Overwhelmed by your email frequency and volume? You’re not alone. According to Litmus, almost 55% of companies have six or more emails in production at the same time. If production demands are high, email complexities are even higher. Email On Acid found that 71.8% of companies plan on spending more time on email production this year.

If you’re an email marketer spending significant time coding, building, and testing each email send, STOP what you’re doing and download our Modular Email Design Cheat Sheet. Using modular email design, you boost email quality, while cutting email build time by as much as half. See how it works!

What is Modular Email Design?

Modular email design enables users to build flexible templates using modular “building blocks.” Email modules are pre-tested snippets of code laid on top of each other like Lego blocks that fit nicely together. Swapping modules in and out allows for endless combinations of email layouts and designs. Ready for the kicker? With modular design, you don’t have to code and test the modules each time.

Modular design takes planning, coding, and stringent testing in advance, but then frees your email team to repeatedly reuse the modules for all email and design needs. Our clients using modular design have cut their email production time in half – check out a case study to see how we did this for Ferguson Enterprises!

Why Should You Use Modular Email Design?

Modular email design makes the email production process easy and significantly less time consuming. By testing the modules in advance, you’re no longer spending time fixing line breaks or irritating rendering issues across different email clients or mobile devices. Your designers can instead focus on email strategy, compelling copy, and eye-catching imagery instead of rendering and formatting issues. Say goodbye to the days of spending hours coding each email, and hello to the days of pre-tested code modules that can be swapped in and out of emails in a fraction of the time!

How Can I Get Started with Modular Email Design?

Have you decided you want to try modular design out? To excel at modular design, you need to think through your email template and module needs to ensure you build flexible email layouts. We’ll break the steps down for you:

Step 1: Look through emails you’ve recently sent and figure out what’s working and what’s not. Are some parts of your emails getting more clicks than others? Is your audience ignoring elements in your navigation or overlooking calls-to-action? What parts of your emails is your audience interacting with?

Step 2: Compile the best parts of your emails and any need-to-have elements. This is where you’ll begin designing email modules to swap in and out of your email templates. Only keep the elements that have been working within your existing emails.

Step 3: Once you choose your modules – code and thoroughly test them. We recommend using a testing tool, like Litmus or Email on Acid, to ensure your modules render correctly across devices and ESPs. We suggest building responsive modules, so every email you send looks great regardless of screen size.

Step 4: Design, build, and test your templates. We typically build standardized headers and footers, and a master body that includes all our flexible modules. Test the templates for rendering and coding issues.

Step 5: Once you’ve thoroughly tested your modules and templates, you’re ready! Add in the modules like building blocks, change up copy and imagery, and enjoy your endless variations of email designs.

Download our Modular Email Design Cheat Sheet

If you’d like additional help, get our Modular Email Design Cheat Sheet. The cheat sheet includes an email modules guide to help you brainstorm module types, examples of what those modules look like in real emails, and a checklist to use when creating your own modular emails. Get ready to boost email quality and decrease email production time!

If you get stuck, contact us and we’ll walk you through the steps. We’ve built a modular email design tool, Code Perfect, that lets you add modules and customize layouts with a simple mouse click. See what everyone’s saying about Code Perfect and get a free demo of Code Perfect.