Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) has always had wire frame templates that many of our customers have utilized, customizing each content box to match their brand. Other Email Service Providers (ESP) such as Campaign Monitor, have predesigned templates with a drag and drop interface where most of the formatting is already applied. The downside is you’re limited to what is available in the template. Most often, this means colors, font, layout and even a branded header and footer. Could it be possible to have the best of both worlds? You bet — as long as you have someone familiar with the template language of the ESP.

Lexington Podiatry is a podiatry practice that breaks the mold from others. It was only fitting that they do the same with their email campaigns and eliminate the “canned” format sent by their colleagues. RootedELM has worked closely with Elise Menold Hinchman, Marketing Director, to create a series of WYSIWYG templates uniquely theirs. Ever since, Elise has been able to create an email campaign from an email template and then edit the content without having to know or learn HTML.

The SFMC is in the process of releasing their new Content Builder which introduces an improved drag and drop user interface. Lexington Podiatry has been a part of the beta program since it was announced almost two years ago. With the launch of their new online store, Elise wanted to develop an eCommerce template. Using a variety of eCommerce email campaigns as inspiration, RootedELM developed a template that Elise could use. Unfortunately with new technology, there has been a few hiccups along the way.

Using Litmus as a rendering and coding tool, we were able to troubleshoot additional code applied by SFMC to the eCommerce email campaign when our formatted content boxes were added, throwing off the design and expectation. To get around this, we’ve reformatted each drag & drop content box once incorporated into the email campaign by editing the HTML to match what we intended within the template.

“Testing has been difficult,” admits Elise. “I think we all know what we want to see, for example, the image to be centered — but in this particular case it just hasn’t worked out.”

We’ve found quirks here and there — some related to learning the new user interface, but mostly testing what works and what doesn’t. That is the key to anything. Sometimes there is no better way to learn a new program or software than to troubleshoot.

SFMC has made improvements since we started using Content Builder. Elise launches her first eCommerce email today (July 8th). As far as making it easy for Elise to utilize this template for future campaigns, she will simply make a copy of this tested campaign and edit each content box using the WYSIWYG editor. We look forward to monitoring her results and continuous enhancements by SFMC.

The best creative content in the world means nothing if it’s not presented in a way that the reader will read it–that’s why content strategy is vital.

Content strategy means the following:

• identifying goals to meet the needs of your audience
• bringing people on your team together to brainstorm and achieve these goals
• keeping a place to store ideas for future content (we use a system called Flow)
• listening to your audience through behavior metrics and simply asking
• determining where, when and how your audience will consume the content
• ensuring your audience can easily access the content
• portraying a consistent brand and voice – don’t confuse your audience
• giving action to take the next step
• reassessing your strategy by evaluating results with your entire team

However, you can have the best strategy in the world and lead the reader right to your content, but if the creative isn’t good, they won’t stay. That’s why creative content is essential.

Creative content draws the reader in and captivates them. It bonds them to your message and delivers your brand voice consistently, on target. It delivers an enticing CTA, so your customers want to take that next step.

A company we refer to often and see doing this well is Litmus.  They offer relevant content that can be consumed in a variety of ways – blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, webinars and conferences. For email marketers, Litmus makes it easy to search for content for ideas, grow your talents and troubleshoot common issues.

So how can you incorporate a creative content strategy to improve your email marketing program?

Bring a team of people together who are involved with the following:

• any form of content
• sales
• management
• valued customer

Look at your most recent email campaigns

• tracking
• engagement
• goals of email campaign
• conversion
• all marketing material – supporting or other

and talk.

• what percentage reached your goal for the campaign?
• is the email design clean and consistent with your brand?
• is it engaging?
• what about the content?
• could you have done something different to get the message out in a better way?
• what do you want your audience to do next?

It’s work, but it’s important work.

RootedELM can help identify and provide many of the resources and metrics mentioned to get your team talking. For example, by using Flow we’re able to manage tasks, collaborate and keep the lines of communication open. Below is a snapshot of Flow and an example of our team sharing ideas to keep the content flowing.

