Big Promise – How you can dramatically lower the cost of switching your ESP or CRM

Ok, big promises require a big delivery, and today I guarantee you we’ve got the goods. Every marketer and CRM leader knows how painful switching providers can be. It’s painful, yet inevitable. New capabilities, better data tooling, more competitive pricing, or maybe a new messaging channel (I do hear whispers that SMS is making a comeback) are all compelling reasons to make a change.

When I discuss Dyspatch and our approach to Email Production, your knee jerk reaction might be “maybe after we complete our migration to %NEW_ESP_X%”. After going through this several times with customers both large and small, I’m here to tell you that only Dyspatch can alleviate some key hurdles and open up new opportunities for you and your team.

Digging in: the landmines of email migration

There are several key areas we see companies struggle with their migrations. The first is simple but scales in difficulty as your team grows – training. Every platform does segmentation, automations, and reporting differently. Having to learn to use a new builder, while not a showstopper, will seriously slow down your team’s ability to get campaigns out the door quickly.

The real killer is the dreaded content migration. We typically see teams split this into two parts: first, rebuilding your templates, modules and email building blocks. This gets complicated because every platform has a different interpretation of what a module is, whether or not there is a visual builder for them, and how constrained a template can be. The next step is to use these new components to rebuild every single email in your marketing arsenal. Even if you’re leveraging an agency or consultants for this work, you’re still looking at a herculean rewrite for every email.

Unfortunately, once your content is migrated the work isn’t even close to being over. Every platform handles things like inlining CSS or formatting HTML code just a little bit differently, meaning you’ll need to retest every email for responsiveness and mobile compatibility. What a pain!

Missed Opportunities

With all the focus on just getting your new platform up to speed, the real loss is that your time is being siphoned away from more valuable projects. What else could all this time be used for?

1. Let’s optimize those old emails

Copy and pasting code between emails, between platforms, often leads to severe inconsistencies. Automated emails get setup, forgotten, emails get bloated or use outdated logos. You’ve built some beautiful new hero modules, but has anyone brought the new look to old emails? That’s what email optimization can help you achieve. Make sure there’s no bloated code and ensure every email still adheres to your latest style guide.

2. Rebrand with ease

Due to the mammoth task of migrating all your email content, many brands chose to use a platform switch as the opportunity to do a brand refresh. You have to touch up every email anyways, right? The unfortunate problem is that an already significant project can grow significantly. I’ve encountered brands running two platforms side by side for multiple years, due to a rebrand and migration blowing up in scope. The missed opportunity here is not levering Dyspatch’s design system, which makes updating all your emails’ branding a cinch with just a few clicks: New logos, hero styles, buttons, and fonts, and all your email content moved over. Magic, right?

3. No data loss

A major issue whenever you’re switching platforms is the data loss, which might make you think of reporting, analytics, or customer information. Institutional knowledge around why an email was built a certain way, how one design performed compared to another, or why you had to use image buttons for an email targeting Outlook users (hint: rounded corners). That’s the kind of institutional knowledge you lose when you switch platforms and only port a portion of your email content.

Something that brings a tear to my eye: have you worked with an agency on an extra special campaign, maybe a big Black Friday promotion? Agencies routinely charge low five figures for a beautiful new email. Are you going to throw that away in a migration?

Decoupling your email from your ESP or CRM insulates you from this data loss and means that your emails truly belong to you. Dyspatch’s unique advantage is that an email can be instantly deployed to multiple platforms, and that includes fun things like personalization!

Move faster, more efficiently, by decoupling your Email

So how does this all work? Dyspatch connects with your existing platform and through a combination of AI, machine learning, and some very talented email developers, we import all your existing emails into a bespoke email design system. Whether you’re managing multiple brands or even multiple sending platforms, we recreate it all in our Email Production Platform.

Now that your email is portable, you can decide which templates to push to the new platform of your choice with the push of a button. Leveraging our modular design system, updating all emails to use a new logo can be done quickly, as can syncing the changes back to your current sending platforms.

