Since the advent of the corona crisis, email marketing has made huge gains in importance.
Statistics show that during the lockdown, the opening rates of marketing emails have increased by as much as 25%. Even more impressively, weekly opening rate increases have been as large as 5-10%.
Basically, now is the time to step up your email communications. An essential part of doing that is to present the content in a visually stunning way.
No matter how good your content is, if the layout in which you present it isn't aesthetically pleasing, chances are that your audience won't give it a second glance.
Luckily, you no longer have to be a graphic designer, or proficient in the more finicky areas of design to give your emails a killer makeover. There are dozens of pages offering ready-to-go templates that you can use as they are, adapt to your own needs, or draw inspiration from.
Here are some of the best sources of amazing email marketing templates, and all you need to know about them.
Mailbakery offers a broad palette of templates, both paid and free. Templates are categorized by industry - from Design & Photography to Travel & Lifestyle.
What is more, Mailbakery offers customization and creation to order.
Stripe allows you to create responsive emails from templates without writing (or adjusting) a single line of HTML code. They offer over 350 free templates that can be exported to platforms like GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, or Mailchimp. A nice touch is also their modern AMP email integration, allowing app-like interactivity in your campaign.
However, the platform requires you to sign up. And to actually use the templates you choose or create, you have to pay a certain fee.
Though Cakemail in itself is an email marketing API that requires a subscription, they offer 40+ freely accessible newsletter templates for categories such as business, special events, and education.
This UK-based online design agency offers 45+ free templates in return for a sign-up, for mail types such as newsletters, promos, and personalized notice templates.
Litmus is a platform for email analytics and design optimization. In line with the latter, they collected 30+ HTML templates for product launches, sales, marketing, and other promotional activities. You can download them with no strings attached.
BeeFree offers over 200 templates to use with their editor. There is a free option in which you have access to the templates, which are sorted by usage (Events, Newsletter, Seasonal Promotion ...) and industry (Automotive, Businesses Services, Computer & Internet ...).
However, to actually use, save, or re-edit, you need a pro plan. Once you're subscribed, you can export the templates to various platforms, such as Mailchimp.
Usually, Colorlib deals in templates for WordPress websites, but they also offer a collection of free, responsive HTML email templates.
Campaign Monitor provides an integrated email marketing platform - but they also offer a stunning array of free templates. While you do have to sign in to export the templates you choose, using - and adjusting - them is free.
The templates are sortable into categories ranging from Announcements and Newsletters to Deals & Offers and re-engagement campaigns. What's more, their design is responsive, which is of major importance since the majority of emails are now opened on mobile applications.
As the premier platform for integrated digital marketing, HubSpot also offers a broad choice of email templates. Some of them are even free for those who are unable (or unwilling) to swing the subscription fees.
In return for signing up for HubSpot's newsletter, the platform offers 15 clean templates (including text) for comarketing, customer references, PR & Blogging outreach, and sales. There is also a set of marketing and sales emails specifically for startups that are freely available.
If you actually do sign up for the paid platform, there are over 350 templates at your disposal.
Okay, confession time: Really Good Emails doesn't offer templates as such. But what the site does provide are over five thousand real emails, including HTML code, that you can use to gather ideas for the design and content of your own campaigns. You can browse by industry, search by keyword, or discover email campaigns by brands such as Pinterest, Apple, or Invision.
With the massive offer of ready-to-send templates, you'll more than likely be able to find the right match for you, to dream up an email campaign that will wow your audience.
But even if you don't find a template that is exactly right for you, there are plenty of options to adapt the existing ones and shape them to your purposes. And at the very least, you can draw inspiration, so that you can develop a solution that appeals to your customers. Because you, after all, know them better than anyone.
