MailsDaily provides an advanced email template builder which can help you reduce the time and effort to create high quality and flexible campaign emails. The new template builder will help you create sophisticated templates with editable regions [text only or html], regions which can be duplicated and regions which are linked with each other, all this is with a minimal knowledge of programming or html coding.
In this chapter we will learn how to create new templates and manage the existing templates within your account.
- Creating a new email template
- Managing existing template
Email templates are pre-defined html content files which can be customized and modified when you create a new email marketing campaign. These templates can help you quickly put your content and other related information in a nicely formatted manner.
- To create a new template go to “Settings” tab.
- Click on the “Email Templates” menu
- This will take you to the email template manager, where you can see the existing templates within the system and you can also create a new one.
- Click on the “Create email template” link as highlighted above.Please remember that you need to make sure that your html code for the email template design should be ready with you so that you before you start creating a new email template using the template builder.
It is possible that you can build the template code on the fly. But If the basic structure of the template is ready, you can quickly customize the same and add the edit regions and other parameters to it.
Once you go to the create new template menu, MailsDaily will allow you to configure preferences of your email template such as name of the template, description and a thumb nail picture on the first tab. On the second tab, you will need to add the email content such as Subject, HTML Content and Text based content.
As seen in the above screen you can populate the preferences and add the Email Contents – once you populate the necessary options click on the “Proceed to Template Builder” button.
This will open up a template builder interface as shown in the below screenshot.
If you look at the above screenshot – it renders the html code you provided under the email contents tab to a nicely formatted html layout. Now as you can see this is a generic layout, the template builder will help you define the edit regions and other types of regions.
In order to make a certain html block editable, you will need to click on that particular block and the bottom of the screen will show you the structure of the nested table’s or div tags. This way ,you know what part of the template you are editing. When you click on any of the html block you will see a dotted or solid line surrounding the block.
The highlighted sections in the above screen shows you that when you click on the element, the bottom bar shows you the html tags which are built around the element – in order to make this region into a dynamic one click on the “View properties” button at the bottom.
We have several options which we can use as shown in the above screenshot, which we can apply to this particular element.
- Make this element editable
Single line
You can tick this option to make the element editable with single line editing.
Plain text multi line
Tick this option to create a plain text editable element with multi line support.
Rich text multi line
Tick this option to create a rich text multi line editable element – this option will allow you to add rich text to the element.
- Make this element duplicable, use this option to make the selected element duplicable. This way, you can duplicate the element several times within your content.
- Syncing, If an element is synced with an element, every time you update the element, synced element is also updated
- Linking, If an element is linked to an element, every time you duplicate the element, linked element is also duplicated
For this example, we are going to make the selected element editable as well as duplicable. Once you make the necessary changes click on the “Test Drive” button at the top of the template builder to see how your template actually looks like and functions when you create a campaign using the same.
When we test drive the template, you should see the rendered output of the template and when you click on the element which you configured as editable and duplicable, it should show you a menu pertaining to those functions as shown in the above screen.
Test all the elements and then once you are satisfied – click on “Back to template builder” and then save the template.
- To manage existing templates go to “Settings” tab.
- Click on the “Email Templates” menu
- This will take you to the email template manager, where you can see the existing templates within the system and you can also create a new one.
If you have templates within your account the interface will list all the templates and will allow you to manage them. In order to modify the template and its settings, you just select the necessary template and do the needful.
