Do you use templates for your emails?

Chart of the Day: To code or not to code? (Technology) - Part 3 of 6

We are now half way through our six-week series on email workflow. So far we have discussed Planning and Time spent on tasks. Last week I asked in a poll, "for each email that your company sends, which task takes you the longest?" View our results and find our which task takes you the longest.

This week we will be looking at what companies mostly used for the creation of the emails. There are two options - you can either use an email template or use HTML and CSS coding from scratch. Firstly, let's look at what an email template is.

Email templates - what they are and why you should use them?

An email template is a pre-formatted and reusable HTML file. When you load the template, it will allow you to edit the areas that are pre-defined.

There are some really good reasons why you should use templates for your email:

Keeps the email marketing consistent in brand and formatting
Allows for quick email creation
Allows less experienced email marketers feel more confident creating emails.

In the chart below, we can see that 31.4% of the respondents will either create new emails by replacing the text and image coding in their template or by copying and pasting the code of previous emails and updating the content. The other three options which vary from 20.9% - 16.9% use templates in one way or another.

The lowest and unsurprising of all, are those respondents who code all or most of their emails from scratch (10.3%). Now, don't get me wrong, I am a self-professed email geek and love nothing more than creating an email from scratch (love a bit of CSS). Also, remember fifteen years ago we had to do it that way. Thankfully technology has moved on. But, we live in a commercial world and email marketing is generally underfunded. So we don't have the luxury of time to create each email from scratch.

PS: Do you know what WYSIWYG is? It is an acronym for "what you see is what you get". It allows you to see what the end result will look like while the email is being created. Personally, I hate these editors and I prefer to edit the code. I do this because it keeps my coding skills current but also because some of these editors format emails differently. I am an email geek after all.