By Brian Leahy & Tim Yeadon
Email remains among the most affordable and effective channels to invest your time and marketing resources.
In fact, more than one-third of respondents to Litmus’ State of the Email Report in Fall 2020 ranked email as “the most effective” marketing channel in their organization. Additionally, half of those in an agency or consultant role believed email was the most effective channel across the customer journey, as well.
It’s also worth considering, that on average, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel.
To us, email remains a channel worth investing in. One oft-overlooked aspect of email is the positive impact a custom coded HTML email template can have on your campaign’s overall engagement and performance.
Custom coded HTML email templates enable you to create a shared, refined, intentional experience between your email and your other channels, helping to build trust and positive impressions for your brand.
In fact, about one in three users will abandon a brand if they have a negative experience, according to a PwC report, while 63% say they’d share more information with a company that offers a great experience. Email remains a huge channel for today's consumers, and for many, it's one of the first experiences they have with a brand.
But is the investment right for your organization? Will the initial cost to build a custom email template be worth the long-term ROI?
Here’s a guide to considering whether or not to invest in a custom HTML email template.
Pros:
Custom email templates provide a seamless brand experience between your email and your website.
Why would you take the time to choose the perfect font or color palette for your website or video content if you weren’t going to try to match it across each of your channels, especially email?
Building a custom HTML email template gives you the opportunity to create a positive customer experience within an extremely popular, profitable channel.
When starting a new website, do you ever take a look at the free, pre-made templates for Wordpress, Squarespace or Shopify and think “these are close, but not exactly what I want”? It’s likely you don’t want to look like everyone else - and need to differentiate your business from the competition.
It’s then that you have to decide if the free template is good enough, or if you should start from scratch and build exactly what your business needs. Creating a custom HTML email template is a similar scenario.
A custom email template will give you an opportunity to explore and test hosted fonts on your platform, while free templates are often limited in your font choices. Type is a key element of brand alignment across channels, and a way to distinguish yourself from your competitors.
Custom coded HTML email templates also give you an opportunity to combat the impact of Dark Mode on your carefully chosen brand colors.
Once you’ve decided to build a custom email template, understanding the distinctions between the different categories of fonts for the web will be useful when creating a custom HTML email template.
To start, it’ll be important to know what percentage of your audience is on iPhone, Apple Mail, Google Android, Samsung, or the Outlook app. These are where you’ll have the best chance of using a hosted font - as embedded fonts or web fonts won't appear in other clients.
You can learn more about establishing a mobile baseline in our video: Do This Key Research Before Designing Your Email Template.
Hosted fonts are files that the email development team must package with the email. They may not be compatible with your email platform, in which case using an external service to host it would be necessary.
Web fonts are fonts available and licensed for use on websites (sometimes free, sometimes not). Google fonts are an example of free to use web fonts. These only work in the aforementioned email clients (iPhone, Apple Mail, Google Android, Samsung, or the Outlook app).
Custom HTML email templates save you production time.
Once built, custom email templates can function just like how a premade template would for your team. We recommend building a design system and standard set of content blocks that you can use over and over to sub in new material for each new email, while maintaining a consistent look and style over time. Establishing consistent spacing between elements (text, images, bullets, buttons, etc) will help speed production, as well.
Templates allow you to decide which elements you want to “lock in” - for instance, you may not want others on the team to change the nav or footer. This minimizes rendering issues that may occur as various hands deploy your email campaigns.
Custom email templates are useful if you’re interested in delivering unique personalization of content (and you should be).
We recommend the creation of a library of email modules that work well for specific types of messages, including product promotion, transactional, triggered alerts, onboarding campaigns, and newsletters.
Of these, it’s worth noting that transactional messages offer a huge (if not often ignored) opportunity for a personalized, dynamic template to shine, as they give you an opportunity to leverage your first-party behavior into extremely profitable cross-sell opportunities. Transactional messages provide the recipient with information related to a recent event or transaction. As they are not promotional in nature, they do not live under the same opt-in CAN-SPAM Act guidelines as promotional messages. There are restrictions on the overall percentage of promotional messaging you may add to a transactional message.
Virtually all email service providers accept custom HTML email templates - making it easier to differentiate your email program from the competitions.
You can use them within your team’s preferred email service provider – no need to adopt a complex new system.
For instance, our team members have used custom templates on a wide variety of email platforms, including Robly, Constant Contact, Braze, Mailchimp, Marketo, Act-On, UberFlip, Salesforce Pardot, Hubspot, Oracle Eloqua, and Responsys (Oracle Marketing Cloud). (There are literally dozens upon dozens of email platforms. Expect most to accept a custom email template.)
Cons:
Custom email templates take longer to first build and deploy than the free pre-built email templates you get with most email service providers.
In fact, most ready-made templates are free and available to use with minimal set-up time. Ready-made templates, though rigid, may be ideal if you’re in a hurry to start sending emails to your customers. Usually, all you have to do is upload your logo, choose a font style for your various elements (headline, subhead, body, etc), and then type in the HEX code for your brand colors - for instance, the background color for your CTA buttons, line dividers (rules), and maybe the footer. After that, you’re probably ready to add your content to several provided modules.
If you don’t have a designer and developer experienced with the nuances of email, you may need to hire external help.
HTML email development can be a fussy, specialized skill. It’s much more stiff, old school, and finicky than modern web development. If your front-end developer is not familiar with email development, they should be prepared to spend extra time reading Litmus, Email on Acid, and Campaign Monitor blogs to learn the basics and pitfalls. It’s a different world than web development.
As with any template, a custom email template’s compatibility with any email platform may depreciate over time. Occasionally, email services like Gmail or Outlook will make internal changes that impact how an email will render. An experienced email developer will be invaluable in chasing bugs.
The best email template cannot make up for irrelevant content or the lack of a well-researched, informed customer journey marketing strategy.
Content relevancy is everything today, no matter how well or poor your email template represents your brand. And while a less-than sparkling experience across your marketing channels will hurt, you stand a very poor chance of converting customers without an informed, well-researched content strategy that speaks to the right audience and the right moment in their customer journey with your brand. So if your content isn’t resonating in any way with your audience, perhaps it’s not yet time to invest in a custom HTML email template. The ROI just might not be worth it quite yet.
(In the meantime, it might be worth checking out the Best Email Marketing Campaigns For Customer Journey Engagement.)
Our advice? Make the investment.
If you’re serious about providing a seamless customer experience across channels, then you’ll want to ensure your brand is professionally represented with a custom email template.
Free templates may have a lower upfront cost to deploy, but the costs associated with building a custom HTML email template are typically one-time, and likely to pay for themselves in the long run through increased email engagement, stronger brand loyalty, and a customer experience that you can be proud of.
Costs are often driven by how many modules you need, or if you need multiple versions of templates. For instance, you may need separate promotional and transactional email templates. Unique complexities offered by various email service providers may impact cost as well. (They’re all a little different and testing is usually required.)
It’s also worth remembering that you’re likely already spending money in content creation for your email program - and while a free template may have a lower upfront cost, building a custom email template is a good way to protect your long-term investment in your brand.
See how we transformed this client’s pre-built template into a custom expression of their brand that draws customers further into their world.
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About Clyde Golden
Clyde Golden is an email marketing agency in Seattle. We’re here to help you create thoughtful and relevant content that leads your prospects through the buyer journey and on to a long-lasting relationship with your brand.