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Email best practices

The many uses and benefits of email templates explained

There are many templates for many different types of marketing email. But which one is right for you? We’ll run through all the options and benefits to help you decide.

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Stop us if we're describing you: Your team thrives when producing highly professional email campaigns and communication materials. You all geek out over everything analytics and love tweaking your content and subject lines to optimize the best results and improve your brand’s CRM. But you're also too pressed for time to create new emails from square one each time you need to hit send. Sound about right?

Let's start by talking about what an email template is and the advantages of using one.

What is an email template?

An email draft template is a sample email with the assets already in place. Using a simple email template, all you need to do is drop in the missing details.

Using an email format template presents six key advantages, including:

  1. Streamlining your brand's format and communication aesthetic

  2. Giving you more time to focus on email personalization by taking care of those pesky details

  3. Empowering you to maintain a consistent corporate or brand voice and vibe

  4. Providing guardrails that bring down your chances of making a mistake

  5. Supplying customizable email configurations to help keep similar messaging feeling continuously fresh

  6. Automating emails to ensure that your audience is consistently engaged

A new or existing template loaded with your brand’s chosen headers and fonts can increase your open rates and generate sales.

What are email templates used for?

Deciding what is the best customizable email template depends on your objectives in any given situation. Choosing carefully will maximize your results. For example, re-engagement emails are usually short and sweet, with some images for personalization and succinct copy designed to win back the heart of a consumer you last heard from a while ago. On the other hand, someone who’s signed up to receive your emails daily will want more depth and content.

When thinking about which email template to use, ask yourself what you're trying to achieve. So let's explore six different types of email templates and their purposes.

1. Newsletter email

Newsletter emails educate and inform your audience. This is your company's opportunity to take a lap and humblebrag about your accomplishments or updates. Did you announce a new product, series of apps, or service? Make a charitable donation? Get mentioned by a celebrity as their favorite discovery? After reading your newsletter email, your audience should be more interested in your brand and, as a result, more inclined to purchase.

2. Welcome email

Welcome emails are a new consumer’s first impression of your company. They’re usually sent as a cordial greeting after someone makes a purchase or subscribes to a service you offer, like your newsletter. Marketers can use these emails to build upon their relationship with a customer, strengthening their relationship with the brand and gently guiding them towards making another purchase.

3. Promotion email

Promotional emails spread an exciting new offer about your brand's goods and services. Maybe you're running a "two for the price of one" campaign. What if everything is "30% off" store-wide? Are you offering a free product after a customer spends a certain amount? A potential customer might have been on the fence about your brand for some time, but a well-crafted promotional email can be just the nudge they need to get through the door.

4. Re-engagement email

When a customer or lead goes cold, these emails can prod them to keep opening your emails and guide them back to interacting with your brand. Mailjet's requalification email sending template can help you create a re-engagement campaign to ask your audience if they still want to receive your marketing content.

Pro tip: Make sure that the unsubscribe option is obvious to simplify the opt-out process, should they make that decision. Your audience will be much happier with receiving emails from you when they know they've chosen to accept them in the first place. Plus, if they receive too many emails, they might flag you as spam – which you want to avoid.

5. Cart abandonment email

Keep this trick up your sleeve for when a budding customer leaves the items in their digital cart unattended. If you run a brand that offers a product or service, you know better than anyone that fighting the competition can feel like swimming against the current. It is heartbreaking to break through the noise only to have your hard-earned customer walk away from their checkout cart. Thankfully, an email subscriber can be gently coaxed back to their incomplete purchase with a cart abandonment email.

6. Order receipt email 

Once the customer makes a purchase, the merchant, who has collected their email address, sends an email confirming the deal's completion. The average person is familiar with these transactional emails. In the modern business climate, customers expect that purchasing comes with a corresponding notification in their inbox.

The difference between these and promotional emails is that they are only sent to one customer directly, correlated with a decision or purchase.

Find the perfect email template with Mailjet

Since you began sending emails, you've worked hard at creating a look and feel for every message. Mailjet’s features will empower you to stay consistent across all your emails.

If you're considering stepping up your marketing game, we'd love to help. Our template generator comes with 14 free email design templates ready to go at launch, and our easy-to-use and straightforward interface makes it easy to upload or create custom HTML templates. When you’re ready to launch your digital marketing campaign, simply drag and drop your assets and HTML files. We’ll take care of the rest.

With Mailjet, you can use CSS and custom HTML email templates, but we also have a simple drag-and-drop Email Editor. You can bring in your developers or leave them at home.

Custom email templates eliminate the obstacles surrounding developing creative branding to support your marketing campaigns. Become an email marketing campaign master by working smarter (not harder) with Mailjet.

Start sending your newsletters with Mailjet

Mailjet provides a completely free newsletter platform covering every step of the process – from beautiful ready-to-use email templates, a drag-and-drop Email Editor, and flawless sending and analysis. Just create your content and let us take care of getting it to the inbox.

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