Email templates work differently in each marketing operations model, because the model decides who builds the templates, who approves them, and who uses them to produce emails.
Marketing ops is like an orchestra, where dozens of individual players harmonize into a single captivating movement, and email templates act as the sheet music: they provide consistency, efficiency, and alignment with the broader strategy (e.g., brand guidelines). Each player brings their own creativity to that sheet music, and the conductor coordinates them into a cohesive symphony.
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 into how they work with email templates.
Model | Definition | Control | Best use cases |
|---|---|---|---|
Centralized | A single team manages all decision-making and execution to ensure brand consistency and uniformity. | High control by a single team or department | Organizations seeking strong brand control |
Self-Serve | Teams have access to centralized tools but execute campaigns independently, allowing for rapid iteration. | Moderate control, depends on governance of tools | Tech-savvy teams that need speed and autonomy |
Decentralized | Independent teams manage their own operations, tailoring campaigns to specific regions or markets. | Low control, each team operates independently | Large organizations with field marketers or diverse products |
Functional | Teams are organized by specific functions or product lines, requiring coordination across specialized units. | Split control, functional teams have autonomy | Organizations needing specialized teams for different product lines |
Campaign-Centric | Temporary teams are assembled around specific campaigns, focusing on targeted execution and objectives. | Variable control based on campaign needs | Organizations focused on product launches or sales campaigns |
Outsourced | External agencies handle campaign execution, often relieving internal teams of resource-heavy operations. | Dependent on external providers | Organizations needing additional capacity or specialized skills |
What kind of platform lets marketers build emails from preapproved templates?
The kind of platform that lets marketers build emails from preapproved templates is a production layer between design and the MAP. Marketers assemble emails from approved, reusable modules, brand elements stay locked, permissions decide who can edit what, a review step catches anything new, and the finished email syncs to the marketing automation platform.
Each operating model hands those pieces to different owners:
Model | Who builds the templates | Who assembles the emails | Who approves |
|---|---|---|---|
Centralized | The central marketing ops team | The central team | The central team |
Self-serve | The central team, in one shared tool | Program and campaign marketers | Central rules, with review for exceptions |
Decentralized | Regional or departmental teams, adapting global guidelines | Regional teams | Regional leads, within brand principles |
Functional | Demand gen, product marketing, and content teams | Each function | Function leads, within shared brand guidelines |
Campaign-centric | The campaign team, adding new modules to approved ones | The campaign team | Brand review for anything new |
Outsourced | An external agency | The agency | The internal team, often over several rounds |
Most enterprise teams mix these models: Knak's 2026 research found that 56% of organizations use a hybrid structure for campaign production, combining centralized governance with decentralized execution, so the template system has to serve a central owner and local builders at the same time. Knak is the agentic production layer for enterprise marketing, built for that split between central owners and local builders.
How email templates work in each marketing operations model
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 field marketing, full centralization is still the exception: Forrester found that 14% of field marketing teams operated under a fully centralized model in 2025, up from 9% in 2023.
The central 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. 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 gain the most when one tool carries the whole process, from design to feedback, approvals, and distribution. At DISH Network Corporation, feedback from approvers in Programming, Strategy, and Legal had to pass through IT before an email could change. In Knak's 2025 customer story, DISH cut email creation time in half, from 15 business days to about eight, and can turn around emergency emails in two days. 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 email template builder (such as Knak) and giving each team direct access to that tool.
Self-service tools let teams act quickly and adapt email templates to immediate campaign needs. This model isn’t without risks, as the lack of direct oversight can result in decreased quality or teams going off-brand, which is why large teams pair local autonomy with central controls, a pattern covered in more depth in our piece on decentralization in enterprise marketing.
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
MOps Summit - Don - Meta
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.
Regional teams are often given the flexibility to adapt global brand guidelines to meet local market demands. That flexibility can strain brand guidelines: a degree of ‘coloring outside the lines’ is accepted, but it works best with guiding principles.
This is the exact challenge that Utility Warehouse faced: keeping its email to a network of 45,000 partners on-brand. 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. Utility Warehouse's 2025 case study reports that 20 people can now build emails, and a new email design takes hours instead of weeks. 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. 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. Knak was used to speed up development, let marketers build on-brand templates, and ensure brand guidelines were followed across the various teams. Template creation now takes less than two weeks, including approvals. 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, and one we know well: 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.
Graduating from this process doesn't require hiring an in-house email designer. With Knak, the agentic production layer for enterprise marketing, your own team can produce on-brand templates and emails without the agency round trip.
How do teams keep templates on-brand when marketers build their own emails?
Teams keep templates on-brand by locking the brand elements in the template itself and opening only the parts marketers need to change. Approved modules, permissions that decide who can edit what, and a review step for anything new let field and regional marketers build their own emails without breaking brand rules, whatever the operating model.
If your team runs Marketo, our guide to building Marketo email and landing page templates shows how that structure looks in practice. To see it with your own templates and operating model, request a demo.
