Is It Time to Scale Your Design Workflow?
Boost Efficiency and Maximize ROI with Scalable Email Design Systems
Cathrina Dionisio
As marketing programs grow, so do the demands on creative teams. You may have started with a few basic email templates for your lifecycle marketing and batch and blast campaigns, but your program is becoming more sophisticated. If you’re struggling to keep up with production demand, it may be time to shift toward a scalable solution, an Email Design System (EDS).
The Challenge: Outgrowing Manual Workflows
For many marketing teams, manual email designs and your Email Platforms, Content Management system works well for a while. Boilerplates or basic templates serve as a foundation, allowing teams to produce standardized emails quickly. However, as your email marketing program grows, these manual systems start to show their limitations:
- Lack of flexibility: As campaigns become more complex, a rigid template can’t keep up with diverse needs and new use cases.
- Inefficiency: Teams waste valuable time redoing work and manually tweaking designs. Global changes to fonts, colors, or layouts are cumbersome to implement across all assets.
- Scalability challenges: A single template can’t grow with your team as new channels, designs, and customer expectations evolve.
So, how do you move from this inefficient, manual process to a streamlined, scalable solution? The answer lies in Email Design Systems (EDS).
What is an Email Design System (EDS)?
An Email Design System (EDS) is a comprehensive framework for creating modular, reusable templates leveraging interactive features of design platforms such as Figma, Taxi for Email, or Stensul. It enables your team to scale quickly and effectively by providing a consistent, structured system that can be adapted to meet your needs. Here’s how it works:
- Modular components: With EDS, you design and organize your email assets as modular components—such as headers, footers, call-to-action buttons, and images—that can be reused across multiple campaigns.
- Flexible layouts: These systems allow marketers to mix and match design elements for various use cases while maintaining consistent brand styles.
- Dynamic content: Create modules to work with your ESP and dynamically populate real-time customer data, allowing for personalized, relevant messaging.
Boost Efficiency and Maximize ROI
The real value of EDS comes when you start to see its quick return on investment (ROI). But it’s not just about saving money—it’s about boosting efficiency. With a well-built system, creative and development teams can work faster, more efficiently, and with greater flexibility.
1. Launch Campaigns Faster
With EDS, users can create new emails with just a few clicks. The modular structure enables rapid iterations, so campaigns are launched more frequently without sacrificing quality.
2. Save Time and Resources
By standardizing templates and components, teams spend less time reinventing the wheel. Tasks like adjusting fonts, colors, and margins, which used to require extensive manual work, are now automated through the design system. This reduces production time and operational costs.
2. Save Time and Resources
By standardizing templates and components, teams spend less time reinventing the wheel. Tasks like adjusting fonts, colors, and margins, which used to require extensive manual work, are now automated through the design system. This reduces production time and operational costs.
Case Study: Consumer and B2B Fortune 1000 Delivery Client
One of our long-term clients in the shipping and logistics industry came to us during peak season, looking for a scalable solution to handle their email design workload. We implemented a custom email design system in Figma that included flexible modules and layouts for every possible use case. This system allowed the client to produce 300 unique emails in just 3-4 weeks, reducing their average email creation time from 3 hours to just 1.25 hours per email.
The result? They saved over 355 hours and $80k—money reinvested into optimizing their data, refining customer targeting, and expanding their marketing channels.
Ready to Scale?
At Ragnarok, we specialize in combining creative vision with platform-specific technical know-how. Our expertise in enabling data to deploy dynamic content, and personalization enables us to design experiences that truly resonate with customers.
If your marketing program is feeling those growing pains and the strain of manual workflows, it may be time to consider an email design system. Contact Ragnarok for a customized solution designed to meet your business’s needs and accelerate your growth.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your data?
Talk to Ragnarok about implementing a robust data dictionary and elevating your personalization efforts to new heights. Your customers will thank you for it.
