The ultimate guide to organizing emails in the editor for large teams: Storage, access, and order

In large companies, managing email campaigns requires a well-organized system. As your email marketing team grows, remaining organized shifts from being a “nice-to-have” to being a non-negotiable. What once worked for a solo marketer can quickly become chaotic when multiple team members create emails for different products or campaigns.

The more people are involved — whether editing content in the builder or pulling templates to prep their emails — the more critical it becomes to have a system in place. This includes storing templates, organizing them into folders or tagging them for easy search, and managing access for different team members.

In this article, we’ll walk you through practical steps to build a clear system for storing emails, managing user access, and streamlining collaboration across your email marketing team. It all begins in the editor — the space where content is created, reviewed, and readied for launch.

Why email organization is significant for large teams

According to HubSpot, 22% of marketers send two or three marketing emails per day and another 21% send emails daily. A quick calculation reveals that mid-sized and large companies may create anywhere from 300 to 1,000 emails annually. This number grows significantly when you factor in segmentation, localization, and trigger-based campaigns. These companies may produce hundreds or even thousands of email templates each year as part of their marketing and customer engagement strategies.

Many of these templates aren’t just one-off sends — they’re designed for recurring use across different campaigns, often with only minor edits. Savvy email marketers also repurpose existing content to meet new goals and get more value from the emails they’ve already created. But to do this effectively — and to collaborate with teammates — template management needs to be clear, accessible, and scalable.

Here are a few common problems teams face in the absence of a structured approach to organizing email templates:

• duplicate work: Two people may unknowingly create almost identical email templates or recreate existing blocks from scratch, thus wasting time and leading to inconsistencies;
• lost templates: Without consistent folder structures, naming conventions, or tags, valuable email templates can get buried or go missing. Team members often can’t find the email they need to tweak and are forced to start from scratch;
• naming confusion: Everyone uses their own logic to name emails, thus making it difficult to locate or identify the latest version. One person might call a newsletter “April_Promo,” while another uses “Spring_Sale_v2” — no one’s sure which one is final or which one performed best;
• complicated onboarding: When new people join the team, bringing them up to speed is hard without a clear, centralized system for storing and sharing previously created emails.

This slows down your team and adds friction to collaboration, primarily when designers, copywriters, and marketers work remotely or across different departments. Over time, inconsistent email design, tone, or layout can erode your brand’s credibility.

Selecting the appropriate tool and structure: Folders vs. tags

Let’s develop a template storage structure that you can easily use in your email editor and ESP.

Folders: When to use them 

Folders are great for grouping templates into broad logical categories. How you organize them will largely depend on your email marketing strategy and team structure.

Here are some common ways email marketing teams organize their folders:

• by campaign type: newsletters, promotions, triggers, educational;
• by key promo events: Black Friday, Women’s Day, Memorial Day, and others;
• by brands or clients: if you're managing multiple brands or working at an agency;
• by internal business units: even with one email marketing team, different stakeholders may need separate folders;
• by project or product: particularly helpful when email designs vary by offering;
• by date: an archive by years and months is helpful if your campaign production is closely tied to a schedule;
• by audience segment: potential customers, dormant users, partners, or resellers.

Each of these methods helps create a structured, scalable system — one where everyone on the team knows where things live and can move faster with fewer questions.

Tags: Best for cross-campaign classification

Tags are another helpful feature that make teamwork related to emails more efficient. Adding tags enables you to easily find templates with shared characteristics, irrespective of which folder they’re saved in.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you want to mark all templates that use gamification or countdown timers so you can quickly locate and reuse them for future campaigns.

Tags let you label templates based on

• сampaign goals (awareness, re-engagement, upsell);
• status (draft, ready, sent);
• personalization or segmentation features;
• a few other characteristics that influence your workflow.

Combine both for clarity 

Adding tags does not change the overall logic of storing templates, but it does make it easy to find specific emails without creating separate folders. Therefore, use both approaches to structure your templates.

Tips and tricks for effective email template organization

This structure improves navigation, reduces errors, and keeps your entire team aligned as campaigns scale:

1. The most important rule is to keep it user-friendly and tailored to how your company runs email marketing. A new team member should be able to look at your folder structure and immediately understand where to find what they need, without asking for help.
2. Build a clear hierarchy. Use folders and subfolders to organize templates in a manner that makes sense for your team’s workflows.
3. Create a dedicated folder for master templates. These should include only approved elements that follow your brand guidelines. Limit editing access to avoid accidental changes, and use these templates as the foundation for new emails.
4. Create new folders during rebrands or design updates. This way, your team can still access old templates for reference, but all new work begins fresh with the updated look.
5. Group automated emails by journey. Create a separate folder for each automation, and number the templates in the order they’re sent. This makes it easier to track the flow and make changes when needed.

Additionally, you can record information regarding the email storage logic in a separate document, Confluence, or task manager.

For more information on how to document information related to email creation, see the following article.

Naming conventions: The key to findability

Consistent naming is one of the simplest ways to speed up your email production and avoid costly mistakes. When every team member follows the same naming rules, finding the right template, reusing existing content, and avoiding sending the wrong version is easier.

A clear naming format should include key details such as the project name, language, date or campaign period, version, and, optionally, the status (such as “Final” or “Draft”).

Here are a few examples that work well:

• Webinar Promo_290525; 
• 2025_Q1_Welcome_EN_v2;
• Promo_Valentines_Final;
• Readers reactivation_email 3.

Accurate and precise names will enable you and your team to find the email quickly. Good naming conventions keep your workspace clean and your team in sync.

Access control: Your ally in email organization 

Access management reduces chaos and protects approved materials by ensuring that only authorized team members can change email content. In medium and large companies, where multiple people collaborate on email campaigns, this control helps prevent accidental edits, unauthorized changes, or the use of unapproved materials.

To ensure smooth teamwork, it’s crucial to define clear access roles and permissions:

1. Assign roles and permissions in the email editor: For larger teams, set up a structured system in your editor based on projects, organization, and role-based access. Assign team members specific rights for each project — for example, a copywriter can edit content but cannot export templates, while an administrator has complete control.
2. Delegate email creation: Create separate folders or workspaces for different team members to ensure each person works within their own templates without interfering with those of others. This relies on team agreements and trust — it works because everyone is responsible and professional.
3. Provide access to essential documentation: Copywriters, designers, and managers should all have access to shared resources such as Jira, Confluence, and a dedicated email workflow guide. This guide outlines task assignments, email design requirements, content standards, and links to templates for each email type.
4. Limit ESP access: Only those responsible for sending emails should work directly in the ESP, since it’s primarily a sending platform, not a content editor. Everyone else should collaborate on templates and guidelines outside the ESP.

Wrapping up

Effective teamwork in email marketing begins with clear organization and smart tools. By structuring your templates with folders and tags, managing access thoughtfully, and providing your team with the appropriate resources, you’ll be able to streamline collaboration, reduce errors, and maintain brand consistency. With these practical steps, your team can focus on what really matters — creating impactful email campaigns that engage and convert.