If you are going through any one or all of these challenges:
- Approval bottlenecks and slow iteration
- Resource and skill gaps
- Misalignment between design and deliverability teams
it’s time you initiated, or persuaded the right stakeholders to initiate, a cultural reset. These are clear signs of deeper structural issues that require immediate corrective action, especially when they start affecting both your team’s mindset as well as the revenue side of things.
As an email design and development agency, our role typically ends at the handoff. During client calls, we rarely, if ever, get the space or the mandate to diagnose deeper organizational stagnation, because that’s just not part of the drill.
Yet, with more than 12 years of experience in the email marketing industry, we’ve seen how these systemic issues can stifle operations. And while a dip in revenue is alarming on its own, the ultimate casualty of an unchallenged status quo is creativity.
We don’t need to tell you how essential creativity is to email template creation. In fact, so much of what teams struggle with in professional email template design can be traced to a sustained institutional degeneration of creativity.
In today’s blog post, we want to help you reflect on the deeper patterns that shape your team’s output and equip you with a set of practical corrective measures you can apply across your organization with confidence.
But if you feel tempted (if not, skip this section) to dismiss a cultural reset as excessive, we want to show you the real cost of indifference. Let’s begin.
Impact on Email Template Creation in the Absence of A Design Culture
By “culture,” we mean an environment, a shared sense of belonging and commitment to a common vision that continuously adapts and evolves. In the context of email design, this goes beyond the mechanics of on-time execution and reflects a deeper investment in the craft itself.
Without this kind of culture, when “just getting things done” becomes the overriding priority, you inevitably set yourself up to lose on multiple fronts:
- The relentless push for completion skips critical cycles of review, critique, and post-mortem analysis, guaranteeing the repetition of mediocre outputs.
- The email design and development team is seen as a commodity-level service provider, rather than a strategic partner driving business value.
- Individual contributors define their own, often lower, standards.
- Knowledge is not captured, documented, or shared because there is no time for reflection, making every project start from a disadvantage.
- The team is always in a reactive state, consuming changes initiated by others, rather than driving, defining, or influencing the direction of the industry.
- The team never exceeds baseline client expectations, thereby failing to create memorable, differentiated experiences that build positive word-of-mouth.
“Creative” is not a department. It’s a culture. It needs to be fundamental to everything the agency does. And culture reflects leadership’s values. The ascent of the MBAs meant more emphasis on cost and profit and more weight given to relationship management over creativity.
— Avi Dan, Agency Search Consultant, writing in Forbes
Now that’s a sorry state of affairs. If all that sounded like your place, a factory-reset is in order. Where should you start? Keep reading!
How to foster a strong email design culture
1. Hire for maturity, not skills
When you’re building an email design culture that can support dynamic, high-quality work, the people you bring in matter just as much as the systems.
With that in mind, here are a few hiring considerations that often get overlooked:
- Consider “junior” designers who are actually career switchers with 5–10 years of experience in adjacent fields such as photography, web design, or sales.
- These candidates bring a level of professional maturity that fresh graduates haven’t yet developed. They know how to communicate with stakeholders, run meetings, and navigate professional environments with confidence.
- Look for people who excel in communication, empathy, and business context, not just pixel-perfect execution.
- Hire talent from diverse backgrounds, not just email specialists, but also content, UX, marketing, and psychology.
- Collaborate with remote teams or contractors across different regions.
- Explore how email performs in different cultural contexts, including subject line conventions, visual density, and device usage.
Thierry Brunfaut of Base Design says, “I’m not obsessed with skills—it’s about personality. I can sense quickly if someone has the potential to grow.” For him, teamwork is non-negotiable: “I don’t need divas. If you can’t collaborate in our business, you die.”
2. Make People-first Decisions
Prioritizing your people is key to sustaining a healthy, high-performing team. Here are ways to make people-first decisions that strengthen the core team:
- Identify the team size at which your culture, profitability, and quality naturally reinforce each other — and commit to staying within that range.
- Develop new service lines because your team is eager to explore and grow into them, not solely in response to client demand.
- Design career paths that offer variety within the same client — shifting between email types, audiences, and strategies — rather than relying on constant client rotation.
- Reduce attrition by showing people that their growth and development matter more than short-term revenue gains.
- Place designers with clients for sustained periods so they can develop a deep understanding of the audience, brand voice, and business objectives.
- Preserve your team’s shared identity through consistent internal rituals, critique sessions, and debates.
3. Build Development Systems
A strong design culture doesn’t emerge on its own — it’s built through deliberate systems that support growth, consistency, and creative confidence. Here are a few structural elements worth considering:
- Create external partnerships that give your team access to specialized learning in areas like copywriting, accessibility, and deliverability.
- Embed design directors or leads directly into projects to provide consistent day-to-day guidance.
- Provide behind-the-scenes creative direction from senior team members to elevate the overall output.
- Rotate designers through different project styles to identify where each person does their best work.
4. Build Culture Anchors
Culture becomes real when it’s grounded in shared experiences and practices. To help make it tangible, consider incorporating anchors like these:
- Hold regular team critiques, even when everyone is working on different clients.
- Create “experience rooms” or dedicated spaces to showcase work in progress.
- Facilitate team-wide discussions to shape and refine a shared design language.
- Use internal Slack channels or async updates to keep everyone connected to what others are working.
- Institute a weekly “show and tell” where one designer walks through not just what they made, but why they made specific choices and what they learned.
- Run design sprints focused on a single challenging element where the entire team collaborates intensively for a defined period.