Email migration projects that might take upwards of 6 months to over a year can now be accomplished in record time, and free you and your team up to focus on many of the other pressing marketing objectives you have.

What else could you accomplish if your next migration was as easy as pressing a button?

With Pardot’s switch from their old dynamic content functionality to using the Handlebars Merge Language (HML), marketers might be feeling a little bit intimidated about switching to the new language. If that’s you, don’t worry though -- you’re not alone. HML might sound like something you’d want to leave to your development team, but with Dyspatch it can be a powerful tool that you can master without having to learn to write any code. Let’s dive in! We’ll show you everything you need to know to start building personalized emails with Dyspatch and Pardot. 

What is Handlebars Merge Language? 

First things first: how is the Handlebars Merge Language different from dynamic content? HML is a new  syntax that will allow you to code dynamic elements directly into your email, instead of needing to use dynamic content blocks, which were more restrictive to use and harder to personalize if you had more than one data point.  

Personalized content has a higher engagement rate than standard static emails, and HML will allow you to tailor your emails to each recipient, making your email campaigns more relevant and impactful. According to Hubspot, email personalization is in the top 2 most impactful email strategies. 

With Dyspatch, you can easily create dynamic, personalized emails without having to write code. The emails generated by our codeless drag and drop email builder will automatically convert and export your dynamic emails to Pardot (or any other popular ESP or CRM). This ensures that your dynamic content will render correctly across all popular email clients and platforms. 

The biggest advantage of HML over Pardot's old merge language is that you have more refined control over your personalized content, but its biggest downside is that it's technical to code because you need to know HML and email HTML. This is where dyspatch shines: we give you all the tools to intuitively build personalizations in our no code email builder, and a whole suite of preview and testing tools so you build complex personalized emails quickly and safely.

Getting started building dynamic Pardot email templates in Dyspatch 

The key to creating highly personalized emails in Dyspatch will be to start by setting up your global sample data and customer profiles. These features will allow you to easily test your personalized content based on your previously outlined variables and data on a per-customer basis. By having your customer profiles set up in Dyspatch, you ensure that this information is always at the fingertips of your team, ready to be pulled into your emails. 

Testing in Dyspatch is easy because we can import all your merge fields, allowing you to quickly autocomplete variable names, preview what sample customers would see, or work iteratively on new personalization.

With Dyspatch, you’ll be able to test your customer profiles across all popular email clients easily and quickly, without having to wait on a render queue, or the ever elusive email from Pardot informing you that your latest render test is complete. 

It’s time to get modular 

At its most basic level, your global data can be used to fill in variables, such as FirstName, LastName, and CompanyName to personalize your emails on a per-recipient basis. But that’s not all there is to creating a truly personalized, dynamic email. Another powerful feature in Dyspatch is the ability to customize content using dynamic blocks or modules. Dynamic blocks enable you to tailor entire sections of your email based on specific criteria or recipient data. 

For example, you can show dynamic content to customers based on their purchase history, engagement level, or payment plan. If a customer is part of your frequent spender rewards program, you can display special promotions tailored to their user data and shopping habits, ensuring that your emails always look personalized, as well as polished and professional. This level of customization helps in creating highly targeted campaigns that will resonate with your audience.

Testing your dynamic content

Testing your email content will give you confidence that your email campaigns are going to look pixel perfect, and ensure your dynamic content is filtering as intended. Dyspatch makes this process seamless by allowing you to test emails with sample customer data directly within the email editor, during the creation process. Customer profiles can be used to test real-world data to see how your emails will appear to different recipients. This makes it a cinch to make changes on the fly, while still guaranteeing that the email gets tested for accuracy before sending. 

What’s more is that you can easily test your emails with sample data across a suite of the most popular email clients, from Outlook to Gmail, or create your own testing case according to the top email clients based on your own internal sending data. Our direct integration with Litmus device previews allows you to test outside of Pardot without dealing with slow render times, making the building and testing process more efficient and allowing you to work faster.

