Modular Email Design: Evolving the Design Process

Modular email design is much more than the simple reuse of prebuilt snippets across different campaigns. Today, modules offer an innovative approach that can help email marketers save time on testing, create newsletters faster, maintain brand consistency, and stop stressing over last-minute changes. 

What are modules?

So, what are basic modules (aka snippets) all about? Modules are independent email elements (headers, footers, banners, product card modules, etc.) that share a common design but have different structures, contents, and goals. Thus, they can easily be customized and rearranged to construct templates for different email campaigns. 

Imagine your collection of modules as a warehouse you can visit to collect the bricks necessary to build various skyscrapers. Snippets help you repurpose content and save time on the email design process: You can create an email element once and then reuse it for your next email marketing campaign.  

Why you should opt for modular email design today

Besides the basic benefits I mentioned above, snippets also offer marketers advanced functionality to elevate the email design process. Here are the key advanced benefits of modular email design:

• Maintain brand consistency without hassle. Modules include preapproved color schemes, styles, fonts, and structures, so you don’t need to check your brand guidelines every time you create an email. Even when the employee responsible for email creation is out of the office, another team member can jump in and build emails that look on-brand.
• Produce emails faster. With an extensive library of modules (the warehouse) at hand, email marketers won’t have to ask designers to create content elements from scratch every time. Instead, they can simply collect the necessary bricks from the warehouse and bring them to the construction site (the email) to assemble a newsletter. Thus, marketers and designers can focus on performance and strategic tasks instead of email layouts. 
• Save time on email testing. You can create modules once and pretest them with various email clients and devices. Once you confirm that your modules are rendered correctly, you can reuse them across email campaigns without worrying about layout issues, broken designs, or inconsistent formatting. 
• Update email elements easily with synchronized modules. If your career requires creating emails, you are probably familiar with having to make frequent adjustments (updating product info, changing a banner to add a holiday touch, and other content tweaks). Well, this is no longer a problem if you use synchronized modules. You can simply update the module once and the changes will be applied to all the templates where you used this module—rushed edits and urgent updates will no longer lead to mistakes. 

The Modules+ approach: Design and data operating independently

Now, let’s move on to the more advanced approach. Modules+ reimagines the philosophy of modular email design and transforms your email production experience. In this approach, I see a module as a content unit where the data are dissociated from the design—they operate independently from each other. 

This dissociation means that you can tweak the module design as you like without altering the data. Or, you can update only the dynamic content in the module (data), while the design style will remain as it was.

Why do you need the Modules+ approach?

When an email marketer has to deal with games or dynamic, interactive content in emails, such tasks require coding. This leaves two options: The marketer either has to learn how to code (which takes time away from honing their marketing skills) or contact a developer for every tiny change, since it’s bound to the data. 

With the Modules+ approach, in which data and design are separated, email marketers can make any design adjustments without altering the data. I think it’s also crucial to make email marketers even more independent by making sure they can pull data into an email automatically. Developers will have to set up links and variables only once, and then marketers can adjust data as needed—no coding skills required!

Key benefits of the Modules+ approach

Now, let’s take a closer look at the Modules+ approach and explore the key benefits it offers marketers:

• “Lock” the design

Maintaining brand consistency across campaigns is a challenge. Fonts may shift, button colors might look different, and overall email layouts can drift from your brand book. With modules, you can solve this problem once and for all.

Once you have equipped your module with ideal design solutions and styles, you can lock it. As a result, it doesn’t matter how many times you update the module data—the design elements will stay intact, and the modules will represent your brand’s look.

• “Lock” the data
  
  

When a marketer needs to tweak design elements, it’s often necessary to dig into the code and risk corrupting the data to make visual updates. With modules, email marketers can refine the design while keeping data safe. 

Here, we have the same logic—you can lock the module data and adjust the design as much as you wish while maintaining the data in your module via an untouched link. This feature is a must-have when you must tinker with buttons, text colors, or font sizes without altering valuable content.

• Add dynamic content to provide personalized emails

Dynamic content changes based on who opens your emails and when and where they do so. (For example, a recipient in New York might get a promo email with winter jackets, while a subscriber from Florida will see summer clothing). Dynamic content varies with display conditions—the parameters that let you change email content displayed to subscribers after hitting “Send.” You can create a collection of display conditions and choose the necessary tools when needed. 

However, email marketers often avoid using dynamic content in newsletters, as it requires working with complex code and variables. When developers add variables to an email, it can be challenging to properly preview. The design gets mixed with the logic, and marketers can no longer tweak visual elements. If there are different text lengths, or you lack some product info, your email might break. You can’t then use standard testing tools to check it, as you can’t view the live data. 

With the Module+ approach, you can overcome this issue by modifying the email and viewing it exactly as it will appear to your subscribers. Data are inserted at runtime, so email marketing specialists can tweak the design if necessary.