Canva Mailchimp Newsletter Tutorial 2020
In this video, you’re going to learn how to create a professionally designed email newsletter to send out to your list so you can start building strong relationships and drive revenue for your business and be sure to stay until the end of the video for a free resource to help you choose great content for your newsletter.
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Hi, this is Jeanne Willson from Six Figure Business Coaching and we’ve been helping small business owners use email marketing to grow the revenue for over 10 years.
So today, we’re going to use two free Softwares to create a professional looking email newsletter for your business.
We’re going to use Canva for imagery, and we’re also going to use Mailchimp as our email software. So here’s what you’re going to want to have for this tutorial. Go ahead and create a free Canva.com account, create a free Mailchimp account and have those both open now. You can have your logo ready. Your logo file. You can have your brand colors and you can have the hex numbers ready. That would be great and I’ll show you where you can put those in.
You’re going to want the articles you want to use the newsletter. You’ll want the text in the images. You want links to your social media accounts and you’ll want a link to your website. So if you don’t have those handy, you go ahead and pause this video and go grab those and then go ahead and start the video again. The first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to go on and head on over to Mailchimp.
So here I just started a new Mailchimp account. So that’s why it says it’s not quite finished setting up. So I’m going to click on campaigns, and these are going to be the different emails that you create. And I was playing around with this a little bit, so but we’re gonna go ahead and click up here, create campaign.
So now it says, What kind of campaign do you want to create? They’ve got lots of different options here. So we’re gonna go ahead and do is we’re gonna create an ’email campaign,’ and we got to give it a name. So if this is going to be a monthly newsletter, which we’re going to just assume that it is, you might want to put the month, and then just put the newsletter. So if it’s January put January’s Newsletter. But for our purposes, I’m just going to put, I’ll just put This Month’s Newsletter and, ‘begin.’
Now, keep in mind, you don’t actually have to do the newsletters in the month that you’re going to send it out. You can do newsletters in advance and schedule them to go out, which we highly recommend, because then it takes the onus off of you having to kind of scramble when you’re really, really busy to get that newsletter out and fast. Because sometimes you’re, like I said, you’re really, really busy, and you don’t have time to do it.
There may be other months where you’re not quite as busy, and you can get maybe two newsletters done, and then you don’t have to worry about it for the next month. So this is what you’re going to see so you can see up here. This is our name, This Month’s Newsletter. And this is the ‘To,’ who are we sending it to? You just kind of follow along as it’s
prompting you. So if you had individual email addresses, you would put them in here. It says you can put up to 100 in here. You can import them right here. And if I had already uploaded e-mails to this account, it would also be asking me, Is there a list that you want to send it to? But because I have not uploaded a list, it’s not pulling that information up.
So, just to let you know that and you could find that information up here at the top where it says Audience, that’s where you would upload your audience. This is ‘From’ so you’re going to want to add in the from. You can either put your name or your name and your business, depending on how you want that to come in. There’s a couple different schools of thought. It really kind of depends on what kind of business you have.
Kirsten and I tend to put Jeanne and Kirsten because it’s a little less formal. We like to think of the people on our email address list as as friends and people that we can chat with. Some people like to be more formal, and they want to send it out from their business because there may be different people sending it out or they might be a bigger business, or some people may just put their full name, you know, Suzy Smith or, you know, Susie from and then the company.
So you know that’s really up to you, how you want to handle that. And then you put your email address here and I would highly recommend that you put your business email address here, and I’m hoping that you do have a business address and not a Gmail address because you want to have it @ your business website dot com. I think it gives your business a little more credibility by doing that, which is really, really important when people are thinking about doing business with you.
So try and not to use Gmail or Hotmail or something when you’re sending out your business newsletter. So just something to think about it. Then you’re going to add a subject line. You may not want to do the subject line right here and now. Subject lines are kind of hard and I say that because that’s one of the most important elements of your email because you’re going to want to make it something compelling because when it shows up in somebody’s inbox what they see or what they read in the subject line, often times determines whether they’re going to open it or not.
So it needs to be something exciting and something like, Breaking News is going to get a better open rate than something that says, An Interesting Story or you may want include emojis in there. Those are something that, I think now Mailchimp just started allowing that, but that might stand out when it shows up in an inbox because not everybody uses those. You can also use what’s called a merge tag to put people’s first names in the subject.
