Scaling the email design process without losing governance is easy with Element Lock

Imagine that you're responsible for email templates in a growing team. Marketers, copywriters, designers, proofreaders: everyone works on the same email. And every month, someone accidentally edits something they shouldn't: the footer, the legal block, a locked-in brand color. Now you're checking every template manually before it goes out.

It’s a pretty common email marketing problem that brings a lot of headaches to the design process, which, in a perfect scenario, must be smooth as butter. But before we simply say that solutions to this problem are not only being developed, but also exist in their first iterations, let's get to the root of the problem.

Why email templates break when scaling your team

Managing email creation from start to finish is a fairly straightforward process, and for small companies, it's a perfectly viable option that can run like clockwork.

But problems arise when a company scales up. Its visibility needs also grow, and the email marketing channel requires more specialists. The number of people working on each template increases. And that's where things get interesting.

We're all human and make mistakes; it's natural, and as the team working on emails grows, the chances of errors increase. Someone might accidentally tweak, move, or delete an element while working on their responsibility. A big multinational technology company recently told us about their pain point: their proofreaders team is elderly and poorly versed in interfaces, and the team has to manually check every template every time to make sure no one has touched something they shouldn't.

The more people working on an email, the longer the chain of responsibility, the more approval stages, and the more points where someone can make a mistake that might go unnoticed.

Just imagine: a request was made not to proofread or edit the legal section, but the proofreader simply overlooked this request in a rush and proofread or edited the text anyway, as that's their job. The template moved further up the chain, and the mistake remained.

Roles and permissions as a half-solution

You might think that various functionality options related to role assignment and permissions would already solve this problem. And indeed, simply assign roles: who can view, who can edit only text, who can edit everything, and so on, and you’ve succeeded. Yes, you've succeeded, but only partially.

The important thing here is the level at which the problem is solved. Roles and permissions are only a half-measure, as roles only limit functionality in terms of the whole template, but this doesn't extend to specific parts of the email. In the same case with our technology enterprise’s proofreaders, they could assign a colleague as a proofreader, who could only edit the text of the entire email (thereby risking editing something they shouldn't), or assign them as a viewer, who couldn't edit anything.

As a result, a more flexible approach is needed. The need for constant checking and the risk of mistakes remain, so the natural solution is to scale down from the entire email to its individual elements.

Element Lock as an answer

The title of this article and throughout the text will frequently mention "Element Lock," but it's worth clarifying that this is merely our interpretation and a general term for this functionality that best explains what such features might entail.

Their main purpose is to restrict editing of certain template elements. Essentially, Element Lock allows large teams (and teams of any size, in general) to have varying access to a template not only at the role level, but also to individual elements of the template itself, prohibiting editing of critical blocks while allowing editing of everything else.

How would this help our tech giant and their proofreading team? The template creator or simply a colleague with a higher role could lock the legal terms and conditions block in the footer. After that, even if the entire enterprise rushes to work on the template, this block will remain unchanged, and there will be no need to check it after any changes. Regardless of the proofreaders' level of UI-savviness, this approved piece of text will remain as is, while they can edit other template text that truly requires review.

This essentially opens the door to more convenient scaling of email teams while maintaining control. Each team works only on what they have access to, both at the role and individual element level, reducing the number of design mistakes.

Industry steps to solve the problem

At the beginning, we briefly hinted that solutions for locking elements already exist on the market and are actively developing. And what's most interesting is that even with such a seemingly simple feature, there are many different approaches to implementing it and the benefits it offers.

• Layer-level locking

The most common method and level of locking is stripe locking. This allows marketers to lock stripes from the header to the footer, thereby prohibiting editing of all content within each strip.

Some solutions go even further and allow locking not only structures but also specific content. For example, it's possible to lock the Text block on a product card, making only this text uneditable, while everything else adjacent to the text (images, buttons, etc.) can be edited.

