CRM Tips 3 Email templates

CRM Tip #3: Simplify and reuse your email templates

In this article, discover how to reuse email templates from your full-base campaigns for your targeted campaigns, to speed up and simplify your creative process.

Florian Jomain

Digital Content Manager

Time to read7 min read
May 17, 2021

We’ve all dreamed of being artists at one point or another. But not everyone can be creative in the workplace.

At Tinyclues, we talk to our customers every day to understand their needs and identify the best possible ways to help them improve their CRM practices.

So we’ve written a series of articles that aim to help CRM marketers fuel their CRM schedules with targeted campaigns and optimize their campaign creation processes.

Here is the third article in this series, which offers the following advice: no need to reinvent the wheel with every campaign. Repurpose your email templates in follow-up campaigns to speed up your creative process!

What marketers think about the email creation process

A few months ago, we surveyed more than 100 CRM marketers from around the world about their CRM practices and team organization as part of The State of CRM 2021 report.

In particular, we looked at email creation processes, namely:

  1. How long does it take to create an email campaign?
  2. How is the creation of campaign designs managed?

The time it takes to create an email campaign

Forty percent of respondents to our survey said that the best-equipped companies took less than two days to create a campaign, in the context of email creation, from idea to launch.

This quick turnaround indicates that the best CRM teams are generally very agile and can respond to requests from their hierarchy at very short notice.

More importantly, this data shows that CRM teams must often respond to significant business pressures and produce quickly to meet a defined need.

Just under 27% of respondents indicated that the second most common timeframe for creating a campaign was one to two weeks. It is easy for us to attribute this duration to a campaign planned further upstream, a regular appointment on a promotional campaign schedule.

Who creates the email campaigns?

Next, we looked at the design and integration of campaign emails.

Forty percent of respondents to the survey indicated that they use the creative teams of their digital marketing department, into which CRM activities are often integrated. CRM marketers therefore call on shared, in-house resources that are most familiar with the brand and its graphic universe.

Thirty-four percent of respondents also answered that they have integrated campaign creation functions within their CRM departments and use email template creation tools to prepare their campaigns.

Let’s make the following hypothesis: the maturity of a CRM team is measured by the speed of its campaign release and the efficiency of its creation process.

All too often, teams spend an inordinate amount of time creating new email templates that will never be reused in future campaigns, preventing them from focusing on optimizing their existing templates to deliver a better experience to their customer base.

On repurposing email templates

Clearly identified in our study, this problem is also regularly mentioned by the clients we work with on a daily basis.

The time wasted in creating new email templates is significant and marketers are always looking for new ways to feed their CRM calendar.

So we’re proposing what is, in our opinion, the simplest and most effective solution: use the optimized email templates of full-base campaigns as a framework for follow-up campaigns throughout the week.

As we shared in a previous article, a good way to enrich your campaign planning is to create intelligent and ultra-targeted follow-up campaigns for particular subsets of your customer base.

Tinyclues has the distinct advantage of being able to identify the perfect customer segments for any product or offer in your catalog once you’ve defined your follow-up themes with Tinyclues, all you have to do is integrate your targeted campaigns into your full-base email template, and capitalize on the creative work already done by your teams.

The method is very simple:

  1. Launch your full-base campaigns according to your commercial and strategic priorities
  2. Identify the products with high potential in your full-base newsletter
  3. Generate with Tinyclues your audiences corresponding to the identified products
  4. Integrate the corresponding product visuals into the email template of your full base campaign
  5. Your smart follow-up campaign is ready!

Some examples of email templates generated by our clients

Let’s take a look at how Tinyclues clients are applying this method, starting with Bexley, an in-store and online retailer of men’s fashion apparel and accessories.

In this example, Bexley sent out a full-base campaign on the theme of autumn colors, with a multitude of product categories: jackets, blazers, sweaters, shoes, leather pants…

Thanks to Tinyclues, the Bexley team was able to identify 3 product categories to highlight for their follow-up campaigns:

  1. Dawson brand shoes
  2. Sweaters and scarves
  3. Corduroy pants

Email Template Bexley

The email template of the full-base campaign was repurposed and therefore simplified the creation of the follow-up campaigns.

In the travel industry

This method applies to all sectors, from retail to travel.

Transavia is a perfect example!

After a generic full-base campaign, the CRM team generated destination-focused campaigns with Tinyclues, sent only to a small portion of the base most likely to travel to these destinations, on the dates of the promotion.

Email Template Transavia

Some thoughts about email templates adapted to targeted campaigns

The two previous examples showcase some common features that are crucial to the adaptation of full-base templates to targeted campaigns:

  • Large and centered main images
  • Powerful titles
  • A few examples of the product being promoted – or a few photos of the selected destination
  • A single call to action

Contrary to a full-base campaign with a diversity of content, topics, and descriptions, the objective of targeted campaigns is to concentrate the attention and the purchase act on a single element.

So stay focused on your product!

Adaptations of your full-base email template should be minor, as most of the content to be showcased already exists within your original email framework.

Email Template

The benefits of repurposing email templates

Repurposing your full-base templates provides myriad opportunities to optimize the production of emails and nurture campaign planning, without fearing creative breakdown.

Indeed, this method will allow you to :

  • Take advantage of the power of Tinyclues’ best-in-class targeting capabilities
  • Increase Efficiencies: Accelerate your processes and launch more campaigns, faster
  • Increase Relevancy: Optimize your email templates and offer a better experience to your customers

And we know that happy customers are loyal customers, generating retention revenue for your business.

Jackpot! 🎰

In the coming weeks, we’ll wrap up this series by showcasing how best to use Tinyclues’ analytics and reporting tools to create high-impact campaigns while remaining customer-centric.

Stay tuned!

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