How to Leverage Email Templates to Skyrocket the ROI of Your Campaigns

Sending plain-text emails will get you nowhere. Regardless of how powerful the email copy is and how enticing the offer might be, without visuals, emails just don’t have as strong of an impact on the subscriber.

Imagine running an e-commerce store and creating an email sequence for a new sweater collection. Would you send emails that explain how comfy the sweaters are and tell your subscribers to trust you that they look amazing, or would you include pictures of your items?

The same principle applies to all promotional emails, regardless of what product you’re selling. You need to show the subscribers what it is you’re offering, rather than babbling on and on about how the products are amazing. 

When it comes to services, the situation is a bit different. You can’t really add an image of the service you’re offering, but you can — and should — include a hero image and use a designed CTA (call-to-action), rather than just adding a hyperlink in the last sentence of your email. 

Why are Visuals so Important?

Images bring your emails to life. They’re much more effective at grabbing the subscribers’ attention than simple text. 

Most of us receive dozens of emails every day, and the bulk of them are boring. Even if we do end up opening an email, the chances are that we’re not going to read through a chunk of text. We’ll probably just skim it, and either click to check out the offer or close the email.

Visuals add a critical element to the emails — they enable subscribers to check out the offer before clicking the link. Product and lifestyle images spark interest in a way that no words ever could. Even if you don’t end up clicking the CTA button, you’ll likely remember what the product you liked looks like, but will forget the email’s copy three seconds later. 

Adding images to your emails helps ensure that your brand stays top of mind. When subscribers are thinking about your products, whether consciously or subconsciously, they’ll be much more receptive to future emails from your company. As they open more of your emails and their interest increases, so do the chances that they’ll decide to make a purchase. 

On top of that, beautifully designed emails give off the impression that you’re a professional who’s put time and effort into their email marketing campaigns. With a plain-text email, you often come off as someone who set up a business in five minutes, didn’t put much effort into their marketing campaigns, and is trying to trick people into buying overpriced stuff they don’t actually need. 

The Impact Visuals Have on Your Subscribers

Let us give you two examples to help illustrate the importance of visuals. The first one is a well-designed email from Airtable, while the other one is a plain email from Sumo. 

Airtable’s Designed Email

Sumo’s Plain Email

The first email talks about one of Airtable’s features, but it doesn’t rely only on words to introduce you to it. Instead, the email features a GIF that rotates five screenshots from the tool and gives you a much better idea of what the feature does than a written explanation ever could. 

The email is also well-formatted, with a headline, bullets, and a CTA in the form of a button. It’s memorable. Even if you don’t click the “browse templates” now, you’ll remember the email and might take Airtable up on their offer at a later date, when the need for these templates arises.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have Sumo's email, which is basically a bit of fluff around a link to the case study. It’s easy to forget, and it doesn’t really spark your interest or instill trust in the company. The email as a whole gives off a vibe that you’re not talking to a professional company, but rather to an individual who’s “sooooo curious” about how much money they can get you to spend on their product. 

Not even visuals would help this email’s horrendous copy, but you get the idea — images are pretty darn important. If the two companies were offering the same product, we have no doubt that the vast majority of people would choose Airtable based on the email alone, without ever comparing the products. 

Visuals are no longer a luxury that only companies with professional designers can afford to add to their emails. They’ve become a golden standard of email marketing, and if you stick to the practice of sending plain text emails like you were stuck in the 90s, the ROI of your campaigns will be abysmal. 

Visuals add a level of depth to your emails, enrich them, and make them more impactful by:

1. Adding branding 

2. Providing context to your messages 

3. Inciting emotion 

So, the question isn’t whether or not you should craft beautifully designed emails, but how you’re going to do that. The answer is — by taking advantage of marketing email templates. 

Take Advantage of Email Templates to Save Time and Boost Your Conversions

You don’t need to know how to code or hire a professional designer to send visually stunning emails. There are thousands of free email templates online that you can download and tweak according to your brand, product, and campaign. 

Even if you were a graphic designer, on top of knowing everything there is to know about email marketing, it still wouldn’t make a lot of sense to craft every single email from scratch. Email templates save you a ton of time and they’re proven to work! 

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel and spend days looking at a design trying to figure out which colors to use and where to place each design element. The much better approach is to select from a variety of templates that provide consistent results for marketers all over the world and make a few small adjustments. 

