Ask a marketing team why campaigns take so long and you hear about approvals. Watch them work and you see something else: the same footer rebuilt for the fourth time, the same button styled slightly differently, the same legal text pasted from an email nobody can find.
What this package delivers
- Three template families — editorial, transactional, promotional — instead of the nineteen most estates accumulate.
- A locked component layer: header, footer, legal block, preference links, buttons. Shared means shared, not “a starting point”.
- Design tokens so a rebrand changes one place, not thirty.
- Landing page templates matched to the emails, so campaigns look like one thing.
- Tested in dark mode, on mobile, with images off, and against a screen reader.
- A written QA checklist a non-expert can run when you are on holiday.
The cost you are already paying
Every time someone recreates something that exists, you pay three times: once for the build, once for the review, and once later when the two versions diverge and somebody has to work out which is correct.
That third cost is the expensive one and it never appears on a timesheet. It shows up as an email carrying last year’s legal text, a rebrand that takes a quarter, and a new hire who cannot tell which of four templates is current.
The rebrand test
If your brand colour changed tomorrow, how many files would someone have to open? If the answer is “all of them”, you do not have a template system — you have a folder of emails that currently look similar.
What you get
| Layer | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Design tokens | Colour, type scale, spacing, button styling, corner radius — defined once, referenced everywhere |
| Locked components | Brand header, legal footer, unsubscribe and preference links, button, social row, product tile |
| Editorial template | Newsletters and content sends. Flexible block stack, one primary call to action. |
| Transactional template | Confirmations, onboarding, service messages. Fixed structure, high data density. |
| Promotional template | Offers and launches. Strong hero, offer grid, repeated call to action. |
| Landing pages | Two matched layouts — lead capture and content/gated — using the same tokens |
| Localisation model | How second and third languages are handled, decided before the templates are built rather than after |
| QA checklist | Eight checks, written so anyone can run them |
| Handover session | 90 minutes with your team, recorded |
Testing that most template projects skip
- Dark mode. A growing share of your audience reads in it, and untested templates routinely produce black text on a black background.
- Images off. Still the default in several corporate mail clients. If your call to action is an image, it does not exist for those readers.
- Awkward data. Empty first name, a very long company name, an umlaut and an apostrophe, a name in a non-Latin script. Permanent test profiles, so you can re-run it forever.
- Accessibility. Alt text, contrast, logical heading order. Increasingly a procurement question in public-sector and enterprise deals.
Locking components creates a queue — that is handled
The objection to locking shared components is that it slows people down. It does, unless you make requests cheap and visible: a named owner, a short turnaround, and a log of every “I needed something the component could not do”. Those notes tell you exactly which gap to close in the next revision, which turns the lock from an obstacle into a feedback loop. That process is part of the handover.
How it runs
- Week 1 — audit and consolidate. Every existing template, sorted by last use. Most estates find half are dormant. That is scope you do not rebuild.
- Week 2 — tokens and components. The bottom two layers, agreed with whoever owns brand.
- Week 3 — templates. Three email families plus two landing pages.
- Week 4 — test, document, hand over. Including the dark-mode and awkward-data passes.
Best for
- Teams where every campaign feels like a bespoke project
- Organisations with a rebrand coming, who would rather do the groundwork first
- Anyone who has accumulated more than a dozen templates and lost track of which is current
- Teams onboarding a new marketer who needs to ship without breaking anything
Price and duration
From €3,900. Three to four weeks. Fixed scope, fixed price. The range reflects the number of languages and whether landing pages are in scope — both agreed before we start.
This is the package with the slowest payback and the longest tail. It becomes visible all at once on the day a brand change lands in one place instead of thirty.
Sound like your org?
Thirty minutes, free, no slides. Bring your questions about scope, timing or whether this package is even the right one — you will get straight answers.