How Email Templates Work in Different Marketing Operations Models

Marketing ops is like an orchestra, where dozens of individual players harmonize into a single captivating movement. The conductor ensures each piece comes together for maximum impact. Without them, the orchestra would quickly descend into chaos—a detail often unnoticed by the casual listener.

Email templates act as sheet music, providing consistency, efficiency, and alignment with the broader strategy (e.g., brand guidelines). Each player uses that sheet music to infuse their unique creativity. Yet, coordinated by the conductor, they create a cohesive symphony.

Each player uses that sheet music to infuse their unique creativity, yet coordinated by the conductor, they create a cohesive symphony. The difference between horns blaring out of tune and customers bombarded with unwanted emails is subtle, relying on the conductor to deftly navigate complex movements.

In marketing, email templates play the role of sheet music. Well-crafted templates allow individual creativity while ensuring cohesion. As we’ll see, marketing operations teams are critical in orchestrating the bigger picture.

In this post, we’ll unpack how different types of marketing operating models can best utilize email templates.

Understanding Marketing Operations Models

Just as orchestras can vary in size, structure, and style, so too do marketing operations models. We've done a deep dive on types of marketing operations models in the past, so let's summarize the main types here before getting how they work with email templates.

Centralized Marketing Ops and Email Templates

The centralized marketing ops model is attractive because it offers a high degree of control over various activities. Decisions run through a central team, ensuring that marketing activities and deliverables remain consistent.

In this model, all email templates are created and approved by a central team that strictly follows brand guidelines and standards. This ensures that every email campaign, regardless of its scope, has a consistent look and feel. The centralized team also manages the distribution of email templates, training on their usage, and quality assurance throughout the campaign creation process.

In the centralized model, you have a single conductor directing all the players, ensuring they closely follow the same sheet music. The benefit is a high degree of consistency across campaigns, typically high quality, and an overall efficient process. For proponents of the centralized model, a key benefit is that it prevents teams from going 'rogue' and creating campaigns that don't follow brand guidelines.

Centralized teams benefit immensely from using email creation tools to streamline their process, from design to feedback, approvals, and distribution. An example of a team using the centralized model is the DISH Network Corporation that used Knak's email template platform to solve email creation bottlenecks. The DISH team required a process that enabled its centralized model but was also accommodating to a high number of requests from the marketing team. Read more about the DISH case study here.

Self Service Ops and Email Templates

If centralized marketing ops is about control and process, self-service ops is about flexibility and responsiveness. Both models, however, lean heavily on software tooling to maintain consistency in the quality of the end product. The self-service model provides direct access to email creation and management tools, offering a high degree of autonomy.

Self-serve martech works best when centralized tools are put in place that help maintain agreed-upon processes. Self-service isn’t the wild west—it’s a systematic approach, partially resulting from enshrining centralized operating principles in marketing technology. In terms of email template creation, this may involve creating templates in a single platform (such as Knak) and giving each team direct access to that tool.

The potential of self-service tools is high, empowering teams to act quickly, adapt email templates to fit immediate campaign needs without delay, and increase efficiency. A well-thought approach and the right setup can be beneficial. This model isn’t without risks, as the lack of direct oversight can result in decreased quality or teams going off-brand.

Self-service models can excel using email template tools. Make no mistake about it—self-service models are built to support the needs of large enterprises. Don Le, Marketing Automation Lead at Meta, has detailed how his team rolled out Knak to democratize the email creation process. This not only saved Meta significant time developing emails, but it also helped create a set of standard operating procedures designed for an organization operating at a global scale.

Watch Don Le Present on Using Knak in a Self-Serve Model

Decentralized Ops and Email Templates

Decentralized marketing ops teams are often spread across different regions or departments. Autonomy is the watchword, and each team has the independence required to manage their own email creation and execution. This model is innately adaptable, allowing teams to respond to local markets and specific audiences.