Export away

The partnership between Pardot and Dyspatch simplifies the entire email creation and deployment process. After crafting your dynamic emails in Dyspatch, you can export them directly to Pardot, choosing your campaign and tracker domain.

Our direct integration ensures that your published emails in Dyspatch are 1:1 with what you see in Pardot, with no need to make modifications using the overly technical Pardot email builder. And with the use of conditionals, Dyspatch not only enhances personalization but also ensures that your email templates work seamlessly across all your sending platforms. This integration between Dyspatch and Pardot empowers marketers to create, test, and deploy highly personalized email campaigns with confidence and ease.

And there you have it! With these basics, you’re well on your way to creating compliant, dynamic HML emails without having to write any code. Start experimenting with simple variables and conditional statements to personalize your communications and engage your audience like never before. 

Our team of email experts is here to help you set up your customer profiles and conditionals in Dyspatch. Get in touch today, and we’ll get you sending in no time!

Not every email campaign can be your #1 performer, but there are ways to improve low-performing campaigns with a healthy mix of experimentation and email marketing best practices.

Marketers, this is your go-to checklist for digging those underperforming email campaigns out of the gutter and boosting results — fast.

There are five main steps to optimize an email campaign:

1. Dig into analytics for insights
2. Test new subject lines and preheaders
3. Use personalization to increase relevance
4. Add interactivity to increase engagement
5. Refine email design and content

Keep reading to find out how to apply each strategy to your campaigns.

5 Effective Ways to Optimize Email Campaigns

Let Analytics Data Guide You

It’s always a good idea to start with data. You may uncover something surprising that completely changes your email marketing strategy. At minimum, you’ll get an idea of who’s opening your emails and what actions they’re taking.

For example, say you’re trying to determine why your latest launch campaign has only converted at 1%, well below the general average 6.34% click-to-conversion rate (for e-commerce emails). You open up your analytics and find people were clicking, but not buying. Huh. But then you see it: Your analytics says 78% of your audience opens your email on a mobile device, but the landing page you’re linking to in the email isn’t optimized for mobile. Yikes.

The analytics you’re able to see depends on your email marketing software, but all should offer tracking of:

• Open rate
• Devices (e.g. mobile, desktop, tablet)
• Email clients (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc)
• Clickthrough rate (CTR)
• Net subscriber growth (new vs. unsubscribes)

Ideally, your emails should be optimized for displaying across all devices and email clients, but at least ensure they’re optimized for the ones most popular with your audience.

Besides helping spot technical issues, analytics can also tell you what your audience is most interested in. What types of content get the most clicks? The most conversions? The fewest unsubscribes? Use all of this data to guide your email marketing strategy.

Try New Subject Lines (And Preheaders)

Your subject line is the single most important factor determining if people are going to open your email or not. No pressure.

You know what a subject line is, but if you’re unfamiliar with the term “preheader,” it’s the preview text below the subject line.

There are many email best practices you can use to optimize your subject lines, such as:

• Add personalization: Use their first name, birthday, or the name of the product they bought, etc.
• Be specific: Say what your sale is — 15% today only, for example — rather than something generic like, “Savings on now.”
• To emoji or not to emoji? Emojis can help draw attention to your email, but some audiences may see it as immature or too informal. Know thy audience.
• Shorter is better: Email clients will only display 60 characters for a subject line and between 35-140 characters for the preheader. We recommend keeping your preheader to under 60 characters for the best mobile experience. (Dyspatch’s Email Guardrails will warn you if your subject line or preheader are too long, along with other email faux pas.)

See how the email from Bath & Body Works above stands out from the other promotional emails? The subject line features an emoji, a specific offer (20% off and capitalizing “ENTIRE purchase”), and a sense of urgency (today only).

Use Personalization to Increase Relevance

Email personalization in the early ‘00s used to mean adding someone’s first name into a subject line or body of an email. Cool, but not enough nowadays.

Not convinced? Consider:

• Personalized emails deliver 760% more sales.
• 62% of consumers say they won’t purchase from a brand if they don’t receive a personalized experience.
• 7 in 10 companies around the world are increasing their use of personalized marketing in 2024 and beyond.
• 55% of email marketers are actively looking for more ways to personalize email content in 2024.

