Studies show that email marketing is 40x more effective at reeling in new customers than social media. Email marketing makes it easy to nurture long-term relationships and stay aligned with the customers that drive your profits.
But to work properly, you must design your email marketing campaigns just right.
As an email marketer, one of the worst experiences is sending out what you think is a top-notch campaign – only to watch it flop.
From a dearth of opens to no clicks on your CTA, it’s tough when customers don’t engage with your brand. (Not to mention the impact a failed campaign has on your bottom line.)
Many marketers’ struggles boil down to a single factor: poor email design. If your emails don’t balance a vibrant vibe with a clean look, it’s difficult to drive conversions, let alone opens.
That’s where expertly-designed email marketing templates come in!
An email marketing template is what it sounds like: an email template designed for email marketing campaigns.
By tapping into professionally-designed emails, you can produce the same gorgeous emails as the Big Guys without trashing your budget. Plus, you don’t have to spend hours sweating your own campaign visuals or stressing about that plain-text campaign.
Effective email marketing templates split the difference by supplying you with all the designs, styles, and colors you need. All you have to do is change the colors, add your logo, and insert your message.
Best of all, email templates come in a huge variety, so you can select and edit the perfect template to:
Then, all that’s left is to hit “send” and watch your efforts pay off.
Novices and professionals alike may turn to email marketing templates for several reasons. We’ll explore a few of them here.
When you’re fresh out of ideas, email templates can provide the answer or at least inspiration. Even if you don’t use the whole design, it’s important to bring new ideas to the table occasionally.
Sometimes, your marketing team needs a reminder of what works, especially as trends change. Email marketing templates often come field-tested or professionally designed. (Read: they’re proven to work.)
Email templates do half the work for you. All you have to do is download the template, plug in your branding and message, and send the campaign.
Why spend more time and money stressing than you have to?
With email templates, all you have to do is pick the right template, drop in compelling copy, and add images. If need be, you can also customize existing design elements to fit your brand and stay on message.
And since many modern templates are no-code, you don’t need expert coding skills to produce expertly-designed, engaging emails.
One beauty of email templates is that they construct the layout, design, and quality for you. Anyone on your team, from interns to freelancers to career marketers, can write a well-performing email in minutes.
Plus, you can design custom templates for your own team to tweak and personalize later, building consistency from the inside out.
Modern marketing email templates tend to be highly customizable.
Even if you start with a cut-and-paste job, your personal touches can create a unique, conversion-driving email.
Any or all of these make great reasons to incorporate email templates into your strategy. But frankly, you only need one: because you want to.
Literally, dozens of websites provide free email templates that you can download at a whim.
While these can be effective, often, it’s better to sign up with a dedicated service that has a built-in template library.
Of course, there’s no harm in combining strategies and enjoying the best of both worlds.
So, we’ve helpfully rounded up a list of both free email templates and paid template sites for your perusal.
All you have to do is find the templates you like, sign up with the site, and get customizing!
Really Good Emails (RGE for short) aims to be “the best showcase of email design” available. The website boasts an impressive 10,000+ email templates and an inspirational collection library.
RGE sources actual email content and templates from an active user community to help you fulfill your marketing dreams. That means that new emails pop up all the time for you to customize or get inspired by.
You can start with a free account and curate up to three collections, or go Pro for just $9 a month.
HubSpot is a huge name in digital marketing, so it makes sense that they have a few marketing tools lying around.
Users can access around five dozen email marketing templates completely free. HubSpot also boasts a free email marketing template maker in-house, so you can design and save your own templates for future use.
Canva is an online graphic design tool that helps users create social media posts, videos, logos, presentations, and more.
Aside from its hundreds of thousands of templates for every purpose, its stock photo library is truly massive. (While Canva doesn’t split the numbers, it’s safe to assume they have at least a few thousand email templates.)
You can access about 250,000 of their total templates and a hefty portion of their stock images with their free plan. Or you can access 610,000 premium templates and the full image library for just $120 per person, per year.
Cakemail provides another source for free newsletters and email templates to spruce up your email campaigns. All told, Cakemail offers around 55 templates and an easy-to-use platform.
Cakemail’s templates come in a variety of designs, so you can send everything from welcome emails to promotional offers. They also boast a few unique designs alongside more generic templates to give you plenty of choices.
Cakemail pricing is customized to each business, so you don’t have to worry about overpaying for services you don’t need.
ActiveCampaign is a popular email marketing tool that provides a built-in CRM and over 500 automated workflows.
Oh, and their template library isn’t bad either, with about 250 customizable layouts available on all paid plans.
ActiveCampaign offers a free plan with limited abilities and a handful of layouts. Or you can jump in with a paid plan, which starts at just $9 a month for 500 contacts.