Quite a few email marketing software tools offer free HTML email templates by default, which you can edit using simple drag and drop tools. There are also dozens of websites that provide hundreds of free email templates to choose from. 

Here are the ten best places to look for simple HTML email templates:

1. BEE

2. Stripo

3. Email on Acid

4. 99designs

5. Litmus

6. Benchmarkemail

7. Cerberus

8. Sendinblue

9. Envato elements

10. Dyspatch

BEE

BEE is a company that makes every email marketer’s life ten times easier. Their website features over 440 professionally designed HTML email templates that you can download and use in virtually any email campaign. 

BEE Homepage

The best part about BEE is that you can use over 100 templates from their catalog completely free of charge for life! Instead of a free trial, the company offers a free plan — simply create an account, and you can start playing with their free templates right away.

BEE lets you can narrow down your search by:

1. Designer

2. Usage

3. Industry

This way, you won’t have to go through all of their templates to figure out what might work for your business. Simply select the industry you’re in and the objective of your email — cart abandonment, confirmation, download, newsletter, etc. — and find the perfect template in seconds.

We understand that 100+ free templates may sound too good to be true, but that’s just how generous BEE is. Naturally, the company has a way to monetize their products — BEE Pro. That said, upgrading to a Pro plan is completely optional. The paid subscription gives you access to a powerful email editor and adds advanced review and approval features, as well as direct ESP (Email Service Provider) integration. 

Apart from letting you use hundreds of pre-built templates, BEE also allows you to create your own templates from scratch. Their email editor is super simple to use — just drag and drop elements you want to add to your emails, upload images and videos, write a few lines of copy, and you’ll have a professional-looking email in no time!

BEE’s Email Editor

Stripo

Stripo is another fantastic email template builder. They offer over 350 mobile-responsive HTML email templates. 

Stripo Email Templates

You can export the emails you create with Stripo to over 40 ESPs, including:

• Mailchimp

• GetResponse

• CampaignMonitor

• Gmail

The trick with Stripo, however, is that the free plan is limited to only two templates. You can choose any two you like, but to create more, you’d have to opt for one of the paid plans. 

The business plan starts from $12.50/month, but only increases the limit to 15 templates. The much better option, in our opinion, is the $40/month Agency plan, which removes any limitations and gives you full access to all of Stripo’s features.

Much like BEE, Stripo lets you browse templates by:

1. Type

2. Industry

3. Season

4. Feature

Stripo’s editor is intuitive and easy to use, but it does not give you the opportunity to create your own email templates from scratch. 

Email on Acid

Despite the somewhat questionable name, Email on Acid is a great online email testing platform that helps ensure every single email you send out is fully optimized. The platform helps you make sure that your emails are mobile-responsive and that they render correctly across all email service providers. 

Email on Acid incorporates pre-deployment checklists and content checks and allows you to preview each message before you hit the send button. Aside from testing capabilities, the platform also offers email tracking and advanced analytics, so you’ll know exactly how every email in your campaign is performing. 

The tool boasts over 600 free email templates. The trick is, they are “free” in the sense that you don’t pay extra for them after subscribing to one of the paid plans Email on Acid offers. The tool is anything but cheap, mind you, with monthly subscriptions starting from $86 for the Basic plan. 

Email on Acid Templates

All in all, if you’re only interested in free email templates, Email on Acid might not be the best solution. If you’re looking for a powerful email tester that includes over 600 HTML templates, then this platform is one of the best options on the market. 

Email on Acid offers a seven-day free trial, so you can test out the platform before you commit to a paid plan. 

99designs

If you’re looking for email templates and other graphic designs for your business, 99design is the place to be. The website is a graphic design hub that aims to connect agencies, marketers, and business owners with freelance designers. 

99designs Homepage

The designers on the website can create pretty much anything, including:

• T-shirt designs

• Logos

• Webpage design

• Product packaging

• Book covers

The site also offers 45 free email templates as one of their lead magnets. Every template was created by a professional graphic designer and follows the standards and best practices of email marketing.

All you need to do is input your email address, and 99designs will deliver the responsive templates straight to your inbox. 

The trouble, however, is that you’ll need to import these in another tool before you can use an email editor to tweak them. You could, in theory, use Photoshop, but that would kind of defeat the purpose. 

Litmus 

Litmus is another email tester that can help you optimize every aspect of your email marketing campaign. Through its detailed pre-sending checkup process and actionable insights, Litmus helps you get better with every email, allowing you to gradually boost your ROI. 

