure that each and every one of your email contacts are receiving consistent messages.
• Email templates simplify personalization. Personalization is one of the most powerful trends in email marketing. However, writing customized emails from scratch can be rather time-consuming, especially if your email list is long. This is where email templates come in. Creating personalized email templates for different email segments will help your email marketing department send targeted messages and, as a result, boost open and click-through rates.

How can we improve email marketing?

Adopting email templates is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your email marketing efforts.

Setting up various email templates will save you valuable time, increase your productivity, help you reduce human error, simplify customization, and, of course, improve your email response rates as you’ll be able to reply faster.

How can I improve my email template?

You can improve your email template by:

• Customizing the sender name, subject line, and preheader text
• Establishing a good visual hierarchy to guide your recipients to take the desired action
• Making it more interactive to engage your readers (think GIFs, illustrations, quizzes, surveys, polls, and countdown timers)
• Adding personalization based on the email segment’s behavior, interests, and preferences (for example, suggesting relevant products or services)

Are email templates effective?

Yes, they are. Email templates allow you to create a positive and consistent brand experience for all of your email contacts without having to type every word or add multimedia one piece at a time.
With carefully designed email templates in place, your email marketing team can reach different segments of your email list quickly and easily.