A few examples of email personalization include:

• Changing your “From” name to a person or the name of your newsletter (if applicable) vs. your company name to build relationships.
• Personalizing subject lines with more than a first name. Ideas include “Because you bought (X), you might like (Y),” or, “Tips for using your new (Thing They Bought).”
• Using automated trigger emails: if someone has been a member or customer for a year, or if they recently completed a specific workshop or class from you, receiving an email about that class, etc.
• Sending a reminder of items your customer has added to their wishlist or favorites.
• Including relevant personalized account information inside an email so your customer doesn’t have to click. For example, their current loyalty point balance.

I recently purchased a packing cube set from Peak Design and was delighted by this personalized email I received on the actual delivery date (!). The email links to a video going over how to use the item I bought.

This can cut down the time it takes a customer to figure out how to use your product, as well as remove the frustration of trying to find instructions themselves. Plus, the fact it was tied into the tracking number so that it was timed to arrive on the day I received my order? *Chef’s kiss*

Now that’s an impactful use of personalization.

However, getting the proper data to be able to personalize your emails remains somewhat mysterious for most marketers. Almost half (48%) of marketers say unifying data and avoiding siloed data is a major challenge to personalization.

Enter: Customer Profiles in Dyspatch.

Customer Profiles make it easy for anyone to ramp up email personalization without code or technical knowledge. Using the visual builder, you can set up as many account-level profiles as you want to easily personalize emails for subscribers.

You only have to set up these profiles once and can use them across all your Dyspatch emails. When creating an email campaign, add in dynamic content blocks and preview how they’ll look to subscribers within each Customer Profile — right inside the Dyspatch Email Builder.

For example, customize promotional offers to different loyalty tiers of customers, or suggest different products based on a user’s past history.

Whatever you do, avoid making the mistake of collecting data from users and then not personalizing content for them.

For this camera retailer who will remain nameless (because I do like them!), I filled out a detailed email preferences form when I originally subscribed. It’s a great idea for specialty retailers to have these preference options. Photographers, as an example, invest heavily in their equipment and don’t switch camera brands often (if ever). Therefore, they’re not interested in emails about brands they don’t use (in most cases).

Yet, I still get emails from this brand with very brand-specific content for brands I did not select in my preferences. The email below could be very effective when targeted only to Sony users, but the overall campaign effectiveness can’t accurately be measured if it’s sent to everyone. Plus, I may get irritated if I get too many emails that aren’t relevant to me and unsubscribe.

If you’re going to invest in personalization, see it through.

Add Interactive Email Elements to Increase Engagement

Interactive email content goes beyond personalization to deliver really standout experiences. Because these types of interactive emails are either so informative or entertaining, brands have seen up to 5X more engagement after adding interactive and dynamic content.

An example is a flight check-in email where the gate you need to go to and status is always updated to the correct information every time you open the email. Or an email with a survey you can click and fill out without needing to click anywhere.

You can easily add these advanced features to your emails with Dyspatch’s drag-and-drop Email Builder. Add polls and forms, let customers schedule appointments, or leave product reviews — all right inside their email client without clicking over to a landing page.

Boost engagement with image carousels, live countdowns (coming soon!), and even bring your emails to life with audio. Feature your latest podcast or a special subscribers-only audio message.

Need ideas of how to make your emails interactive? Try:

• Events and scheduling: Let customers book their regular appointments from their inbox, or offer a one-click RSVP or webinar registration.
• Image carousels: Adding clickable carousels can increase your click-through rate by up to 73%. Plus, it’s a great way to display multiple angles or products within a small space or short email.
• Customer reviews: Ask for a product rating or review for a recent purchase. Having it all happen inside the email increases the response rate because it’s so easy to fill out.
• Gather feedback: Run polls or surveys to gather valuable market research and make your customers feel heard.
• Onboarding: Allow users to set preferences or fill out their profile from an email without needing to sign in.
• Encourage referrals: Offer an incentive for customers to refer their friends, and enable sharing products from the email with their customized referral link.
• Information features: Integrate live-update shipping or order status tracking within the email. Any data point can potentially be integrated to show right inside the email. Your customers will appreciate the quick access to information.