The company also offers a bunch of free, email-related resources that its users can leverage to enhance their email marketing. Among them is a community-created library of 45 free email templates that anyone can download from the website. 

Litmus Email Templates

The templates are divided into four categories:

• Product launch 

• E-commerce  

• Account management 

• Generic marketing templates 

Although Litmus doesn’t offer as wide of a variety as some other websites on our list, the templates are completely free to use, and you can download all of them if you wish. 

Benchmarkemail

Benchmarkemail is a robust email marketing tool that facilitates email creation and helps automate every aspect of your campaign. The tool also includes advanced insights and analytics, ensuring you always know exactly what works and what you need to improve.

Benchmark Email Homepage

The tool comes with a handful of free email templates, but it does feature a simple yet powerful email editor that allows you to create stunning emails in seconds. The tool offers a 30-day free trial, so you can check out the templates and the email editor, as well as try out the tool’s email marketing automation features completely risk-free.  

Cerberus

If you’re not looking for anything fancy, but want a few minimalistic HTML email templates, then Cerberus is a decent option. The tool is open-source and completely free, and you can download it as a zip file directly from the website’s homepage or from GitHub. 

Cerberus Fluid Email Template

Cerberus puts emphasis on responsiveness. The main concern of the tool is restructuring the email based on the screen size, making sure that all the content and images are displayed properly, regardless of which device the subscriber is using. 

That said, Cerberus also allows you to insert hero images, product photos, buttons, and text blocks. While you can’t create gorgeous, fully-designed images as you could with BEE, for example, Cerberus certainly gets the job done. 

Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers a suite of tools to help you take your business to the next level. From email marketing and customer relationship management to creating captivating landing pages and powerful Facebook ad campaigns, Sendinblue can help you streamline all your marketing-related efforts.

Sendinblue Homepage

As far as email templates are concerned, there are over 60 professionally designed ones to choose from. Similar to most other tools with built-in templates, Sendinblue features a simple drag-and-drop email editor that you can use to adjust the templates according to your brand, campaign, and offers.

The great news is that Sendinblue offers a free plan, which lets you leverage the templates and send up to 300 emails per day! 

Envato Elements

Envato elements is a website with a database of over 80,000 graphic templates. There are over 2,000 stunning email templates to choose from, and you can download up to 12 per month with a free account.

Envato Elements Email Templates

The subscription is only $16.50/month and gives you unlimited access to all of the assets available on the website. If you’re looking for graphics for your business, as well as email templates, the deal Envato Elements offers is a real bargain. 

Dyspatch

Dyspatch is an interactive email builder that helps you create surreal emails in minutes. 

The company behind the tool understands that the online business world is constantly evolving. That’s why Dyspatch seeks to help forward-thinking marketers integrate innovations into their business and create cutting-edge, interactive emails. 

Dyspatch Homepage

With Dyspatch, you can add videos, GIFs, and even carousels to your emails. This helps bring your emails to life and adds an element of interactivity that helps pique the subscribers’ interest. 

Aside from the incredible email builder, Dyspatch offers an extensive gallery of free HTML email templates. There are hundreds of stunning email templates to choose from, created by the Dyspatch team and members of their community. 

A Powerful Autoresponder and Email Editor That You Can Resell

Before we wrap things up, we want to quickly introduce you to the Sell SaaS white-label autoresponder. 

You can use our tool to create automated outreach and follow-up email campaigns in minutes. A simple yet powerful email editor lets you create visually stunning emails that drive conversions in seconds through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. 

The autoresponder will also automatically track you open, bounce, and click-through rates, so you’ll be able to monitor the performance of your campaigns in real-time. 

The best part, however, is that you can both use and resell our software! Simply add your company name, logo, and brand colors, and you can start selling the autoresponder under your own brand. 

This is an excellent way to scale your business by creating an additional revenue stream. There are no license fees or any hidden costs — you can get started today for free. 

To top it all off, we’ll handle everything from setting up the payment links to providing customer support to your clients so you can focus on generating sales. 

You also get to choose what price you want to sell the software for and will get to keep between 60% and 80% of every sale you make. If you’re looking to maximize your profits by adding SaaS to your portfolio of products, check out other white-label software we’re offering:

• Enrichment data software

• Email extractor

• Chatbot

• Online review manager

• API to prevent fake email registrations