Each department or regional team is ultimately responsible for creating and deploying their own email templates. They are often given the flexibility to adapt global brand guidelines to meet local market demands. While this can often be a benefit of a decentralized setup, it can also pose challenges when it comes to following brand guidelines. A degree of ‘coloring outside the lines’ is accepted, but it often works best with guiding principles.

This is the exact challenge that Utility Warehouse faced prior to working with an email creation platform. The requirement to enable 45,000 partners with email templates at the same time as staying on-brand was daunting. As in a self-service model, a centralized toolset makes sense and enables teams to stay on-brand without inhibiting creative freedom. In the case of Utility Warehouse, they brought on Knak to centralize email creation and create high quality, on-brand emails across their vast partner network. Read more about the Utility Warehouse case study.

Functional Model and Email Templates

The functional model combines tenets of the centralized model with localized decision-making. It borrows from the traditional decentralized setup, particularly where regional or field marketing staff oversee localized marketing efforts. Functional models differ in that they are organized by functions (demand gen, events, etc.) or product lines.

The efficiency of this model lies in placing experts in their respective areas at the forefront of the email creation process. Teams like demand gen, product marketing, and content marketing are empowered to create and manage email templates. The linchpin of the functional model is a technological system and well-defined internal processes to ensure coordination.

Similar to decentralized teams, a common challenge in the functional model is that email templates fall out of sync with general branding guidelines. This is what happened at TIBCO where the branding in their email templates became disconnected from their web design. Worse, email templates were taking three to four months to code. This is where an email creation platform can shine – in this case, Knak was used to speed up development, enable marketers to build on-brand templates, and ensure brand guidelines were followed across the various teams. Read more about the TIBCO case study here.

Campaign-Centric Model and Email Templates

The campaign-centric model is like a special operations team focused on a singular mission. Campaign teams are often assembled by bringing together members from multiple teams, all focused on a single campaign or marketing objective. The campaign-centric model may be short-term and exist within the framework of other models (centralized, decentralized, etc.).

Email templates are designed with specific campaign goals in mind, sometimes adapting brand guidelines to fit the messaging and tone of the campaign. By necessity, this requires more flexibility in the template approach, integrating new modules with existing pre-approved modules to create cohesive designs.

The risk with a campaign-centric approach is that creativity strays too far from existing brand guidelines. This is where a centralized approach to template creation and management is critical. Leaning on tools to guide template creation acts as a brand guardrail, while clear instructions for approval processes ensure the final product is top-notch.

Outsourced Model and Email Templates

The outsourced model relies on external agencies to manage key aspects of email template development. It’s a common model in the marketing operations world, but it is increasingly becoming outdated. We should know—Knak was originally built by an agency.

The challenge with the outsourced model is that it takes time, can get expensive quickly, and doesn't offer a lot of flexibility. Frustrated by the continued back-and-forth, many teams settle for “good enough” templates and use the same set across all campaigns. This hinders creativity and limits the potential of your email marketing to drive exceptional results.

Graduating from this process doesn't require hiring an in-house email designer—nowadays, you can use email creation platforms like Knak to handle this yourself.

Orchestrating Success with Email Templates

Whatever your marketing operations model, achieving harmony and success with your email campaigns requires using a tool that aligns with your internal processes. Knak meets you where you are—no matter your operating model, Knak’s features help streamline the email creation process. Whether you are centralized, decentralized, using a self-service model, or adopting a campaign-centric approach, Knak supports key components:

1. Ensures high-quality emails that fit your brand guidelines
2. A centralized asset approval workflow to keep everyone on the same page
3. No-code tools to design responsive emails that function across all email clients
4. Integration with your marketing automation platform to empower your marketing ops and demand gen teams

Ready to conduct your marketing ops with precision? With Knak, not only will you create beautiful emails faster, but they’ll stay on-brand, deliver maximum impact, and foster collaboration across your entire team. Request a demo today to find out more.