Any of these examples can work in almost all types of emails, from transactional messages like abandoned cart emails to newsletters. Want to make your newsletter more engaging? Break up content sections with a quick poll — your audience will know you care about their opinion and you’ll get valuable insights.

Refine Your Email Design and Content Strategy

Last but not least, it’s worth taking a look at the overall design and content of your emails. Your campaigns don’t need to look the fanciest to be successful but they should follow common email optimization best practices.

Optimize your emails for clarity, click-throughs, and conversions by evaluating the following:

• Header: Can users tell who this is from right away? Is your logo and/or name prominent, but not overpowering?
• Branding: Does the email match your brand identity? Does it use the right colors, fonts, graphic elements, style?
• Voice and tone: Are your emails written in a way that aligns with your brand? With your other content? Does it match what your audience expects (e.g. formal vs. informal, fun vs. serious, etc).
• Calls to action (CTAs): Does your email have at least one clear call to action? Is it big enough and/or easy to tap on mobile?
• Subject line and preheader: As mentioned above, have you A/B tested different subject line styles? Is it under 60 characters for mobile?
• Readability: Is your background color distracting or does it make the copy too hard to read? Is your font size large enough for most people to easily read? Consider using accessible email design strategies.
• Graphics: Are images compressed and optimized for email? Ideally, all images should be in PNG or JPG format and be under 1MB (smaller = better!).
• Layout: Is it easy to scan your email? Are larger copy sections broken up with columns or graphics or other ways to encourage scannability?
• Mobile: Does your email load quickly on mobile? Is it just as easy to read on a phone as it is on a computer screen? Are all the landing pages it links to also optimized for mobile?
• Footer: Have you included your business name and address? Links to an email preferences page and/or unsubscribe link? Add links to popular website pages and your social media profiles too.

Optimizing your email design is easy with Dyspatch’s No-Code Email Builder. Fully drag-and-drop, anyone can create gorgeous emails with advanced interactive and dynamic functionality in no time.

To get nerdy for a moment, the Dyspatch Email Builder uses our own code language — Dyspatch Markup Language (DML) — which converts and exports your email design to HTML designed to work well across all devices.Save emails as templates, reuse content blocks in other campaigns, and export emails created in Dyspatch to send with any ESP.

Check all the new features we’ve added in 2024 and get a free demo of Dyspatch today.

The One Extra Thing to Optimize Your Email Campaigns Is…

Experimentation.

You can create the world’s most beautiful email template, the most mobile-friendly experience ever, and pop CTAs all over… but if your content strategy doesn’t align with your audience’s expectations, you won’t see the results you want.

Spend time figuring out what your audience responds to and wants from you, then create optimized email campaigns to deliver that. Focus on the content and let Dyspatch worry about ensuring every email looks great in inboxes around the world. Get a free demo today!

Domino’s is an iconic brand, synonymous with my favorite food ever: Pizza. Some traditional brick and mortar businesses get a bad rep when it comes to email marketing, especially franchise-based models. The good old red blue and white, on the other hand, is doing an amazing job of staying relevant and true to the brand. Let’s dig into this iconic brand and see how they’re executing on email.

Email Mouthfeel (™)

Bite sized takeaways

• An iconic brand like Domino’s can combine 3 simple colors with spacing, large font sizes, and alignment tricks to create a really engaging email
• If you have a loyalty or points program, elevate that to the top of your email and give your customer ways to action on it
• Use a dynamic repeating background image to add some punch to your designs
• More is sometimes better, when it comes to call to actions, but use color to set information hierarchy

Email mouthfeel

What’s the mouthfeel of an email? It’s me stretching an analogy to match the theme of Domino’s email. To be clear, Domino’s has a great overall structure and theme to their emails, and they do two things very well. First, Domino’s hard commits to their iconic brand colors: red, white, and blue. Blue is predominately used as a background color for their single column layout, whereas their unique red and white are used as highlights for text and calls to action.

