A step-by-step guide for marketers — Stripo.email

Email digests are a cornerstone of email marketing strategies for many companies, including Litmus, 2K, and Sony, to name a few. That’s not surprising when you consider their value:

A variety of tech companies leverage a weekly digest email as an avenue to deliver content and value directly to a subscriber’s inbox, as well as a key engagement tactic to remind the recipient of the service. The key attribute that makes these emails successful is the strong personalization they employ to ensure the top 3–5 pieces of content entice the subscriber to click through.

Sachin Rekhi,

Founder & CEO of Notejoy.

Although digest emails are structurally quite simple, they need to be compiled regularly and often, which takes time. Utilizing modules will allow you to save time when creating these emails in the future. In this guide, we show you how to create the core modules you need for an email digest. By spending a few hours creating these modules, you can save hundreds of hours on further email design.

This guide is a visual aid for anyone wanting to adopt modules in your email design process. We show you how to create these modules in our editor so you can reuse them in further campaigns.

The email elements we’ll cover

Let’s imagine a simple blog post digest, of the kind many companies send to their audiences. Something that looks like this.

Digest email

Manually creating this email from scratch took around 2.5 hours — it was pretty time-consuming. For weekly digests, that means me setting aside at least two hours each week, which I have to spend rebuilding almost the same email over and over, with a few changes depending on the type of content and its quantity. What if instead you could spend 2.5 hours building a digest just once, and each week after that, adapt it in only 10 minutes? That’s where modules come into play.

Everything you need to know centers on three basic parts of an email digest:

introduction part, with a banner, text, and button leading to the blog page;

the digest itself, comprising a small article photo, its title, a short description, and a button to the article;

closing part of the email, with feedback buttons and your signature.

Important note: This guide creates modules for emails for which we have designer mockups. Those are necessary to create the modules covered. When a designer works on those, we recommend instructing them to prepare mockups not only for the blog post digest but also for all future digests you may send out, so that the subsequent process of creating modules in the editor is smooth, fast, and easy. For more detail on the complete path from having an email digest idea to producing ready-made modules, take a look at our special case.

Before creating modules, you should first use A/B testing to determine the effective structure of a particular email block and create a module based on it. However, no one forbids you from creating several module variants for the same structure and then using tests to determine which one is the most effective for your strategy.

Oleksandr Dieiev,

Email Marketing Specialist at Stripo.

Important note: The next steps demonstrate how to create the modules for a digest based on the example email above. Each step shows how to create this exact email digest, covering the content, structure, and blocks needed. However, you are not limited to only this structure. Go away and develop any digest you like, matching your needs and with creativity in your design.

Module introducing the digest

The first email element that we’ll turn into a module is the introduction. This part is the first thing recipients see, and it tells them what this digest will be about. It also invites your audience to dive into the blog and spend some time reading your articles.

Introduction module for digest

For this module, I would recommend creating several versions at once, with different placements of images and texts or changing the structure. This will make it possible to create different digest layouts using modules in the future without additional effort. You should also not forget the importance of this block, as this is the first screen the recipient will see after opening the email. Therefore, experiment with your designs and the ones that work best for you to interest recipients and motivate them to scroll down.

Oleksandr Dieiev,

Email Marketing Specialist at Stripo.

Step #1. Creating a rough sketch

First, create a basic layout of your future module using structures from our editor. In the same way any painting starts with a sketch, so do your modules.

click on the “Structures & Modules” button;

choose the “Layouts” tab, which stores all the basic layouts you’ll need;

drag-n-drop this one-line layout into the editor for an email section with three containers, each of which may hold a separate part of your content (not all three are required — you still can produce the section with one or two of these containers).

Step #2. Adding the main content

Your basic layout is complete. Now, it’s time to add content to your containers. To recreate the example digest email, you need an Image block, two Text blocks, and one Button block. Add those from the top to the bottom of the module:

drop an Image block into the first container and click on it to open a tab for downloading images;

Important note: You can use images from your devices, or for more creative choice, browse the stock images, icons, and GIFs in our built-in library. Alternatively, generate a new image using our built-in GenAI feature.

click on the “Drag & Drop Your Image” area and download the image into the block;

next, add two Text blocks to the next container below your image;

following that, add one Button block to the last container;

now, click on the Text block and enter the text you need;

finally, click on the Button block and enter the text for your call to action;

Keep in mind that you can make this module in your own way and with your own set of content. If you don’t need some of the elements, they can be deleted by hovering over them and pressing the “Delete” button.

Deleting elements

Step #3. Adding links

You’ve added your content, and now it is equally important to make that clickable, so it will take readers to the desired destination. This block has two links: in the main picture and the button.

click on the Image block and paste the necessary link into the “Link” field;

the same goes for the Button block, where you again need to paste the link into the “Link” field;

Step #4. Tweaking the look

The content is loaded into your future module and links are tied to the image and button. It’s time now to make it all look pretty. You can achieve this by customizing fonts and button colors and using image rounding, content positioning, padding, and so on:

first, add pretty rounding to your main image by clicking on the Image block and setting its radius to 11;

now, for the text, choose the first Text block and set the paragraph style to h2, the weighting to bold, and the alignment to the center of the email;

after that, pick a font for your Text block by clicking on the “Styles” tab and choosing a font from the “Font Family” drop-down menu;

the same goes for the Text block below. In this case, leave its paragraph style unchanged, set its alignment to the center, and select a custom font;

the button needs little adjustment in this case — just set it to fit the whole container and its border radius to 7 in the “Styles” tab;

to make everything look even better, set the image structure padding to the numbers shown below in the “Settings” tab;

the padding for the structure of your Text blocks will take the form shown below;

while the structure of the Button block will have the padding shown below.

Step #5. Saving the module

Your first digest email part is ready, so it’s time to save it as a module. Just hover over the created part and click on the “Save as Module” button.

Saving the created email part as a module

After that, enter your module name and click on the “Save” button.

Naming the module and saving it

The main module with content

Let’s move on to the heart of any digest email. This module contains the title of your article, a short description, and a button leading to the page you are promoting (in this case, it’s a blog article). An image is also a great addition, as it visually represents what readers can expect from this article.

Digest module

The nice thing about this email part is that by making one block a module, you can build digests with any number of blocks. Do you have three new articles? You add three modules to your email. Have your content creators gone into a creative rush and delivered 10 articles for promotion? All these 10 blocks can be placed one after the next in a single email thanks to its versatility. All you need to do is change the content in each module for the specific articles.

In this module, you can test different structure options to come to the final version (for example, different formats or button locations). In addition, this module can be made into smart containers so that you don’t waste time transferring content to blocks manually but simply add it by substituting the necessary link for the site. After that, the block will independently extract all the necessary information, saving you time.

Oleksandr Dieiev,

Email Marketing Specialist at Stripo.

Remember, the following steps recreate the content module from the example above. All the content, blocks, and structures are applied to achieve that goal. In practice, you can create your own structures and experiment with placing different pieces of content and applying different styles, to create your own perfect email digest. Check out our article exploring various types of email digests, design ideas, and examples to fuel your inspiration and help your design process.