Emilia Gette serves as a marketing associate at Workast, specializing in crafting innovative strategies to engage with the audience. With a focus on creativity and attention to detail, she contributes to driving impactful results across various marketing channels.
Modern email marketing without automation is like a lion in the zoo—powerful, but powerless. The real strength of email today doesn’t come from raw force, but from systems that let it move freely.
As businesses face mountains of customer data and rising demands for personalization, automation is being seen as their caped superhero that battles the villains of manual work and wasted time.
In fact, 58% of marketers use automation for email marketing. Automated emails set you free from repetitive tasks, scale campaigns without extra hands, and make every interaction tailored.
And a critical moving part of email automation workflows is email template design.
Anyone who uses email templates knows how drastically these pre-built structures reduce the time and manual effort that goes into designing emails from ground zero every time an email campaign is to be sent.
In this blog, we’ll share 10 proven email template design tips that don’t just make your emails look good, but also make your automation workflows faster, smarter, and more productive.
Whether you have an in-house team or partner with email template design services, the truth is if you don’t design email templates properly, your team ends up either:
Building low-quality emails that damage your credibility, or
Getting bottlenecked because emails pile up waiting for someone to “fix it,” and disrupting your workflow.
It means you have to consider the following email template design practices—
Clutter is automation’s enemy. When email workflows shoot multiple emails in sequence—like welcome, onboarding, or re-engagement—the design has to be simple and effective.
Brands have found that when they hire a professional email template design agency, it's they who are accountable for simplifying the layout for maximum clarity, making automation sequences easier to manage and update.
To create email template designs that don't get lost amidst email sequences:
Keep the email layouts sleek and spacious.
Short text blocks, one clear call-to-action (CTA), and a balanced text: image ratio are some practices that your team must follow for all the design tasks.
Simple email designs are great at guiding readers’ eyes through the most important message without the friction. Don't forget that it’s easy for your design and production team to handle design jobs for numerous email workflows.
Around 71.5% of customers prefer mobile devices to open emails. So, your automated emails are only as good as the device experience.
It’s a mandate that you design responsive email templates that adapt to different screens, like water taking the shape of any glass it’s poured into.
Big buttons, single-column layouts, and generous spacing in your email template designs keep your workflows click-friendly, whether it’s a birthday discount or an abandoned cart reminder.
Agency-built templates use robust CSS and real-world device previews to guarantee flawless mobile performance.
Modular email design is quickly becoming popular among design tribes known for making email creation five times faster. Modular blocks are pre-built, pre-coded content blocks for various design elements that make up an email template.
Headers, footers, images, CTAs, to name a few. You can reuse and rearrange them infinitely, creating brand-consistent emails across automation workflows.
For example, your “thank you” email and “special offer” reminder can share the same hero block, saving hours of design work.
To unload your design burden, you can ask your email template design agency to deliver scalable, modular libraries. It’s of great help in speeding up campaign launches and optimizing your automation workflow.
Automated workflows thrive on speed. Slow-to-load emails are often weighed down by design blunders such as bulky images, risking the loss of attention before the email even appears.”
Compress images, use SVGs for icons, and rely on background colors instead of heavy graphics. Lighter templates = smoother automation performance.
A big part of the benefits that come from automating emails is personalization to scale.
Cynthia Price, SVP of Marketing at Validity, says, personalization is the most effective way to get the most out of your targeted emails.
But just using the basic <first name> merge tags in the name of personalization is a lost opportunity when there are thousands of different ways to personalize your email template designs.
Hence, while you must design your templates to handle dynamic fields like [First Name], personalize your product recommendations, location-based offers, hero images, and learning resources to make your emails truly valuable.
For instance, a replenishment workflow email could auto-fill “Running low on [Product Name]?”
A flexible email template design ensures personalization doesn’t break the layout.
In the age of pre-built email templates, email creation has become such a low-barrier task that anyone can put together a polished email.
That makes it essential for your emails to act as mini-versions of your other marketing channels. Otherwise, it doesn’t take long for your audience to confuse you with other brands using the same cookie-cutter template.
Be it the first welcome email to a subscriber or the last loyalty reward, your email template designs must ooze your brand personality. Through fonts, color palette, logos, and overall design. These elements play in a team to help your audience recognize your email in a cluttered inbox and build trust. Disjointed designs, on the other hand, make automation feel robotic.
Email template design agencies often document style guides and build master templates that scale brand rules across any workflow.
Automated email workflows are triggered by specific, predetermined actions taken by subscribers. They only work if subscribers take the next step by clicking on the CTA.
Therefore, there is no alternative for your team but to pay attention to them. Clear, bold, mobile-friendly, and action-driven CTAs are what guide users to clicks.
Email template design agencies use A/B testing and best-practice positioning for CTAs that work within email automation platforms.
The ability to design and deploy accessible email templates means that reaching as wide of an audience as possible and ensuring they can engage with your email. Only then can your automated workflow have an impact, even if that impact is not easy to quantify.
Designing with accessibility in mind is, at the most grassroots level, to:
Add alt text to images.
Use high-contrast color schemes.
Choose legible fonts.
Accessible email template designs not only broaden your reach but also improve deliverability scores, rendering your automated workflows effective.
Automation can magnify small mistakes. An email that appears fine in Gmail but breaks in Outlook can disrupt the entire sequence.
Test your templates in major clients and devices before putting them into workflows. Many email template design agencies include testing as part of their service. So rendering disasters are out of the question.
Your ESP isn’t just a sending tool—it’s a design ally. Use features like version control, conditional content, and A/B testing to refine templates inside your workflows. For example, test two subject line styles in your onboarding sequence and let automation pick the winner.
Email marketing has long struggled with inefficiency. From sourcing content and designing emails to coding HTML, loading campaigns into your ESP, testing, and finally hitting send, the process has been far too manual for far too long. With smart email template design powering automation, you can streamline these steps and deliver truly personalized emails without piling extra work onto your team.
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