Five Signs It’s Time to Change Your Email Template

Your template is the structure you hang your entire email marketing campaign upon. Therefore it is imperative that it be effective, powerful, flexible, and easily modifiable. Here are the top five signs that your current email template belongs on the cyber scrap heap and should be replaced:

1) Social media doesn’t fit within it. Many common email templates were designed at a time when a successful social network strategy meant having enough buddies on speed-dial to call an impromptu poker game. Your email template should be riding the crest of the social media wave, which means, among other things, integrating sharing and “like” buttons, Twitter badges, and every other means of encouraging your customers to share your content. If your template is restricting you to posting inline links for these sites and lacks the interactivity that social media enthusiasts demand, it’s time to trash it and get a new one.

2) Your template doesn’t render for non-PC formats. The days when everyone read his emails sitting bolt upright in front of an 800 x 600 or 1,024 x 768 monitor are gone… along with Hummers, Tamagotchis, and the Macarena. At last count there were more than 2,000 types of mobile devices that can access emails (not counting tablets and netbooks), and each has a slightly different display standard! Your email template has to have such broad inherent flexibility that it will display equally well on everything from a 2,560 x 1,600 30-inch LCD monitor down to a phone screen barely larger than a postage stamp.

3) Your website has changed. You’d be amazed how many times email marketers will thoroughly redesign their website but keep on using the same old tired email template. A site redesign should always carry through to your template, and that doesn’t mean just swapping out the old logo for the new. Setting up harmonious color, pattern, and overall design schemes that apply across your website and template will ensure that the customer is not jarred in the transition from your email to your landing page.

4) Your template can’t handle video. Trying to shoehorn video into an email template designed for text only is a fool’s errand. Not only will it look awkward, but on some screens it can display scrambled or not at all! Since video testimonials and previews are becoming compulsory content in your email campaigns, you should seek out a template designed to contain video and then extensively test it on a variety of display devices to ensure that it works as advertised.

5) Your template is not scalable. Your email template may handle your logo and three images perfectly well or be set in a handy four-section format, but what happens when you want to increase your images or add a few more sections? If your template starts to fall apart when you try to expand upon it, that’s a good sign it’s time to trade it in for a younger model. Before settling on any email template you should try it in several configurations to ensure that it’s ready for anything you can throw at it.

Email templates should help you get your message out, not hinder the process. If you find that you are spending hours coding and recoding a template to get around its inconsistencies and inadequacies, don’t hesitate for a single minute in hitting the delete button. There are plenty of great templates out there that can do exactly what you want them to do with a minimum of heartache.

Hal Licino is an award-winning writer and an email marketing expert for service provider Benchmark Email.