Master Email Template

While working at Sercante I created quite a few Pardot email templates for clients.

Most clients were interested in flexible email templates that contained various components that could easily be added or removed. To accomplish this, I'd create a master template that contained all of the components they could possibly choose from. From there, they could copy the template and create a new email by duplicating and/or removing the components provided by the master template then swap out the content as-needed.

You can click here to see an example of a master template. Yes, it kind of looks like a cluttered mess, but we found this worked well in Pardot for most of our clients. If you check out the HTML, you'll see all of the needed Pardot attributes to make this easy-to-use in their editor, but you'll also notice the code is also pretty easy to work with without a visual editor.

To determine the components the client would need, I'd do several things including:

Review
Reviewing their existing templates and previously sent messages would provide me with a lot of information. In some cases the client would provide us with some examples, and in other cases I'd take a look through their ESP to see what I could find.

Compile
Compiling a list of components usually started on paper, then moved into XD. In some cases I'd save screenshots, and in other cases I'd wireframe out commonly used components. In this step it was important to list out even the most obvious components to make sure I would meet the clients' needs and wasn't making any assumptions.

Present and discuss
Once I had a list compiled, I'd present my findings to the client. This was a great opportunity to understand what they liked, what frustrated them, what they'd like to try, etc. These discussions would often uncover underlying issues that I could solve for them as well as how technical or how much time they had to devote to their email creation. This would help me to understand how to build their template and what resources I needed to provide them with once it was time to deliver the asset.

Iterate
From here I could iterate on my findings and either narrow down or wireframe more components for the client to review.

Once their template was built out and added to Pardot, our clients could accomplish something like this just by uploading their own images and removing or duplicating any of the components.