1.  Develop a template for each type of email you send.

Sit down and think of every email you’ve sent over the past year. Now add to that any additional campaigns you’re wanting to add over the coming year. This is the minimum number of templates you’re going to need.

Each of these templates are going to look similar while addressing the layout needs of each individual campaign. This allows you to focus on the content of the email without trying to re-invent your email design every time.

2.  Templates can be broken.

Just because you now have templates doesn’t mean you no longer have to worry about specifics. Even the best templates can be broken.

You can place content in the wrong areas, include images of the wrong size or change the suggested font sizes and or colors. Some outdated ESP’s don’t allow for fine grain control over templates because their template language wraps your input. If this is the case for your ESP, then your template might not be able to control font sizes or colors and you might be better off entering your content as HTML instead of through your ESP’s WYSIWYG editor.

If your template needs an image that is a specific dimension, most ESP editors allow for you to place an image of any dimension. Depending on the design of your template, placing the wrong size image could do everything from making the design of your email look bad to breaking the email completely on multiple devices. It’s important to take note of the dimension your images should be and stick to those dimensions.

3.  Create one template that is mostly free form in nature.

There’s always going to be an email that doesn’t exactly fit into the templates you have available. Having a template where only the header and footer of your email are defined permits you to create free form emails. The header and footer for these open templates will adhere to your branding, ensuring the campaign ties in with the other emails you send.

4.  Sometimes a bespoke email is the only way.

Even with an open format template available there will be times – whether it be a holiday sale or special event – that a bespoke email is needed.

In these cases it’s important that the email still retains some of the branding and style from your template campaigns. By keeping things like your font families and sizing of your logo consistent with your template emails, your custom email will look special while maintaining your overall identity.

In Summary: Moving your production from bespoke emails to templates has multiple benefits: it can save you time, provide consistency to campaigns and keep you more focused on content. However, following these key points for creating templates, as well as knowing when to use your templates and when to use a custom design is important to the overall success of your email marketing.

Email templates have always existed within email service providers and outside vendors. Streamline is the word I would use to describe the trend taking place with email templates. This is happening for a couple of reasons: 1) the industry is making it easy for companies to follow best practices with mobile rendering and readability and 2) using a template saves on time and budget while ensuring brand and code consistency.

Choosing the Template:

The College Program is a small company with a tight budget. Their audience is comprised of high school student-athletes and their parents looking for assistance with finding the right college based on a their individual profile. The template I chose, Awesome, Co (see below), is HTML and came from the Litmus template catalog. This template offered quick, bite size chunks of information and was exactly what The College Program needed based on what we’ve learned about their audience through previous Litmus Advanced Analytic tests.

Converting the Template:

I started with the style guide for The College Program, mainly for colors and font. The Director, Tim Twellman, provided me with a variety of facts and snippets of information to include as content. Using a subscription to FlatIcon, I selected relative icons that fit the message and changed the color of the icon to match the branding of The College Program and colors within the email. The header image remained from their previous email template and is sized to optimize mobile rendering, but the background is a solid color to render properly for desktop.  Note: basic HTML knowledge was required to edit this particular template.

Testing is Vital!

Because this template came from Litmus, one might think that it’s already been tested. Change is ongoing within this industry and you still need to test to make sure the campaign looks the best it can on all devices. Plus, changes were made to the code. Using Litmus Builder (as shown below), I am able to edit the existing HTML, images and conduct a rendering test within the same window.

The Results:

With this new template, the client has seen an increase in mobile viewing (above 65%) and an increase in Skimming (engaging between 2 – 8 seconds). Reading stayed the same (engaging 8+ seconds) at 27%. This makes sense based on the email content.

In regards to saving time and consistency, we were able to save 3 hours per campaign. Yes 3 hours! Part of that was in drafting content and placement within the email campaign but the other was sourcing images because we are working with more specific parameters.

You might have noticed I mentioned Litmus quite a bit, not because we’re promoting them but because they’re a partner in every step of our email: email strategy, design and development – whether bespoke or template. Currently most of the email marketing program for The College Program is managed by us, but if that was to change, with a little bit of HTML knowledge, their team would be able to update this template on their own.