Five questions to ask yourself about your email template
A well-chosen template saves time and keeps your emails consistent. But templates can become stale, the layout that worked well two years ago may not reflect how your audience reads email today, or how your brand has evolved. These five questions help you evaluate whether your current template is still serving you well.
1. Does your template get a regular check-up?
Email clients update their rendering engines frequently, often without announcement. A template that looked perfect in Outlook two years ago may have broken elements today. Check your template in Message Check at least once per quarter, and after any major email client update. Look specifically at your spacing, font rendering, image alignment, and button styles, these are the elements most likely to change behaviour across client updates.
2. Is your template mobile-first?
More than half of all emails are now read on mobile devices. If your template was designed for desktop and adapted for mobile, it may still feel like a compromise on small screens. Review the mobile preview of your template critically: Is the text large enough to read without zooming? Are buttons large enough to tap easily? Does the layout feel intentional rather than squished?
3. Does your template reflect your current brand?
If your brand has evolved, new colours, a new logo, updated typography, your email template should reflect that. An email that looks out of step with your website and other marketing materials creates a subtle inconsistency that erodes trust. Check your Brand kit settings in Flexmail and make sure the template inherits the right values.
4. Is the layout still appropriate for your content?
A three-column layout works beautifully for a product catalogue but feels cramped for a thought leadership newsletter. If your content strategy has shifted since your template was created, consider whether the layout still serves it. The structure of your template should make your content easier to read, not harder.
5. Is your template easy to use?
If filling in your template takes more than 15 minutes per campaign, something is wrong. A good template should be quick to update, clear sections, obvious placeholders, no need to fix formatting issues every time. If your team dreads using it, it's slowing you down. Simplify.
Support tip Schedule a template review at the start of every new year or marketing quarter. It's much easier to update your template as part of a planned process than to fix it urgently after you notice something is broken in the middle of a campaign.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Updating the template mid-campaign. If your template breaks or needs updating, make the fix before your next send rather than changing it while a campaign is in progress.
- Skipping Message Check after a brand update. Even small changes, a new brand colour, a logo file swap, can cause unexpected rendering issues. Always run Message Check after any template change.
- Over-designing the template. The more complex the layout, the harder it is to maintain and the more likely it is to break across email clients. Simpler templates are more resilient.
- Using a template across very different content types without adjusting it. A newsletter template and a transactional confirmation have different requirements. Don't force all your communications into one template if they have meaningfully different purposes.
Next steps
- Run Message Check on your current template to check for rendering issues.
- Open your Brand kit in Settings and verify your template colours and fonts are up to date.
- Review your mobile preview in the Email builder, use the device toggle at the top of the canvas.