Fast, stress-free guide to adopting modular email design

Modules are real lifesavers. They not only streamline the email creation process, but also bring advanced capabilities for creating emails effectively. However, adopting modules doesn’t happen with a snap of the fingers.

Adopting a modular email design may seem challenging and time-consuming. To make your life easier, we guide you through the essential steps to take when using this system for your future campaigns. We’ve also asked experts to share their wisdom with you on better ways of adopting modular email design.

What is a modular email design system?

First of all, let’s discuss the basics. Modules are independent content units that are universal in structure and purpose. The main idea behind ​​modules is that they can be combined and customized as a marketer sees fit, offering a more flexible approach to email design.

But there’s more to modules than meets the eye. To start, these content units come in two forms: snippets and modules.

Snippets

Snippets are basic modules and essential elements that are designed for easy reuse of created content. Snippets range from simple buttons to entire pieces of emails with text, pictures, and banners. You can save your creations as snippets and create a library for future email campaigns. Put simply, you store basic building blocks from which you can create full-fledged emails later.

Modules

Meanwhile, modules are more advanced snippets (email elements) that take the philosophy of the modular email design to a new level. They provide more extensive capabilities to marketers. Think of it this way: While snippets are bicycles that are easy to master and use to perform tasks, modules are cars that you need to learn how to drive before they carry you. But once you learn, great opportunities open up for you, like creating emails with GenAI, bulk updates, working with data, and more.

We’ve made a more detailed comparison of modules and snippets for you to better understand their differences and that benefits that each brings to the table. 

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Benefits of modular email design

Now that you know what modular design is, it’s time to consider why you should implement modules into your email production.

Maintain brand consistency

A consistent brand is an integral part of any successful and recognizable business. Indeed, brand consistency increases revenue by up to 10–20%.

Modular email design provides the necessary workflow for creating emails while greatly simplifying the maintenance of brand consistency. You create all the modules according to your brand book once and then use them when composing emails. Each email has consistent elements of your design, from the choice of fonts to the arrangement of content.

Save costs on email production with modules

Businesses in all areas strive for cost-effectiveness without loss of quality. Modular design offers cost-effectiveness thanks to the reusability of previously developed modules. The main costs of creating an email with a modular design come at the stage of module development, when all the modules are designed, created, and implemented.

But once your library of modules is ready, you can use each module as many times as you like and in different newsletters. There is no need to create every email from scratch since you already have all the necessary modules. Now you simply need to design a complete email with them.

Faster, easier email creation

Creating an email using modules is incredibly easy and often requires no technical knowledge. While the old-fashioned process of email creation requires a wireframe, mockup, coding, and testing for each email, creating email newsletters with modules is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. All the elements are already prepared, and you simply drag them from the library and drop them into your email, arranging everything in the right order and location.

Furthermore, this approach significantly reduces the time spent composing emails, speeding up their creation by up to two times. This is possible not only thanks to the ready-made library, but also because there is no need to thoroughly test newly created emails, as all the modules were already tested when they were made.

Advanced benefits of modules

The section above holds the overall benefits you’ll gain from adopting basic snippets as your weapon of choice during email design. But there are more boosts awaiting you once you reach the territory of advanced modules.

Locked design and data (coming soon)

We are expanding the advanced features of our modules, and right now we are actively working on the option to lock data and designs. These features are big lifesavers when you’re working with module data.

When you push data into a module, it can mess up your design (e.g., the product description is too big for the block). It also goes the opposite way since making design changes can unintentionally affect the data (e.g., during banner redesign, the text can change). These problems are the main targets of the feature we are developing now. 

Here’s how it works:

• the “locked” design feature offers the ability to lock the module design in place, allowing the marketer to update data within the module without affecting its design;
• the data is in turn “locked” inside the module, giving you a green light to experiment with the design without worrying about losing important data.

This feature is in active development at Stripo as we are expanding our module capabilities. We can’t say exactly when these features will be released, but you can be sure that if you stay tuned in to our news and updates, you’ll be the first to know.

Bulk updates

Sooner or later, you will need to update your modules. Remember how Twitter changed its name and logo to X in one day? It was a “great” day for email marketers all over the world, who suddenly had to update all their email newsletters and templates to add the new logo of this social network. Manually updating dozens of templates proved once again that it is a real chore.

Synchronized modules fix this problem, as they allow you to update a module once; all email templates that include this module update automatically. Instead of repeating the same update sequence many times, you do it just once.

Better work using data with smart modules

Working with data is a vital part of the email marketing pipeline. Creating modules from data is also a common scenario. For example, when you create a product card, you need to add a product photo, its title, description, and price. With one module, it won’t take much time, but when it comes to several emails with dozens of product cards, adding all the data manually is a sure way down a routine, monotonous road that can lead to imperfections and mistakes.

Smart elements are your go-to tool, as they allow you to pull data from the source directly into the module, saving you time and eliminating the work of manual data transfers.

Creating emails with GenAI

GenAI is developing rapidly, and today, creating AI-generated emails is not a fantasy but a reality. This is a process of email creation that we are steadily moving toward. No more creating emails manually. No more long design brainstorms to come up with how your email should look or how this CTA should sound. You delegate these routine tasks to GenAI so you have more time for strategic thinking.

However, GenAI does not create emails out of thin air: Modules remain the cornerstone of generating any module-designed email. They serve as the necessary context for GenAI, allowing it to precisely direct its creative abilities. Modules clearly show GenAI what content, in what order, and in what layout the email should have, after which the magic of generation takes over.