Different solutions focus on different granularities, and this is a double-edged sword. Lower granularity means easier workflow and faster locking of large chunks of emails, but it's quite limited, as not all content in a stripe is always untouchable. Higher granularity means more flexibility and freedom, but it takes longer to lock significant chunks of templates.

• Various types of locking restrictions

Some solutions opt for different types of locking rather than granularity. For example, there's a template stripe lock, but you can also select the level of restrictions before locking. You can allow editing of text in the locked stripe, while the design (colors, fonts, etc.) remains locked.

There are also solutions on the market that allow locking of individual attributes of a given content variant, such as changing the text color, style, size, and so on. This can be somewhat overkill, but it's also an excellent option if the tool doesn't have something like Global Styles and Layout, which allows you to set specific parameters for the entire template that will remain unchanged even if you rewrite the entire text, add new elements, and so on.

• Module restrictions and locking

It's difficult to cover much in this section, as after researching the market, we noticed that few solutions delve so deeply into the problem. But we can confidently say that there are solutions that allow you to lock not only a specific section of a specific template, but also a single email element that can be used in dozens of templates.

For example, you've created the perfect footer for your template, the design is approved, and the copy is polished to perfection. You save this footer as a module, and lock it.

This way, you have a section of the template that all your colleagues can use in all their email campaigns, and you can be confident that the lock will protect this footer module from accidental and unauthorized edits, even if you're not even aware of some email campaigns where it's used.

Stripo solution 

We're not sitting idly by, either, but actively polishing our solution, which will be released soon. Remember the proofreading team? This is how they will be able to work with the functionality that we are currently developing.

There is a task to edit the template text. The template owner locks the legal container before the email goes to review. The proofreader opens the same template, sees all the other blocks available for editing as usual, but the legal text is simply not clickable. No need to learn a new interface, no need to remember additional steps. A block that previously required a second manual review after each proofreading no longer requires it.

Our Element Lock feature will have three locking options based on the structure of our templates: Stripes, Structures, and Containers.

This allows for a lot of flexibility in applying this approach to different design situations. For example, your legal team rewrites the footer once a quarter. So a marketer can lock down the entire Stripe, and it's untouched until the next revision, and no one on the marketing team can change a single pixel, whether they want to or not.

Or imagine the opposite situation. Your brand team has a color palette and an approved header design, but your copywriters still need to update the subject line of the email every week. To avoid accidental design changes, you can lock down just the design layer on that Outline, and the text remains fully editable, while the colors, fonts, and spacing remain fixed.

But features like these aren’t just for the in-house team; they can also help you work with people outside your department. Maybe a freelance designer is helping you for a while and doesn't need to change the style of a specific CTA button, so just lock the design of the Container with that button and save it from changes.

You’ll have even more flexibility with different locking options to choose exactly what you want to lock: everything, just the design, or just the content. 

But keep in mind that our Element Lock will be in active development even after its initial release. Subsequent iterations of this feature will include locking for individual content blocks, such as Text and Images, a Prevent Remove & Move option, and much more.

The whole feature will be based on our existing roles, where Owners, Admins, and Designers can lock elements, restrict editing to other roles (Writer, Proofreader, and Viewer), and thus bring control to the design process of large teams.

So, stay tuned for updates and news to test this feature in your email design process as you scale.

Wrapping up

As unpleasant as it is to admit, most design mistakes in large teams are caused by us, not by tools. Inattention, workload, or poor communication can throw a spanner in the works at any moment, preventing us from achieving that perfect and polished email design process and scaling marketing teams. But what we can definitely strive to excel at is using tools that can help solve this problem.

The Element Lock and its analogs in other products serve to bring control and corporate governance. However, these solutions on the market always leave you with a choice: lock broadly and stay simple, or lock precisely and slow the workflow down. The ones worth watching are the few trying to do both at once. 

But as the problem becomes more apparent, solutions appear faster that are designed to cover all possible cases. So keep an eye on the industry, and you’re sure to find the one that will cover all your needs.