So it might say, ‘Susie, have you seen this breaking news?’ So it feels really personal when it arrives in Susie’s inbox. You can put something here that you think you might want to have as a subject line and then you can change this before you send it out. I highly advise you to, and I’ll show you how to do this is, you can send yourself the newsletter before, like a preview of it, before you actually send it out to anyone.
So you get to see what it looks like when it arrives in your inbox. Because sometimes I’ve written a subject line and I’ve sent it to myself and then I think, ‘No, I don’t like how that sounds. I don’t like how that looks, or I could make that better.’ So that’s something that’s alsothat’s what I would call best practices that we do.
So the next part is the content. So we’re going to go…this is the fun part…so we’re gonna go ahead and design our email. So we click on design email. It comes to a section called Select a Template. And these are some things that are already set up, and you can see some of them are available when you put your cursor over them, and some of them say upgrade to use. So those are for the paid program. And most of these, I think, except for the first couple are all upgrade. They do also have some themes. So these are already set up with colors and images, and you can always click on this little eye dropper icon to have a look at it and see what it looks like.
Then say I like how that looks are not so much. Feel free to kind of poke around there. These are saved templates. So if you create your own layout and you want to use that same layout month after month, you can save it and give it a name. Campaigns, if you had something to save and then if you wanted to code your own. We’re going make this easy, we’re to go to layouts, and we’re going to go over here to ‘One column full width’ is the one that I like to use. I’m going to go ahead and click on that .
What you can see on the left hand side is the email. On the right hand side are all the different elements that you can slide on over to your email to customize it. So, here’s the top of it for right now, it says, ‘view this in your browser.’ Here’s a logo you could put in here. Here’s some text. And then on the right hand side, you can see when you click in here and you always click on this little pencil here to edit it. It shows up over here and the writing inside, and you’ll see a lot of text elements that you’ve seen before, like bold and italicize and underline and things.
So hopefully some of this won’t look too confusing for you. So the first thing that I thought we would work on is a image at the top. Not just your logo, but let’s put a nice header image here. So we’re going to go over to Canva and we’re going to get over here to create a design. We’re gonna type in here, email header, and it comes up. It already has something formatted and it’s formatted at 600 pixels wide by 200 high, which is a really nice size for an email header.
So we go and click on that. On the right hand side is our work space here. On the left hand side are some things that we can use. This is so great. And what I love about Canva. It’s amazing. And you can put your cursor over these and you could see the word ‘free’ on a lot of them because they’re absolutely free. They do have some parts and pieces, usually images that you have to pay for. I don’t see any in here right now, and they will have a little dollar sign or it’ll say, $1. That’s usually what they charge you for them.
So, even if you picked out an image that you had to pay for, its probably only going to be a dollar. We are going to go ahead and do Carly’s Berries. So we’re going to do an email newsletter for a business called Carly’s Berries. No, actually, I really quite like how this is laid out. I like the Berries in the background. I like the name on the top
so you can use this as it is. However, if you had a logo to put in here, if you picked out a background or layout that you liked, and you had a logo you could go over here to uploads and you could upload your logo. You can see these are some custom images that we’ve uploaded in the past.
This leaf is one part of our logo, so I could put that in the middle. Let’s say that was part of Carly’s logo, but not sitting on top of Carly’s name, I don’t really want it there. So if I hit ‘position’ and I say ‘backwards,’ it moves it one layer back. So now it’s behind the name Carly’s Berries some. I kind of like that. So now I’m just going to show you a few things. If you wanted to change them. If you wanted to change the background image, you could click on the background and hit delete.
Now it goes away. But now I can’t see where the text is because the text is white. So I’m going to go up here and hit, undo. So there it is again. That’s good. But if you did want to change the image, you could go over here to the left hand side and go up to ‘photos’ and you could search through these photos. (Oh here, now you can see where it says a dollar.) You could put in what you want to search for. You can see I searched for berries or berry pie. How many? We put a different picture in the back. If you wanted to change the text, here the font.
