Building emails with email modules is a great way to make your production process more efficient. We spent some time on our latest webinar talking to Brandon Lawson and Ryan Wallace from Ferguson Enterprises and Lauren Kremer and Scott Epple from the Litmus team on this hot topic. We explained what modular email building is, how Ferguson Enterprises does it, and how Litmus can help you get started.
Didn’t have the opportunity to see the webinar live? Do not worry. You can always access the full recording and read the questions and answers below.
questions and answers
Thank you to everyone who came up with a question during the webinar! Here is a recap of our answers to the most frequently asked questions, as well as what the Ferguson Enterprises and Litmus team thought on some of the questions they didn’t answer during the live webinar.
How do you get a consistent voice, style, and flow across different elements? Or does it always require final editing and style adjustments?
Litmus: Language and tone guidelines are great additions to an email design system, but should probably be agreed across all marketing channels. Using placeholder copies in your templates and modules that illustrate your brand’s voice and tone (or provide explicit guidance) is another great way to guide users.
When building Partials, I would prefer to place CSS that belongs to the Partial in the Partial itself. However, I recently read somewhere that the CSS would be better off in the main template. Thoughts?
Ferguson Enterprises: I think every way is different, but we recently decided to add our CSS as Partials. We did this because we see we will have a wide variety of templates in the near future, and when we were thinking of ways to streamline the updates to the main CSS, it made the most sense to make our CSS too partial.
I am curious to see how you present all of your modules / templates to internal customers who do not have access to your e-mail system (and therefore the design library). Do you present all modules separately as options, or do you give them complete templates that use available modules (and they don’t necessarily know they are “modules”)?
Ferguson Enterprises: We do this in a number of ways.
For our campaigns that support local initiatives, we provide these stakeholders with an “Email Marketing Menu”, a collection of pre-made email templates that already meet their messaging needs and are plug-and-play friendly are. Our national campaigns are custom built by our creative team, but we involve our stakeholders more in the review and QA on these types of emails.
Can you talk a little about using the code with an ESP that is not on Litmus’ sync compatibility list?
Litmus: Use the ‘Export’ menu in the builder to copy the compiled HTML to your clipboard or download it as an HTML file and then paste or upload it to your ESP. Please refer to this help document for more information.
I would also like to learn more about Ferguson’s approach to approaching dark mode, which is in line with brand standards!
Ferguson Enterprises: This was a collaboration with our creative team. We worked with them to establish best practices for situations where email controls were not supported in dark mode. We also worked with the creative team to come up with a color palette for things like title text, body text, CTAs, etc. that would meet brand guidelines if we could control the dark mode preferences.
Are you adding style pieces to the modules or adding the styles later when all of the email is ready? Do you create fixed-size modules?
Litmus: Adding inline styles to modules can certainly work, but it does mean that if certain styles ever change (e.g. font styles), you’ll need to update every module that has those styles embedded in them.
If you instead include your styles in your boilerplate template – or, better yet, extract your styles into partials and include them in your template – you can make changes to the styles in one place.
With Builder’s ‘inline CSS’ option, you can make sure your styles are included automatically before syncing them with your ESP or exporting your code.
How does the Design Library work with other ESPs? For example, how do you compose emails in Salesforce Marketing Cloud using the Litmus library?
Litmus: Templates from your design library can be synced to your ESP for use.
Modules work best and more smoothly in Litmus Builder, but you can still reference your modules in the Design Library and copy the code for them into your preferred building tool by simply selecting a module and clicking the code preview in the right sidebar to view the module code to your clipboard.
How do you create a module?
Litmus: We have a great help document that will walk you step by step through the process of creating modules in Litmus. However, if you’re talking about getting started with modular email in very general terms, this blog post is a great guide.
When should you use one modular block over another? Are there any rules for using it?
Litmus: Suppose this question is about the difference between partials and excerpts …
Partials are global modules referenced by your emails or templates. Changes to a member will affect every email / template that contains this member. Partials are great for commonly used elements that don’t change from one email to the next: headers, footers, CSS reset and base styles, responsive breakpoints and styles, spacers, etc.
Snippets are reusable modules that can be inserted into an email or template and edited within this email / template without affecting other emails / templates. Snippets are perfect for most of your “body” content: hero blocks, primary / secondary / tertiary content blocks, CTAs, etc.
How should you organize blocks?
Litmus: Check out our blog post on 7 Ways To Organize Your Email Modules Into Useful Categories (By Email Type Is A Frequent Favorite!).
How do you keep people on the same page for consistency?
Litmus: That’s the beauty of a design system: it’s always up to date and promotes consistency by ensuring that users are always building with the latest and greatest of all templates and modules.
Documenting and making your design standards and branding guidelines available within or alongside your design system is another great way to communicate.
Some organizations also keep a “change log” or “release note” that they share with stakeholders.
Think of your design system as a product, communicating how-tos, benefits, and key changes so users can stay updated and get the most out of the system
Related content
And that’s a conclusion to the questions we were able to answer. For more information about modules, templates, and design systems, see this related content:
