I’m working for a company that recently split into a few separate bodies. As part of the split, each group took a copy of duplicable marketing materials. The set I’m working with most right now are email and landing page templates from our customer relationship management (CRM) software.
And. wow.
I was told initially that the company split because it was getting to be too complex, and that definitely feels true looking at these materials. The food science side and the environmental science side, for instance, produced very different materials for very different audiences. But, the split was also recent enough that I’m combing through old materials to find models for what I’m supposed to produce. Writing my first few emails and creating my first landing page here took a lot longer than it should have because I didn’t have a solid starting point aside from a plethora of examples.
Examples vs. Templates. Copy/Paste vs. Fill-in-the-Blank.
As a copywriter in other settings, I’ve gotten into intense discussions about the value of templates. Essentially, the debate comes down to an issue of creative freedom. Some see templates as an unnecessary constraint, a “paint by numbers” sort of approach to creating material that removes a lot of the content creator’s skill from the equation. Others (like me) see templates as an enormous boost to creativity: by making some hard limits or expectations explicit, a template shows where the most creative potential is in a document.
I mean, consider the old “Got Milk” ads. That is the power of a template. The only requirements for those ads are the phrase “got milk?” (all lowercase), a milk mustache on the model, and a short paragraph explaining why they drink milk. That’s it. The ad can go in any direction it wants to from there.
It’s instantly recognizable, but different ads played with themes of humor, family, friendship, manliness, sex… The template gives a lot of flexibility and amplifies the message through repetition.
Would the campaign have been anywhere near as powerful if creators could go with whatever made an individual piece strong? Or, if the phrase “got milk” was required but the mustache wasn’t (or vice versa)?
I love templates. I think they cut out a lot of unnecessary mental work in creating new material, and they increase the impact of a repeated message. That said, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do templates.
Find an example, copy/paste, and then replace what you need to?
When I first moved from academia to industry, I was given a “template” for my first project: an email promoting a piece of content. The template was another email for a different piece of content. That email had performed well, so folks were just sort of opening that Word doc, saving it with a new file name, then replacing text as they went to describe whatever they were promoting.
In a classroom, I’d describe this sort of like building a house by first moving a house onto some land, then replacing the whole building wall by wall until you got the floorplan you wanted.
There are times when this approach works! Tour any new subdivision and you’ll see dozens of houses that are just minor variations on a single design. That method gets the job done, provided the end-user doesn’t have some specific needs out of their floorplan. In marketing materials, it works as long as the functions of the old and new document are very similar.
Like, sometimes I want to promote a webinar or a podcast or a video of some kind, and I know that my target audience is going to click that link once it’s given to them. (You know, the die-hard audience that’s actually sitting there, waiting for the next podcast episode, regardless of its specific subject.) In that case, sure. Copy, paste, replace a title, done.
But what if I’m promoting a technical paper or a white paper on a wildly different subject from the original? What if the webinar I’m promoting is meant to reach a wider audience than just the die hard fans? Essentially, what if there are enough differences between the audience, the message, and the collateral being promoted that moving some walls in my floorplan won’t get me the result (a basement, a shop, an additional bedroom…) that I need?
In that case, a template really is the answer.
What is in a good template?
This probably needs a longer discussion specifically on the subject, but in a nutshell, a good template contains guard-rails only. It tells the creator what boundaries cannot be violated and the rationale for them. I’m a big fan of Word templates with comments or macro-generated content explaining these things, but I’m also a fan of content management systems with editing tools already designed with these things in mind.
So, for instance, before I left my last job, I made a boatload of templates for the most common projects we did. That simple email template went from being a copy/paste job of a high-performing example to being a series of prompts for content.
- Subject Line: Maximum X words or Y characters gets best performance
- Email heading: Maximum X characters (keep it between 1-1.5 lines of text)
- Body: Best CTR is between X and Y words
- CTA: X sentence structure and max Y words
The specifics were more detailed than that list, but you get the idea. Instead of saying “here’s an email that worked well” (which was two short paragraphs), the template says “here’s the rule and the rationale.” Did we break those rules sometimes? Yes, but only the ones that we knew had some wiggle room. An email’s body could be double our normal length if it met certain, known criteria.
The result? Emails became super easy to write and our open and CTR rates went up. It wasn’t a “paint by numbers” approach, but it did highlight where our creative muscle could have the most impact.
Be more general?
Now, when I sit down for a new project, my first task is to see if I’ve already made a template at this job. Most of the time, I haven’t. That is the first thing I do.
Some templates are very literal template documents. I’ve made a dozen or so Email Templates and Landing Page Templates in Pardot, all generalizing from existing examples and using Pardot Regions to prompt for specific rhetorical moves or blocks of text. Rather than expect that I’ll continue to remember why an event landing page has a bulleted list in the middle, I am telling myself that there need to be bullets that accomplish a specific goal—if I don’t have the kind of content that accomplishes that goal, then the bullets get deleted so I don’t waste screen space on unnecessary content.
Some templates are just my own personal drafting scheme. I make Word styles and macros to block out chunks of text in accepted patterns. For instance, when creating a webpage, the “hero zone” (not something I worry about much on this blog) has a set of components that every company does in their own way. So, my Word documents for creating webpages have a macro that generates prompts and guidelines to ensure that I follow existing practices. I don’t have to consult current webpages to remember how to structure that space and waste time remembering each component—instead, I get to spend my mental energy on creating a solid page title, a compelling tagline, an SEO-friendly intro block, and other materials that matter more than remembering whether the preheader comes before or after the “contact us” button.