If you have a font that you work with on your logo that you use a lot, you can highlight it so you could type in the fonts or you can try and find it. The ones with the crown’s, there is obviously an upgraded version of Canva, a paid for version, so you could, if you wanted to pay for that, you could pick for the upgraded version. And I believe if you pay for the upgraded version, you can also upload your own fonts if they’re not listed. If you have a particular font that you use for your logo, so each piece of this can be changed.
You can type over this. Maybe instead of for fresh and organic finds. I just want to put fresh and organic finds. We’re going to come back to Canva and do a few other things, so don’t worry about anything there just yet. This is a really nice feature, though, if we’re done with this and we’re happy with it, we want to make sure that we give it a name. We’re going to call it Carly’s Berries Header for email and then we’re going to download.
When you click on this, it gives you a bunch of different ways you can download it, and sometimes it will download it straight to certain places and one of them is MailChimp. I love that. So if I click on MailChimp, it’s going to say, ‘Do you want to save your designed files to MailChimp? And we’re going to say ‘yes, please!’ And that’s exactly whatit’s going to do. Be sure to let me know in the comments how you are feeling so far.
Are you excited to start using Canva and MailChimp together? Maybe you already use Canva and MailChimp camp but maybe you’re thinking of some new ways to put together some designs and some things to include in your email newsletter. So be sure to let me know in the comments below! Your design has been saved. So now we’re going to go over to male chimp and we’re gonna see this is where we want to put it. When I put my cursor here to make an edit in this section, which right now just the logo, it brings this information up.
We’re going to want to replace this picture. It keeps calling it a logo, but this is just a picture. So, if we click ‘replace,’ it’s going to go and show me all the pictures that I have in the picture library, and this is the one that we just created. I’m going to check that one and go ahead and hit insert. And there it is! Seee, isn’t that fabulous? It’s a really nice size. 600 is a really good width for email imagery. You don’t want it any bigger than that, because on some screens, it’ll be It’ll be crazy big.
So we like to have that. So maybe the top of your email, we’re going to change, too, and you can do this is well, you can put all your text and information in a document so that all you have to do is copy and paste. So again, our editing is all happening over here on the right, paste that in there and then up here, I’m going to write something like, Hello from Carly – and then save and close. Okay, so now I have a top little introduction that says, Carly’s Berries, has our logo, has this beautiful image of a berry.
Now we’ve got a little personalized section of it. So after that, I’m going to put let’s see, why don’t we put today’s feature? So Carly’s got some kind of berry that she’s featuring today in her newsletter. The first thing we want to do is we’re going to have an image, and we’re going to have some text. So we’re going to go over here, these are all parts and pieces that are already formatted.
So I’m going to grab this image and caption and drag it over here and drop it. Now you can see it’s put a whole block in here and it has an image, and it has space for text. So let’s see. Now let’s go back into Canva and create the image. Our email header is done and since we’ve given a name, it’s got a name and you could see over here, it says ‘all changes saved.’
Now we know this has been saved just as it is. Now I’m going to go back to home, and I’m not quite sure what size I want to make this, so sometimes I’ll just use, a Facebook post size. I’ll show you how we can resize some of the pictures for that if we need to. So let’s see. So I want a picture of a berry in the background. Let’s go to photos and I’ve got some Berries there. Let’s see, if I search for Berries, I can pick out any of these free berry images.
Now, this one in the basket is $1. That one’s free. This one’s $1 so I could decide how I wanted that to happen. I think I’m going to pick this one. When I click on it, it automatically shows up on the right hand side. We could see it’s not quite the same as the square background. I’m going to grab the corner and drag it up and drag the whole thing over. It’s going to be not quite the same shape.
Some end up cutting off a little bit, but I’m okay with that. So I think that’s pretty good. So that looks nice. But you know what? I’d like to give it a border, because when you put a new image with a white background on a white template, it’s kind of gets lost, so I’m going to give it a little bit of a border. So if I go over to elements and right here, it’s under recently used. But you can always scroll through and there’s loads and loads of choices. You can click ‘see all.’ There’s all different kinds of shapes, and some are filled at some aren’t. So, by all means, go through this and have fun with it. Lots and lots of options in here. I’m going to click on there, and then I think I’m going to make this little bit darker because we’ve got a lot of dark colors in our logo. I might even make this a logo color. So right up here is the color of the frame.