Intrigued by how this looks in action? That’s what our AI Assistant is all about. It helps marketers generate emails using basic prompts and configurable modules. Mixing both these elements provides marketers with fast-created emails that they can use right away in their campaigns.

You can learn more about our AI Assistant, how it works, and our future AI plans in our special article on AI use in modular email design. 

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A playground for interactive content

Modules are a great way to add interactive content to your emails and increase the engagement of your email campaigns without constantly creating games from scratch. Hired developers code the games you need just once and fit everything into modules, putting you at the forefront of interactivity with content that is ready to use at any time.

In addition, you can choose an even simpler path, our Interactive module generator. We created this tool specifically for anyone who wants to try interactivity in their emails but is not technically savvy. The generator provides a pack of diverse interactive modules that you can create using an intuitive interface. Next, you receive the finished module’s code, which you simply paste into your email. Everyone will see your interactive element since we provide three versions of the code for maximum compatibility:

• an AMP version of your email that works in Gmail, Yahoo, and FairEmail;
• an interactive fallback that works on all devices and with all email clients that support HTML5 and CSS3 (including Apple Mail and Samsung Email);
• a text fallback that works with email clients that do not support HTML5 or CSS3, such as some Outlook apps.

First steps to adopting modular design

We now provide a detailed list of the essential steps you need to take when migrating to modular email design.

1. Define which email elements you use most frequently

Before you start designing your content modules, it’s crucial to decide which email elements you use most often. When components such as headers and footers are used in most messages, such elements as product cards and AMP modules are not so common. Still, it’s better to design all these modules and update them with relevant details as necessary.

2. Specify email elements you want to have as reusable modules

Once you’ve come up with a list of the email elements you use most frequently, it’s time to clarify which ones you will use as modules. You can design components such as the header, signature, and footer just once, as they usually remain intact across all of your campaigns. Thus, it makes sense to use these email elements as modules to save time.

The situation is a bit different when it comes to modules such as blog posts, banners, and product cards. You have to update information every time you use these modules, but you can use smart elements that allow you to update the modules in just a couple of clicks:

• insert the link with the new data;
• press Enter, and the editor automatically pulls the new data into the module.

It sounds simple, and the reality is even simpler. Our guide further shows how to do this, so we encourage you to become familiar with it.

3. Master template method: Crafting consistent modules from scratch

First, let’s figure out what a master template method is. At its core, you create a single email template from scratch, taking into account all your design codes, rules for submitting content, and so on, after which you “cut” the master template into the necessary modules, saving each separately.

By creating a master template, you can achieve maximum consistency in the design of your modules.

The master template is created together with the designer, who draws the final look of the email template. However, the design is not created out of nothing. To bring the idea to life, the designer needs a brief that includes:

• a description of all the blocks to appear in the future email;
• a description of how the blocks will be used;
• other email newsletters as references.

In addition to the structure of the blocks, a good approach is to provide full-fledged content for these blocks. It’s not necessary to substitute content that will go live. This can also be AI-generated text or an image. The main task of the brief is to visualize your idea for the designer as clearly as possible so that they can accurately implement it in the master template.

Once the master template is done, it’s time to assemble each module according to the master template data specified for each block.

4. Test all the modules to make sure everything works as planned

Don’t forget to test every module before you hit the Send button. Testing is a vital step when creating modules. It helps to ensure that each module renders and works properly in a live environment. Stripo provides several means of email testing.

Option 1. Sending an email with the module to an inbox

Sending an email to a live inbox is a great way to see how your email will appear in your recipients’ inboxes. Stripo provides an easy way to send your test email to several inboxes and see what it looks like.

Option 2. Testing using Email on Acid integration

Email on Acid is a must-have tool for any email marketer, as it allows the fast and convenient testing of emails in many environments. Stripo has direct integration with Email on Acid, allowing marketers to check how their emails will look on dozens of email clients and devices, in light and dark themes, and much more.

5. Structure, use, and review your modules 

Created modules are the core of your library, which holds all the necessary email elements for easy access. However, there’s no use in this module library if you have a hard time finding the modules you need.

Modules must be structured logically so they can be easily found. Luckily, you can separate modules by type, name, and category, as well as assign them tags and other searchable labels. Here, you are limited only by your imagination, but the main condition is always the convenience of your library.

For example, in Stripo, before saving a module, you can set a name, a module hashtag, and its unique ID, then assign it to a category. All this helps make navigation through the library convenient, regardless of its size. Besides that, we are actively working on making module libraries better by creating an option to set custom module categories.

Creating a library is good, but as time goes on, reviewing your module library should become a priority. Some types of newsletters are phasing out, and maybe you’re about to update your brand design or internal email design rules. All these changes should be actively implemented in your module library. Therefore, it is extremely important to regularly review your library for outdated or unnecessary modules.

So, now you have a personal library of content modules aligned with your brand design styles, making your newsletters memorable and unique. You can reuse these modules across your upcoming campaigns to speed up the production process.

Check out what else our modules are capable of in our dedicated module guide. 

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Final advice

Before we wrap up, we want to give you some useful advice that can help you both in deciding to adopt modules as well as using them.

When you start on the path of switching to modules, there’s one thing you should keep in mind:

Wrapping up

With a general understanding of how to start in modular email design, you can speed up the email production process, rearrange your templates much faster, and stay brand-consistent without any coding knowledge. We at Stripo are always happy to help you exploit the full functionality of our easy-to-use modular system.