As an email marketer, you tend to think there’s value in doing the same thing over and over because it seems to work. Kind of a digital version of the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
But maybe it is broken—or a less-than-optimal process—and you don’t realize it. You’ve been spoiled by the ease of the copy/paste used in Office, G-Suite, and several other applications. However, copying and pasting HTML code is not easy. It’s not easy to apply a new color scheme or add the same messaging to multiple emails. Not only is it a process that’s not easy, it’s one where the potential for error—and disappointment—is high.
The alternative is to use Stensul Reusable Content and Style Variation, two important features of the Stensul Email Creation Platform™. They let you switch between brands with a single click and add the same piece of content to multiple emails in seconds.
I can speak to that experience firsthand—and not just because they’re features in the our Email Creation Platform. As a member of the Stensul marketing team, I’ve been taking full advantage of these capabilities in our own email marketing efforts. If you subscribe to our email marketing, you may recall that each email contains secondary content subscribers might find of interest. Prior to the availability of Reusable Content, creating these secondary content modules was tedious. It had me copying and pasting from previous emails, then searching for the illustration from our image library, and, finally, uploading it to the email. (BTW, if you don’t get our eBooks and other useful material, just sign up here.)
Now with Reusable Content, I go into the old emails to save more than 15 modules for reuse. That means when creating an email, a platform user simply goes to a dedicated eBook or Case Study folder and drags in the module to the appropriate place in the email they’re creating and it’s done—the very definition of easy.
Style Variations brings even more time savings for things like A/B testing—something we always have time for because the Stensul Platform makes email creation so efficient. Although Stensul only has one brand to manage, we do have different brand color combinations to use. Our primary “Space Cadet” dark purple color is often our background, requiring a light-colored font, but sometimes we change it up with a lighter background color, like our “Platinum” gray color or just white, to see what works best for our subscribers. In those cases, we need a dark color font, of course. Other than those changes, the module being used in the email is identical. We could clutter up our collection of modules by having duplicates with different color schemes, but that creates a lot of maintenance headaches when something changes. Believe us, we know because we tried it that way. It wasn’t fun.
Style Variations lets designers create different styles, like background and font colors, fonts, and buttons within a single module, so email builders can select them with a single click when building an email. And that capability makes testing different color combinations, or applying different brands to similar emails, a breeze.
Amazing, isn’t it?
To learn more about Stensul Reusable Content and/or Variations, click here.
