Email templates are stuck in 2007. Here's why that's finally changing.

Email refuses to die.

Every few years, someone declares it over. Social will replace it. Slack will kill it. AI will render it obsolete. And every year, email stubbornly remains the highest-ROI channel in digital marketing, delivering approximately 36:1 return on every dollar spent.

This isn't nostalgia. It's commercial reality. Email's value was evident from its first marketing use case: in 1978, Gary Thuerk sent an unsolicited message to 400 ARPANET users promoting Digital Equipment Corporation computers. That single email reportedly generated $13 million in sales. It also inadvertently invented spam.

Nearly five decades later, email remains the backbone of customer communication. But here's the thing: while email's commercial value has compounded, its underlying technology has barely evolved. The emails you send today are built on the same technical foundation as the ones sent in the early 2000s.

Tables. Inline styles. Rendering hacks that would make a web developer weep.

How did we get here? And why is it finally changing?

The technical debt nobody paid

When HTML arrived in 1991, it opened possibilities for richer email content. Marketers could add images, format text, create layouts that looked like actual designed communications rather than plain text. The history of email marketing is, in many ways, a story of chasing what the web could do.

But email clients didn't evolve like web browsers did.

The critical moment came in 2007, when Microsoft made a fateful decision: Outlook would use the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer's. The reasoning was probably sensible at the time: better document handling, consistent rendering across Office products. The consequence was catastrophic for email design.

Word's rendering engine doesn't understand modern CSS. It doesn't handle floats, flexbox, or grid. It barely tolerates anything beyond the most basic styling. And because Outlook dominated enterprise email (and still commands significant market share), email developers had no choice but to code for the lowest common denominator.

That denominator was tables. Nested tables. Tables within tables within tables.

The web, meanwhile, kept evolving. jQuery gave way to React and Vue. CSS frameworks like Tailwind made responsive design trivial. Design systems in Figma created shared languages between designers and developers. Component-based architecture replaced the old model of building pages from scratch.

Email got none of this. While web development reinvented itself multiple times, email remained frozen somewhere around 2007, building layouts with techniques that web developers abandoned a decade ago.

The ongoing battle against spam added another layer of complexity. SPF arrived in 2003. DKIM in 2007. DMARC completed the authentication triad in 2012. Each layer added security but also friction: more protocols to configure, more ways for legitimate email to break.

By 2023, Google implemented a 0.1% spam complaint threshold, meaning one complaint per thousand emails puts you in the danger zone. Getting email right matters more than ever.

How templates became the problem

Templates emerged as the obvious solution to email's technical challenges.

If email code is fragile and rendering is unpredictable, lock in what works. Create a template that renders correctly across clients. Let marketers swap images and copy without touching the underlying code. If it works in Outlook, don't touch it.

This logic made sense. For a while, it worked well enough.

But templates calcified. What started as practical shortcuts became rigid systems that nobody could modify without developer intervention.

You know the pattern. You need a layout that doesn't exist in your template. The email is due in a week. Your developer is buried in other priorities. When they finally get to it, you'll sit through the debugging session: the Slack messages about rendering, the resigned sighs about Outlook.

Or maybe you've sat through the template modification meeting. The one that feels like the UN Security Council. Consensus is futile. Everyone leaves with a begrudged agreement and a template that gains three more modules nobody asked for.

The template was supposed to make things faster. Instead, it became the bottleneck.

This matters because most people say the emails they receive aren't useful. 59% of Americans, to be exact. In a channel where relevance determines survival, templates that constrain creativity work against you. Segmentation boosts email performance according to over 90% of marketers, but segmentation requires flexibility. Personalization requires variation. Templates built for consistency often sacrifice both.

What the web learned (that email didn't)

Web development solved this problem years ago.

The insight was separating structure from content. Instead of building pages, developers build systems. Components that snap together. Design tokens that enforce brand consistency without requiring pixel-perfect templates. Figma files that translate directly into production code.

React didn't succeed because it made building web pages faster (though it did). It succeeded because it changed how teams think about interfaces. Not as monolithic templates but as composable building blocks. Not as rigid structures but as flexible systems with built-in constraints.

Design systems codified this approach. A button is defined once, used everywhere. Colors and typography are tokens, not hard-coded values. Designers and developers share a common language. Changes propagate through the system instead of requiring manual updates to dozens of templates.

The result: teams move faster while maintaining consistency. Constraints exist at the system level, not the individual asset level. Creativity flourishes within guardrails.

Email never had its React moment. The technical constraints (those rendering engines, those nested tables) made component-based thinking harder to implement. And so email teams kept building templates the old way, adding modules, accumulating bloat, treating each email as a document rather than an assembly of parts.

Email's framework moment is here

The tools have finally caught up.

Production timelines tell the story. In 2023, over half of marketers needed two weeks or more to create a single email. By 2025, only 6% of teams take that long. Some of this is AI: 95% of marketers who use AI for email creation rate it as effective. But the larger shift is architectural.

Email creation is moving from template-based to module-based. From documents to systems. From developer-dependent to marketer-controlled.

The difference is subtle but transformative. In a template model, you fill in the blanks. In a module model, you build. The guardrails (brand, typography, approved layouts) exist at the system level. Within those constraints, marketers assemble emails from building blocks rather than editing fixed structures.

This is what Knak was built for. Not to replace templates with better templates, but to give enterprise marketing teams the building blocks to create emails themselves. Lock in brand guidelines. Define approved modules. Then let marketers build.

The results validate the approach. Amazon reduced email build time by 95%, down to 10 minutes or under. FTI Consulting increased email output capacity by 316x. Citrix went from 5 people able to create emails to 80.

These aren't template improvements. They're architectural shifts.

Coordination is the real problem

The no-code builder is table stakes. Every competitor has one.

What enterprise marketing teams actually need is a coordination layer. When you have 100 marketers across global teams, each sending emails from the same brand, building individual emails is the easy part. The hard part is ensuring those emails are consistent, compliant, on-brand, and delivered through whatever marketing automation platform the organization uses.

This is the unsexy work that templates never solved. Approval workflows that span continents. Brand governance that doesn't require a design review for every send. Asset management that scales beyond a single team's Dropbox folder.

The shift from templates to modular building isn't just about speed. It's about who controls the system. When marketers own their building blocks, when they can assemble, adjust, and iterate without waiting on developers, email stops being a bottleneck and becomes what it should be: the most reliable, highest-ROI channel in the stack.

Templates don't suck. How we've been forced to build them does.

That's changing.