Modular email templates are a godsend.
If you’ve spent even a hot minute in email marketing, you can’t not know modular email templates. Or why experts won’t stop raving about them.
Modular email design started as a trend but soon turned into a necessity.
But, faster email production is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the why.
While email is a powerhouse marketing tactic, it also throws curveballs at marketers trying to capitalize on its prevalence.
Email’s sweeping usage also means you’re trying to stand out in a pitch-black room, wearing a jet-black suit. That’s your customer’s inbox, crowded with lookalike email designs that have stopped captivating anyone for ages.
Your audience, who suffers from an ADHD-ish attention span like all of us, has higher expectations and zero tolerance for irrelevant content.
Even when they do engage, they won’t convert overnight. You need to guide them patiently, with consistent, well-timed messages that guide them smoothly through their customer journey.
Then there’s the automation paradox.
Email is the top-used channel for marketing automation, which should make life easier… but doesn’t always. More automation means more versions, more personalization, more pressure.
Email designers are expected to move faster, juggle more assets, and still maintain brand consistency across every campaign. And for teams working across multiple audiences—or worse, multiple clients—it’s easy to burn out with the complexity.
That’s where modular email templates shine. We’ve been trained to think that great email design has to be a struggle. Modular email templates say otherwise.
This article outlines the most common email design struggles marketers face and demonstrates how modular email templates can help address them.
But before going into the crux of the topic, let’s quickly brush up on the basics.
What Is A Modular Email Template?
TL;DR:
A modular email template is a flexible, reusable framework composed of reusable modules or blocks, such as headers, footers, product cards, CTAs, and more.
It’s easier to understand module email design as a custom email Lego set. A lego set that lets you build a design without starting from scratch every time. You stack pre-designed modules into branded, high-performing emails faster. That needs you to lift, shift, and drop these pre-coded elements into your email editor.
Wait, isn’t that just a regular template?
Not really.
A regular email template is a fixed layout. You select one template, enter your content, and make any necessary customizations before sending. Sounds convenient—until you need to build five different emails for five different goals… yesterday.
Whereas, a modular email template isn’t a fixed wireframe. It’s a whole design system you can build on. It’s made up of individual modules or content blocks. You can mix, match, rearrange, and reuse the modules based on the email’s objective.
Modules play versatile roles. From headers and footers to product showcases, banners, social icons, and main content blocks. Plus, they’re customizable.
Can I use modules to design a series of modular email templates for various campaigns?
Most definitely.
“Once you’ve created your email modules, you can swap them around to be in any order. No more being stuck to one template with the same beats,” confirms Aileen O’Brien, Email Developer at Dyspatch
Whether it’s your weekly newsletter, a promotional email, or transactional emails, modules are easy to shuffle into endless combinations across countless email campaigns.
Let’s say you’ve built a modular template with these pieces:
- Header
- Hero image
- Product module
- CTA block
- Social links
- Footer
For a newsletter, your CTA might read “Read Now” and lead to your latest blog. For a promo email, swap the image, update the copy, and change the CTA to “Shop Now”. No redesigning. No coding.
Here’s the difference between pre-built email templates and modular email templates.
| Regular Template | Modular Email Template | |
| Design Layout | One fixed design | Many flexible content blocks (modules) |
| Customization | Hard to adapt quickly | Easily rearranged and reused |
| Reusability | Used as-is across campaigns | Remixable for different goals |
| Speed | Slower, manual edits each time | Faster, drag-and-drop assembly |
| Scalability | Limited | Built to scale across teams |
In summary, what is a modular email template?
A modular email format is a system of content-filled building blocks, ready for you to stack and arrange as needed. The flexibility lets you customize your email template without having to toy with the code of the blocks themselves.
The Biggest Headaches in Traditional Email Design (And How Modular Templates Fix Them)
- The time suck of the traditional email design process
The elephant in the email team’s cabin: email design takes time. How much could it be?
For 62% of email teams, two weeks or more to build one email. Even the 21% teams that are “fast” ones spend a full week.
And now factor in multiple versions, with up to 5 emails in production at any given time, clients demanding faster rollouts, and internal teams clamoring for reusable templates.
Some brands, in their rush to get emails out the door, even compromise on personalization, interactivity, A/B testing, and in some cases, HTML itself—just to save time. But speed at the cost of performance is never ideal.
How does a modular email format help?
Instead of designing email templates from scratch each time, you build them with a library of pre-built modules. Plus, because your modules are pre-tested, you’re not wasting hours QA’ing every tiny update.
“Moving to a modular email system completely transformed how I work. Tasks that used to take me hours are now done in half the time—sometimes even in just 10 minutes,” says Carin Slater, who is Email and Content Growth Marketing Manager at Litmus.
- The never-ending cycle of email testing
It’s not just designing the email that eats up time. Testing can be just as demanding, and sometimes even more so.
In traditional email design, especially when you’re working with HTML templates, every small change can throw off your layout, changing how emails render across email clients and devices. And for mobile-responsive designs, it’s quite risky, as 71.5% of consumers check emails on mobile devices.
As Oleksandr Dieiev, Email Marketing Specialist at Stripo, explains, full email testing in traditional workflows is more than an hour’s task. Mostly consumed by fixing bugs and correcting rendering issues.
That’s not the case with modular email format. That’s because, when you use pre-tested, pre-coded modules, your layout is already optimized for rendering and responsiveness. Now, you only need to check the links, copy, and basic functionality, which makes testing a job in a fraction of the time, often 10-15 minutes, says Oleksandr.
Important>> smart testing ≠ no testing
It’s fine to skip testing simple, static modules, such as headers or footers. However, if your modular email template utilizes dynamic or complex blocks—such as product cards, carousels, or personalized elements—it’s worth conducting a final test.
- Maintaining brand consistency is easier said than done
Maintaining consistent branding across all emails is a significant undertaking. If you’re building emails from scratch each time, you will inevitably have to double-check brand guides, manually applying fonts, buttons, and colors.
That’s not what it looks like while using modular email templates. Your brand design elements are already baked in pre-coded modules. Every time you drag in a module, you’re applying brand standards automatically.
- Dependency for coding and technical skills
Traditionally, changing even one element in an email design meant begging a developer. Modular email templates eliminate that dependency.
Once your modules are custom-built and tested by a developer, that’s it. You save them to your library, and your marketing team can reuse them until doomsday. No coding, no bottlenecks.
Even if you want a developer to create a unique module, they only need to do it once. After that, it’s yours to drag, drop, and deploy across all your campaigns.
As Matthew Smith, Co-founder of Really Good Emails, puts it, teams no longer need every player involved in every email. Design and dev teams check in periodically for broader updates, not daily edits.
- High design costs for one-time email templates
Often, traditional email templates are created or purchased for a single campaign and then shelved. Those costs add up fast, going forward.
On the other hand, with modular email templates, you pay once for a flexible design system. Then, reuse and rearrange modules across all campaigns.
The result? Lower email production costs and allocate more budget for strategy and testing.
Wrapping Up
From slow production cycles and endless testing to rising design costs and inconsistent branding, traditional email production workflows come with baggage.
All that can be sidestepped with modular email templates.
They accelerate production, streamline testing, and enable you to scale campaigns. Without burning out your team or your budget.
And the best part? You don’t have to do it alone.
With experts like Email Mavericks, modular email design becomes even easier. With expert-designed, flexible, reusable modular email template systems, you can 2X your email production speed and cut unnecessary costs.