BEE Free is a newer email editor that lets users create responsive designs quickly. The site boasts over 1,200 (mostly) unique, highly vibrant templates for all occasions.
BEE Free’s templates live in a handy quick-search menu, so you can find what you need in a flash. From there, it’s all plug, play, and send.
Or if you’re not satisfied with the existing menu, you can submit template ideas to their design team.
BEE Free starts with a free, no-code email and page creation plan for up to 10 emails and pages. Upgrading to their Team plan costs just $30 a month for unlimited projects and content blocks.
Sendinblue offers over 60 fully responsive email templates to all users.
Best of all, there’s no code required. The process is simple: pick a template, customize it with the drag-and-drop editor, and press send.
Advanced users can also take advantage of the WYSIWYG HTML email editor to code their own content from square one.
Sendinblue offers four plans: Free, Lite, Premium, and Enterprise. (The free plan also comes with prebuilt email templates.) The Lite plan starts at $25/month for basic features. Premium kicks it up a notch at $65/month for automation, landing pages, and Facebook ads.
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing software renowned for its ease of use and predesigned template library.
Each design is fully customizable, from the layout to the color scheme and images. (Though free users will have Mailchimp’s branding on their designs.)
Mailchimp users can access a portion of its basic templates on the free plan to get a feel for the service.
If you like what you see, you can switch to the Essentials plan (starting at $11/month) to access all 100 Mailchimp templates.
Stripo is an email design platform that offers over 1,050 fully responsive no-code HTML templates.
Stripo’s emails are built so you don’t need to customize to get a good-looking email – just drop in your message and go. Marketers can also access a library of premade interactive elements like GIFs, countdown timers, and animated buttons.
To enjoy Strip’s premium template options, you can expect to pay at least $15/month.
But bear in mind that unlike the other names on this list, you can’t send emails from Stripo directly. Instead, you can export your designs into the email marketing software of your choice.
For those low on time, money, or ideas, email templates make short work of a crucial process. But if you’re still not sure how well a template can turn out, let’s look at a few examples of effective templates that could drive your ROI from 0 to 60 in a hot minute.
Why it works:
This email from Spotify Design is the perfect balance of color and minimalism.
Simply designed, yet popping off the page, it’s fair that the editors nailed this welcome email.
It’s bright without being excessive, and as soon as you open it, you know who sent it and why.
They even tell you how to unsubscribe immediately in case you made a mistake!
Source: Cakemail Template Library
Why it works:
This abandoned cart email template from Cakemail is the perfect way to ask customers to return without being obnoxious. (Clicks and conversions, here we come.)
The muted color palette does the opposite of what you’d expect by not sparking a sense of excitement. It’s just busy enough to keep the eye without overwhelming, producing a calming effect that reassures customers clicking through is the right move.
Plus, with the CTA conveniently placed beneath the discount and above the upsells, the design pulls double-duty without trying too hard.
Why it works:
As a graphic design facilitator, Canva knows the impact of going simple and letting your work (or product) speak for itself.
That’s exactly what their “Beige Minimalist Fashion Photo Email Newsletter” does.
With your company name, a handful of text, and some beautiful photos, this template puts your products center stage while the text sings backup.
It’s clean, simple, easy on the eye – and a great way to push visuals without overwhelming your audience.
Source: BEE Free’s Template Library
Why it works:
This example from BEE Free shows how a transaction email can straddle the balance between beautiful and business as usual.
The bright text draws your eyes to the most important information, while the images remind customers what’s in the boxes.
All the while, the dark background offsets the small details and makes the email appear clean and easy to read.
Why it works:
A little customer feedback goes a long way to helping businesses improve their brands – so what does mass-produced feedback get you?
That’s what this feedback email template aims to find out.
Unfortunately, feedback emails come with one big problem: customers really don’t like to click through multiple pages for a business benefit.
Fortunately, this email template solves that problem, too. By including a clickable feedback mechanism right in the email, you make your customers’ jobs quick and easy.
And even if the link redirects to a longer survey, your customers have already begun the process. Chances are, they’ll finish it.
Keep an eye out for changes in your email marketing metrics, and make sure to constantly improve your campaigns!
There are a few things you’ll need to consider when creating an email marketing template:
1. The purpose of the email – what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to promote a new product, announce a sale, or simply stay in touch with your customers?
2. The target audience – who will you be sending the email to? Make sure your template is designed with your target audience in mind.
3. The content – what will you include in the email? Will you be including text, images, or both?
4. The design – how will you lay out the content? Will you use a single-column or multi-column layout?
Email marketing templates are pre-designed email layouts that you can use to easily create and send marketing emails. Most email marketing platforms (such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, or AWeber) offer a library of free and paid email templates that you can use to get started with your email campaigns.
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