5. Position Your Team As a Cultural Standard-Bearer
To strengthen the role of design within your organization, it helps to shift how your team shows up and how others experience their work. Accordingly:
- Give your team the autonomy to originate projects, not merely react to briefs.
- Create room for healthy provocation and inquiry. Spark dialogue, surface new questions, or challenge existing assumptions about branding.
- Equip your team to respond quickly and genuinely to cultural moments. When something meaningful happens in your industry or community, don’t wait for a formal brief—enable designers to craft an authentic, timely reply.
- Make internal work impossible to ignore. Showcase it across your organization via Slack channels, lobby screens, and all-hands sessions. Visibility builds trust, recognition, and influence.
6. Scale Communication to Complexity
Good communication keeps projects on track without creating unnecessary friction. Here are some strategies to ensure your team communicates efficiently:
- Avoid over-processing simple requests — don’t create unnecessary meetings or layers for tiny details related to email layout design.
- Save deep collaboration for work that genuinely requires it.
- Use the MoSCoW method (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) to manage scope with agile clients.
- Keep teams co-located when possible to reduce feedback loops. Sitting next to each other means they can talk to each other and respond as quickly as information comes in.
7. Curate Learning & Inspiration Sources
Staying creatively sharp requires looking beyond the daily grind. Here are a few ways to keep your team inspired and informed:
- Use trend forecasting platforms like WGSN or Stylus to track email design trends and shifts in consumer behavior.
- Consider attending conferences such as Litmus Live or the Email Innovations Summit for hands-on learning and human connections.
- Prioritize real-world observation over endless browsing on Pinterest or Dribbble.
- Draw inspiration from other industries; email designers can learn from product design, UX, and even architecture! Encourage your team members to attend workshops such as typography classes, packaging design seminars, editorial photography sessions, etc. These experiences reshape how designers approach composition, hierarchy, and storytelling within the email canvas.
Push your team to explore content far beyond typical design sources. Email designers aren’t just trend-trackers; they’re students of psychology, narrative, and cultural signals. The more diverse their inputs, the more resonant and relevant their output.
Revisit our expert infographic on email design trends.
8. Balance Autonomy with Structure
A strong email design practice balances structure and creativity. Here’s how to equip your team to contribute effectively while maintaining quality and consistency:
- Leverage established brand systems, component libraries, and templates so even less experienced designers can contribute meaningfully.
- Encourage solving business problems creatively within clear guidelines rather than designing entirely new visual systems.
- Provide well-defined design systems and email pattern libraries.
- Offer senior oversight for strategic decisions while trusting the team’s execution once direction is set.
This balance becomes even more important when building modern email template design systems that rely on consistency as much as innovation.
Read: Email Design Systems: The Role of Designers, Coders, & Marketers
9. Find A Leading Champion
Building influence at the leadership level ensures your team’s work is seen, valued, and positioned strategically within the organization:
- Secure a C-level advocate who supports and endorses your work, helping to open doors, provide organizational backing, and elevate design’s strategic voice.
- Potential advocates for email teams include the CMO, VP of Marketing, Head of CX, or Chief Digital Officer.
- Show them how email design impacts metrics such as revenue, retention, and brand perception.
- Keep them regularly updated on wins, learnings, and strategic insights relative to modern email template design.
10. Incorporate Failure as Internal Learning
Innovation thrives in teams that experiment deliberately and learn systematically. The following practices help turn ideas, both hits and misses, into valuable insights:
- Secure budget to experiment and incubate new ideas.
- Collect evidence on desirability, functionality, and business value before scaling.
- Avoid launching everything to users—some concepts exist to demonstrate what not to do.
- Test radical concepts with small user groups.
- Document why certain approaches didn’t work, considering technical feasibility, business viability, and user desirability.
- Maintain a “concept graveyard” to track the evolution of ideas and thinking.
The Meta Open Arts Lab keeps a pile of “make ready” prints—failed or imperfect prints that got repurposed as business cards, where every card became a unique piece of art. The point? Making failure visible and valuable removes stigma and encourages risk-taking.
Closing Thoughts on Email Design Culture
We know that implementing all these measures at once is unrealistic. You’re running a business, managing client expectations, and juggling day-to-day delivery. In that context, a full reset can feel like the last thing you have room for. Still, you can begin by thinking it through and slowly building a case for the change your team needs. You can take this on gradually, without disrupting your immediate priorities. Here are a few ways to help you get started and overcome the initial hesitation:
- Establish a regular, low-stakes, and non-judgmental 15-minute meeting where one team member briefly presents a recent design and the team provides structured feedback focused on user goals and effectiveness. This builds a shared vocabulary for quality.
- Start a simple shared document or wiki that captures the “Why” behind every major design choice. This immediately shifts the conversation from subjective opinions to objective standards and shared knowledge.
- Before jumping into mockups, require designers to explicitly write down the user story/objective for the email and review the design against that goal.
- Pair a designer specializing in visual/UX with a team member specializing in a secondary skill crucial for email success. This means that for two weeks, they work on a project where the non-specialist shadows the specialist, forcing the cross-pollination of deep knowledge and ensuring that technical constraints are considered as a core design input.
- Dedicate a short, focused sprint to collectively identify the worst performing or most inconsistent element across your template library.
However, keep in mind not to get bogged down in processes and methodologies. They often generate a false sense of engagement with your work.
As we mentioned, initiating a structural reset while running the day-to-day can feel overwhelming. If you need support with professional email template design, our team can take that off your plate and deliver exactly to spec, freeing you to focus on the strategic and cultural overhaul your team needs.
Something worth considering?
If yes, feel free to get on board with us and let’s get started.