All email campaigns — even your best-performing ones — deserve an occasional update. What better time than now to give your emails a much-needed makeover? Many factors across industries, technical requirements, design trends, and best-practices evolve and shift throughout the year.

In an ever-changing media landscape, customers can easily fall into complacency and boredom when faced with stale, repetitive content. A refresh allows you to evaluate the quality of your campaigns and strategy as well as account for changing trends and standards.

Here’s how you can give email campaigns a fresh look and feel.

Where to start

An email overhaul can be daunting, but refreshes don’t have to be monumental. Even small adjustments — from subject-line testing to new layouts or templates — can create incremental improvement for your engagement metrics. There are a few ways to  approach a campaign refresh:

• Design

• Content

• Future-proofing

No matter how you choose to refresh campaigns, testing is an integral part of the process. Continually measuring customers’ responses to changes will help you understand how to create the most impactful campaign for your audience.

Try a fresh design

Keep subscribers on their toes by changing up the templates for promotional sends. It’s easy to fall into the plug-and-chug habit, but a facelift for your templates will garner renewed focus and interest from your audience.

For example, instead of sticking to a column layout, try a broken-grid design that can give content a unique look and feel. Be wary of change for the sake of change, though — test new designs against your current campaign and optimize based on the results.

More emails are opened on mobile than on webmail or desktop environments. This year, make it a goal to improve the way your email displays on a variety of devices — including smartwatches. You don’t want to lose out on subscribers because of a poor mobile experience.

If you have an older but high-performing campaign, it’s easy to set it and forget it for extended periods of time. Most brands have one (or more) of those campaigns — they were created a few years ago, perform well, but haven’t been made responsive or accessible. There’s a lot to gain by modernizing legacy sends.

Content is (still) king

Content should be the core of any email campaign. Slick design without meaningful content won’t be enough to engage your audience and drive them to action. To keep messaging relevant, consider using dynamic content.

Dynamic content blocks, personalized content that can be added to an email, allow you to create specific messaging for a variety of configurations. You can move past one-size-fits-all templates and send content that resonates with every part of your unique audience. You can create different templates based on a variety of configurations, such as demographics, location, and segment.

Mapping out your entire customer journey and the number of campaigns involved will also help visualize where your content needs updating. With Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, you can identify key moments within the customer journey and make updates as customer relationships and lifecycles evolve.

Future-proofing

When marketers are more efficient, we create better experiences for our customers now and in the future. Use artificial intelligence to recommend words and visual assets based on customers’ preferences and behaviors. With smart predictions, insights, and recommendations, you can ensure content doesn’t go stale and updates are easier than ever.

In order to grow your AI and automation, take a look at your current data storage, CMS, lists, and integrations. Your current systems and assets must be organized in order to be utilized for better content creation.

This year, set out to give your emails the attention they deserve. With a few strategic updates, you’ll be on the way to fresh content in no time.

To get started, learn more about how Journey Builder can help this year’s email campaigns convert.