Second, Domino's has opted for an awesome party-themed repeating background image. In this case, it was Hockey Night in Canada, which would explain the background of hockey sticks and pucks. I’m looking forward to receiving this email in the spring, when I hope the background will swap for something to match the season. Background images like these are largely “set it and forget it” but I think they’re a small touch of personalization that can really delight a customer.

Domino’s theme in Dyspatch

Rewards, rewards …

This subtle puzzle piece slips in just under the logo, though it is one of my favorite parts of this email. Many brands track loyalty points and rewards status, but so few highlight it in customer communications. I love that Domino’s puts this at the top of their email.

This really could have been enhanced by highlighting some available rewards or by adding a way to leverage those points today. Can I get a free 2L soda with my order if I use points? Maybe I can add a second large pizza to my order using points only? That’s what I really want to know! Herein lies the challenge for many marketers: sending data-driven emails is hard and often requires an email developer. Kudos to Domino’s for adding the points total. Fingers crossed they double down on the investment!

Nuts and bolts, this iconic brand goes modular

I really have to hand it to the email marketing team at Domino’s, they’ve adopted a modular design for the emails that really plays to their strengths: Pizza looks amazing. In this email we have the same hero module used 3 times, with different variations of component positions and text size. It’s great to see a brand practicing what we preach (modular design). 

One criticism of Domino’s approach is that each hero is composed of 2 images, including their text and buttons. This is a major bummer because without images enabled, this email really doesn’t hit the mark – the recipient will see a long, blank email. In rebuilding this email in Dyspatch, we made the choice not to create this as one huge image. The benefits are that we can make changes to everything on the fly, no designer required, and we can ensure the email scales down to mobile really easily.

Left aligned pricing?

I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the decision to have pricing left-aligned in the column, while the rest of the text and calls to action are center-aligned. I’d love to know if there was testing or analytics behind this decision and it performed better, or if there was another reason for this. Visually, the red horizontal section is striking and is a great way to break up the email.

Menus? We’ve got those.

After the repeating hero modules, Domino's includes this great little menu. I love the choice of the full column blue bar being a clickable button. Visually it really reminds me of a menu I might find in a mobile app. It’s a great touch.

If I was talking with their email marketing team, I’d suggest including a mini menu in the header as well, maybe just leveraging these icons to also help customers find their way.

Atouch that any marketer will appreciate is how Domino’s speaks to price sensitivity without saying “free” or “20% off” etc. “Find coupons” is a great way to entice a click, but it’s not included in the first ⅓ of the email. Domino’s knows they have a great product so they don’t have to race to the bottom of the pricing barrel right away. I thought this was a great, tasteful way to include this in their email.

Speaking of differentiators…

I bet if you hire an MBA-toting agency expert to analyze the takeaway Pizza market, one of the things they’ll bring up is the emergence of “pre-made” pizza delivery companies. It’s hard to ignore the business efficiency that this creates, but I love Domino’s fighting back with “Handmade over pre-made” . 

Domino's knows it’s important to remind customers why their pizza is so great, and even if you don’t click through to the info page, it’s still a great reminder and visually breaks the email up.

We’re almost done

Before we get to the ever important footer, Domino’s has a quick reminder that “Hey, we’re hiring!”. Personally, I’m a big fan of play on words, so the invitation to deliver your application really tickled my fancy.

From a design standpoint, this block uses a slightly different light grey background, which helps the reader know this component is important, but not as important as what came before it. As a company that is constantly hiring thousands of people, I think it’s smart for the Domino’s team to pack in one more call to action before the footer. Email marketers are often reluctant to give up email real estate to tertiary links, but I’m of the opinion that you never know what will entice a user to click. As long as the call to action aligns with your business goals, what’s the harm in testing it out?

Change is a foot….er

I did say I like puns.

