Thinking Of Custom Email Design? 8 Crucial Pros And Cons

Custom email design can sometimes feel like more trouble than it’s worth, adding complexity and increasing costs. But done right, a custom email template gives your emails a unique personality while boosting their performance and deliverability. Choosing between a custom email design and pre-built email templates is the email marketing equivalent of choosing between a bespoke suit or something off the rack. 

Whether considering taking the plunge into custom design or wondering if pre-built templates might serve you better, understanding its pros and cons matters. As they say, maturity is when you realize that custom email design isn’t inherently good or bad—how and when you deploy it makes all the difference.

So, before you plunge into hand-coded custom email template designs (or sack them), let’s understand their pros and cons in detail. 

A Word On Custom Email Designs

If DIY email templates are microwave food, custom email templates are freshly-cooked meals made from scratch, says Drupal Sinh, Senior Project Manager at Mavlers, in this video. 

Makes sense. Coding a custom email template is a full-fledged power to create emails the way you want. There is no need to compromise your brand guidelines. Each of your emails is unique and true to your brand personality. And more so if you have niche coding and design experts—like custom emails by Email Mavlers. 

This way, your audience will remember your brand for the unique emails. And not as a brand sending emails that look like they came from the same template ten other brands are using. That’s the point of cheating custom email designs.   

Well-developed custom templates ensure compatibility across email clients and devices, directly impacting deliverability and user engagement. This technical foundation matters more than most marketers realize.

Plus, a consistent user experience across all platforms— your website, social media, or emails lets you present a unified narrative wherever your audience encounters you. 

Said another way: custom email designs mean emails are molded into your brand’s specifications and not run-of-the-mill designs of ready-made email templates. 

The Benefits Of Custom Email Designs

1. Brands Have Full Control Over Email Design

The creative freedom that you have with custom email design can not be questioned. The only limit is your imagination. 

It’s up to you if you want your custom email templates to be minimalistically simple, use complex CSS, implement interactivity, want dynamic color gradients, or add brand-specific typography. And custom email design will bring it to life. 

You can create custom designs that uniquely reflect your brand and its personality. 

That being said, such design features demand exceptional coding skills, ESP familiarity, and rigorous testing protocols. Since all these are critical for your email rendering and deliverability, having an in-house email developer, a skilled freelancer, or a specialized agency gives you peace of mind. 

2. Consistent Branding For All Email Campaigns 

Consistency forms brand identity. It maintains uniformity so subscribers can recognize it at a glance. On the contrary, if there is a conflict among repetitive patterns, your brand identity suffers, and the user experience is disrupted. And trust? Trust that operates on brand consistency trembles, too!

Translation–consistent branding in email campaigns distinguishes your brand from the next. 

And custom email designs help you communicate your brand personality to subscribers. They are open to standardization and give you full control over branding.  For instance, if minimalism is your thing, standardize it across your custom designs.  

Isn’t that possible with DIY email builders or pre-built email templates? To some extent, yes.  However, their customization capabilities are only limited. 

3. Perfect Rendering Across Email Clients And Devices 

Pay good attention to code optimization and testing, and your custom email designs will render consistently.  Whether they land in Gmail, Outlook, or on a mobile device.

Giving a suitable fallback when the custom design feature has limited support also makes a big difference to email rendering. 

Plus, with niche coding skills, optimizing code to reduce the template weight is possible. That way, you create faster-loading custom designs. Which improves opens and reduces spam scores. 

4. Reusable Design Framework 

Custom email templates are no different than pre-made ones, once built. They become part of a larger system of reusable design blocks. And then, you can mix and match these blocks to create new emails without reinventing the wheel every time. 

It’s efficient. Saves time. And prevents constant back-and-forth in the later part of your email production process. 

But The Problem Is…

1. Custom Email Design Is Complex and Time-consuming

When you code email templates from scratch, you are in for several challenges. It takes a team of experienced email developers to create pixel-perfect customized email templates. Unless you’ve got a custom email, development can also be time-consuming.

A deep understanding of email client behaviors, responsive design principles, and technical nuances makes custom email development time-consuming, too. Without an efficient email production process, campaigns can miss critical deadlines.

2. Custom Email Design Might Face Rendering Issues 

Emails render differently across various email clients because there are no universal standards for rendering emails. There is responsive design, dark mode adaptability, accessibility, and hundreds of other things you have got to pay attention to. Miss one, and your emails could end up broken to some subscribers. 

3. Custom Email Designs Need Extensive Testing

Testing the backbone of a successful custom email design. It ensures emails render correctly across all clients and devices. You have got to check every tiny detail—links, images, dark mode compatibility, responsiveness, and deliverability.  Even small issues can slip through and impact campaign performance.

4. Custom Email Design Increases Your Costs

There’s a price to the precision of this level. You must hire an expert developer and designer to create custom email templates. According to Email Mavlers, custom template development costs around $70 per hour. Plus, the additional $100 for testing. So, the cost associated with custom emails is higher than that of DIY templates. 

Custom Email Designs: To Use Or Not To Use That Is The Question

Custom email templates are the best decision you can make for your brand to delight subscribers with compelling, cohesive emails. Precision, brand consistency, creative control, and a uniform cross-channel experience unmatched with custom templates. Done well, they can be a strategic investment rather than an expense. 

The best approach for brands is to have both custom email templates and DIY templates in their marketing arsenal. The former is for more nuanced, high-impact email messages, and the latter is for urgent, no-fuss emails that must go out quickly.