Whether you’re running an online discussion group, managing casework in a legal firm, or an e-commerce company looking to drive more leads and sales – email is an important channel for helping you connect and communicate with your audience.
However, many people underestimate the amount of time it can take to create an effective email.
If you’re creating each email from scratch, it can be quite a time-consuming process, especially if you’re trying to make it suitable for all device sizes and include visual assets like images and videos.
This is where email templates can be useful.
Email templates provide you with a ready-made layout for your emails – so anyone wanting to send an email from your account only needs to focus on the content and doesn’t have to worry about the structure and design.
In this article, we’re going to look at the benefits of using email templates and the steps you can take to ensure your email templates are efficient and effective.
What are the benefits of using email templates?
By using email templates, you’re able to save a lot of valuable business time, ensure brand consistency, and reduce the risk of errors in your emails.
Let’s take a look at these benefits in a little more detail.
Save time
If you have an existing layout and structure for your email, it means you no longer need to start from scratch for every new email you send.
This makes the process of sending regular group emails or marketing emails far more efficient.
By using email templates to streamline your workflow, you can more quickly create professional, engaging emails for your audience.
Ensure a consistent brand experience
Using email templates also helps you maintain a consistent look and feel across all your emails.
By using templates to ensure all your emails have the same layout and color scheme, you can be confident that every email you send aligns with your brand’s identity.
You don’t have to worry about other people within your organization going ‘rogue’ and sending out emails that don’t have the right visual representation of your brand.
By delivering consistent ‘on brand’ emails, you can build a sense of familiarity and trust with your audience.
Reduce the risk of errors
If you’re creating every email from scratch, it can increase the likelihood of errors occurring.
Given the fast-paced nature of business, it’s difficult to guarantee that every email will be tested across multiple browsers and email clients.
When you start working from email blast templates, you only need to make sure that the layout and structure of your template displays as they should on all devices. This testing and optimization process only needs to happen once.
Then, as long as your team uses your thoroughly tested templates to build their emails, you can have confidence that every email that goes out will display correctly for every member of your audience.
When building email templates, it’s common for businesses to make areas like the email footer uneditable.
So by building a footer in your templates that includes all legally required information like registered company address and unsubscribe link, you can have the peace of mind that all your compliance requirements are being met, every time an email is sent out.
Reduce costs
If your business currently uses a design agency or freelance designer to create each email, switching to email templates can deliver significant cost savings.
Using email templates reduces the need for professional design services.
Once a template is created, it can be reused repeatedly – saving you the expense of hiring a professional for every email you send.
What are the key things to consider for an effective email template?
Your email blast templates are going to form the basis for dozens, if not hundreds, of future emails.
So, it’s important to invest the right amount of time and attention to detail to ensure that you get them right.
Let’s take a look at some of the key things you’ll want to consider when you’re designing your email templates:
Make it responsive
Responsive design means that your email can automatically adjust its layout based on the size of the screen on which it is being viewed.
For example, a multi-column layout that looks great on a desktop might turn into a single column on a smartphone, making it easier for users to scroll through the content.
With the increasing number of emails being accessed on mobiles, this is best practice email design in 2025, and helps ensure your email looks professional and is easy to read whether it’s viewed on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
By using responsive design in your email templates, you can ensure that all your subscribers receive the best possible user experience.
Include consistent branding
By consistently incorporating your brand logo, color schemes, and fonts in your email templates, you can ensure that every email your business sends complements your brand.
When you’re putting your email template together, consider placing your logo in a prominent position, such as the header, to make sure it’s always visible as soon as subscribers open your emails.
The colors and fonts you use in your email template design should also align with your website and social media channels to create a consistent cross-channel experience for your subscribers. By making sure your emails deliver visuals your audience is familiar with, you can build trust and actually improve email performance.
You can obviously have more than one email template – and sometimes it’s good to allow your team to have the flexibility of a number of template layouts to choose from when building their emails.
However, it’s also worth bearing in mind that there are benefits to maintaining a similar structure for each email, as it delivers a sense of familiarity and helps your audience quickly find the information they need when they open your email.
Make the layout simple and easy to read
When you’re building a template that will form the basis for a lot of your future business emails – it’s important to prioritise a clean, simple and uncluttered design that is easy for your subscribers to read and understand.
It’s important to include white space around your content, to make it easier for your subscribers to scan and absorb the information in your email. It’s suggested that the effective use of white space can improve comprehension by up to 20%, so it’s something to really think carefully about in your email templates.
Another area to focus on in your templates is the use of clear headings and subheadings.
Your headings act as ‘signposts’ to guide your subscribers through your email content – so making sure they are clear and distinctive within your design is key.
Your email template can also define your ‘visual hierarchy’, which is the way you arrange your design elements like headings, images and CTAs in a way that guides the reader’s eye through the content in a logical order.
Use legible fonts and font sizes
Ensure that the font sizes in your template are large enough so that all your business emails are easily readable on all devices.
In addition to font size, try to choose fonts that are clean and easy to read. Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are popular choices for email content because they are simple and legible.
It’s also best practice not to go overboard on the use of different fonts in your email template design.
Using more than two fonts in an email can appear cluttered and confusing. It’s generally best to stick to one font for headings and another for body text to deliver a consistent and professional look for your emails.
Build accessibility into the template
Building accessibility into your email templates is essential if you’re going to make sure that all your business emails can reach the widest possible audience and remain compliant with accessibility guidelines.
One of the most important areas to consider is ensuring it’s easy for all team members to add ALT text to images when creating new emails from your template. ALT text provides a description of each image in your email that screen readers can read aloud to visually impaired users.
Your email template design should also have good contrast between text and background colors, as this is really important for the readability of your emails.
Before you sign off on your email template and start using it to build emails across your business, it’s worth completing tests to ensure it meets accessibility standards. This can help you identify and fix any issues before rolling them out.
Include an effective footer
The email footer is often overlooked when it comes to email design – but it’s a really critical part of your email templates.
For your emails to be compliant with legislation, your email footer must contain certain information, such as your company address, registered company name, and an unsubscribe link. Making sure these legal requirements are in your email newsletter templates helps ensure every business you send will be compliant.
Your email footer is also the last thing that subscribers might see when scrolling through your email, so you might consider including things like customer testimonials, a CTA to visit your website, or even social media icons to encourage subscribers to visit your social channels.
Test your template in popular email clients
Every email client has a different way of displaying emails, which can sometimes lead to inconsistencies in how your email is viewed by your subscribers.
For example, an email that looks perfect in Gmail might have formatting issues in Outlook.
Tools like Litmus allow you to preview your email in a wide range of different email clients and devices so you can see exactly how it will appear to your subscribers.
By testing and fixing any issues in your email marketing templates, you can have confidence that any emails created using your template should display correctly..
Looking for an easy way to send group emails or marketing emails?
Email templates are crucial if your business wants to save time, ensure brand consistency, and reduce errors in the emails it sends to subscribers.
By investing in email templates, you and your team can focus on creating engaging content for your audience without worrying about the design and structure of each email.
With full support for HTML email templates, Simplelists is an intuitive, user-friendly platform for managing your group emails and marketing campaigns.
You can send emails using your own domain, segment your audiences at a granular level, and sync with your other business tools for easy, hassle-free management of your email lists.
Ready to simplify the way you manage your email? Sign up for a free 1-month trial of Simplelists today.