Two things I love about the Domino's footer that really set it apart: First, we’re seeing app (iOS/Android) links show up next to social links more and more often. Normally you see larger “install our app” icons, I like the subtlety here.

Second, and this is small but… the little Domino’s blue highlight of “Legal Stuff:”. That’s 🧑‍🍳

All in all this email is composed of seven (7!) simple modules, but you could argue it’s really six since the logo/rewards section are one.

Peloton’s January newsletter of “Workouts to Watch”

Peloton is an amazing brand that matches a premium product, a lifestyle aesthetic, and a community all in one. A large differentiator of Peloton is the exhaustive selection of live and recorded classes that are available on the platform. With all this content, keeping users aware of new programs, new instructors, and highlights is a challenge. Hence where this newsletter “Workouts to Watch” comes into play.

After receiving this email, I just knew we HAD to rebuild it in Dyspatch. This email features a unique Hero that leverages contrasting background colors and “netflix” style video cards – this look is both eye-catching and pulls on an interface we’re all very familiar with nowadays. I’m going to document the process, share what we loved about the design, and what we think anyone implementing a similar email might want to improve.

It all starts with a theme

When you’re going from a static email design to a full modular design, the first step is to build out your theme – including your fonts, your brand guidelines colors, padding etc.

The Peloton Theme in Dyspatch

In this Peloton email, we make note that they are using a standard 600px wide email, with a dark grey (#131416) full-width background. The main text is a distinctive white (#FFFFFF) text on a black background (#000000). For the logo and hero section, Peloton is using their distinctive brand blue (#007CFF) and their word mark. The fonts are Roboto with a Helvetica fallback. Lovely. And there’s a generous left/right padding of 40px on all the content. 

One thing to note with Peloton is their very specific use of letter spacing and line height to create a highly recognizable visual effect.

Breaking it down / Building Blocks

Once we have our theme built out, our next step is to break down our email into distinct blocks. First up is the header, which includes the logo and wordmark. We’re using Peloton’s wordmark with an extra branded blue background:

After that we have the most visually striking component in this email, the hero.

Static Images vs Dynamic Blocks

Peloton is using a single static image for this entire hero. This is common in the world of email marketing, and if you’re working with a design team that can quickly create these assets, it makes email sends a breeze. There are some major downsides to this design though. First, you’re highly reliant on that design team being available to give you email-ready designs every day. That’s a pretty big limiting factor for many teams.

Second, it limits (but doesn’t make it impossible!) your ability to link out to distinct content or track what is best performing. In this hero, I love the “Netflix” style cards for different workouts, but unfortunately, they all link to the same place. As a marketer, that means you’re not getting rich analytics on which content you’re sending out is the most important to your readers.

Finally, full image blocks suffer when viewed on mobile, which in this day and age, every email is going to be read on.

Dynamic Hero in Dyspatch

In rebuilding this module, what we did is make every component dynamic, so they could be updated in place without going through a designer. Want to swap out Yin Yoga for Power Vinyasa? Just update a single image. Going to reuse parts of this email for February’s send? No need to go back to a designer. An added benefit here is that Dyspatch will guarantee this 🤣new module is mobile-friendly from the get go. Winner winner chicken dinner, as the kids say.

Building the Body (of the email)

The body of Peloton’s email is alternating between left and right image and text combinations. These are really quick to setup in Dyspatch and make reusable components that can be used in any email.

One of the issues email marketers face is that when this left/right swap design is viewed on mobile, it often stacks in an unflattering way – image, text, text, image – eroding the designer’s intended layout. By using Dyspatch’s responsive features, these two modules are actually the same, just with the direction swapped. The mobile view then stacks perfectly:

Building out the remainder of this email is quite simple: dropping in our images, heading, text, and links at the bottom.

To wrap up, we have Peloton’s footer. I love the use of a full width, full black block here. It gives the reader a clear visual reminder that “this is the end”. The generous padding with subtle monochrome social icons adds to this effect.

All in all, this is a 10/10 email from Peloton, with some great and subtle design elements that don’t distract from the ultimately great content.