Templates: Are they really the best choice for Demand Generation?

Careful, your HTML is showing…

As a Demand Generation (DG) marketer, you’re usually asked to drive awareness, interest, and demand for your organization.

In a market where technologies and preferences evolve faster than a cheetah on caffeine, you better keep up! 🐆

To succeed, it’s important to be adaptive and to meet your customer’s preferences – which will rarely be the same from one day to the next.

Why? Because buying habits, customer expectations, and decision-making processes are all influenced by various market trends, which can impact your campaigns. DG professionals are tasked with keeping up with these customer needs. Therefore, email and landing page campaigns MUST hit home and resonate with your audience.

One main upgrade that can change an entire market overnight is advancing technology. 📡

New tools, platforms, updates, and tech come out so often it could make anyone dizzy trying to keep up.

But, if marketing automation and technology are so easy to make an entire market sway, – according to our most recent Benchmark Report – why are 57% of marketers still using email templates to create their campaigns?

Email and Landing page builders are a great tool to have in your back pocket. They allow you to reach out to exactly who you want with the messaging you want. But, when it comes to templates, you may have noticed they’re not always as simple as they should be.

If you’re a DG professional, let’s take a closer look at why it may be time to swap away from templates for your campaigns 👀

Limited customization: DG campaigns – email or landing pages – often require highly targeted and personalized messaging to engage prospects and customers. However, many email templates offer limited customization options, which can stifle creativity and your campaign results.

Generic templates often don’t allow you to fully customize content, design, or calls-to-action (CTAs) so they align with your campaign needs. It may not seem like the be-all and end-all to success, but having a clearly defined design that matches your brand, can increase your customer or prospect’s trust in your organization.

Generic or overused content: Have you ever received an email and thought, “I feel like I’ve seen this a hundred times before”? You may have seen the same template used by a different company or for a different campaign. 

Many email templates come with pre-designed content that limits originality. As a result, they often don’t provide a compelling value proposition.

But DG marketing needs fresh and engaging content to capture the attention of your audience and inspire action. Conversely, templates with generic or overused content may not hit home with your target audience, impacting your campaigns for the worst.

Poor design and User Experience: Email templates must meet modern design trends and best practices for user experience. But, the ones that do are often overused.

Templates that lack cohesive design and UX don’t have relevant content or don’t use best practices. DG marketers need visually engaging emails that are easy to read, navigate, and take action. It should be clear and straightforward. Any templates that offer unclear designs should be thrown out!

Limited Automation and Personalization Capabilities: DG campaigns often rely on email automation and personalization to deliver relevant messages at scale. 

However, some email templates may not offer personalized automation capabilities, limiting your ability to send targeted emails. This can hurt your efforts to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, which is crucial for DG success.

No room for change: DG campaigns are dynamic and must be adjusted to the market’s needs over time. But, when using templates that are difficult to edit or lack scalability, that can hurt your ability to adapt to change.

As your campaign goals or target audience evolves, you need the flexibility to update your emails. Templates that don’t offer that can seriously damage your campaign’s success.

Templates can be a great starting point for DG marketers. But, they may not be the best to build a successful campaign. Adaptability, design, and cost should always be the top priorities of campaign creation.

With all of the limitations of templates, it can be hard for an individual or a team to get campaigns out the door efficiently.

The main takeaway? Not all templates are created equal. Some are better than others. None, however, are perfect.