So I’m actually going to go over here and you can see this is the hex color I was talking about. I actually put my colors up here in my document and I think I’m going to make it this color. Copy that. I going to Put that down here. So I know that’s one of my logo colors. Now, my frame and if I just want to make this side wider I just pull that side
piece right there.
Now it’s got a nice frame on and I think that looks nice. I have a nice frame on there that is the same color as my logo. So I’m liking that. Now I think it’s going to be today’s featured item, so maybe I’ll put some text over it and let people know. So let’s add a heading. If I go over here, I don’t know if you caught that I did it really quick, I clicked on ‘text’ and you can click at a heading, subheading, or body text. Those are already formatted to a certain size and a certain type of text.
You can add those and then you go up here and change the type of fonts for the size, or the color, bold, all those things or you can pick out some that they’ve already done and formatted for you, which is kind of fun, but I’m good with this plain one right here. I’m going to double click on it to select the whole thing. And I’m going to put today’s feature.
Well, now, no one is going to be abele to see that, it’s too black. I’m going to highlight the whole thing. I’m going to go up here and change the color to white. So that’s better, right? Now you can see that better but it’s awful small because I know they’re going to get this in their email.
I’m going to highlight the whole thing and make it bigger. 42. No, no, I think I could make it even bigger than that. 56 like that. And then I’ll just bring it up a little bit. Okay, so I think that’s pretty good. And again, so many different options. Just be sure that you don’t get too carried away. You still want it to be something that looks cohesive with your brand. Now I’m going to go ahead and download. This download is a .png Png is a nice file type.
So I’ve already set up a folder for this. This one’s called Today’s Feature_use this. Okay, then hop on back over to MailChimp again. I’m going to click on image, either click, browse here or browse over here. They do the same thing and click on Browse.
This one that says today’s feature is actually one that I had uploaded earlier so forget that that’s i n there. I’m going to click, ‘upload’ and go to today’s feature_use this and open. It’s uploading the document from my desktop, and then I’m going to click on it to select it and then insert. All right, so that looks pretty good. Looking pretty now. Something that is really important is that if I look over here, it gives me the size of this picture. It’s 940 by 788, that’s too big. If you remember, we only wanted it to be no bigger than 600.
We’re gonna hit edit and we’re gonna go over here and the dimensions are checked that they are locked, which means all I have to do is change one element and it changes the other to the right proportion. Then I’m gonna hit Save.
There you go now. It doesn’t look very different on screen but if this arrived in somebody’s email who had a very big screen, this would have shown up very, very wide versus the header, which would have been 600. This would have been 900 so it would have looked a little funky, a little distorted. And then let’s… we’re gonna go and change… Okay, so here’s the caption… gonna go over here and I’ve already got the text for the caption for that here. …and then we go save and close and then if you wanted to preview it to see what it looks like you can hit ‘preview.’ So here’s what it looks like so far.
Not too bad! If you wanted to change anything, If you want to put Today’s Featured Berries underneath it as a header or you wanted to center this you could do that, but I think we’re doing okay, so far. Actually, I think we did have a header on that one. There it is. Today’s featured berries are a mixed bags. I’m going to copy. Click back here so I get this. Paste it, then I’m gonna highlight it. I am making it bigger and if we wanted to, you can hit more colors. We could select a color that we thought was pretty close. Maybe you wanna make the text here centered and then once you’re happy with that, you hit ‘save and close.’
Okay, now that’s saved. We’re going to do just one more section. We’re gonna go through this just one more time and again, we’re gonna do an image and caption. Drag it over here. But we don’t have an image yet so we go back over to Canva. We already have this one here, and it says all changes saved, which is great and we want to create another one that’s the same size and kind of the same layout. We can go over here and go ‘file/make a copy.’ If you don’t do that and you just edit the one you have, you’ll lose your original, which is kind of a bummer. So the first thing I do up here is rename this. This section is going to be today’s recipe.
I’m changing this to today’s recipe, and you can see, when I click on this, it puts the little circles and lines around the outside. What I don’t know is, is that the frame or is that the picture? So I can either delete it? Oop, I know it’s the frame. So I go up here and go undo, select it and just grab the frame because I want the frame, but I want to change the picture. So I’m gonna move the frame and click on the picture and delete that. I need to get another picture because I want to get a picture of something…I was gonna do a pie. I want to do a pie because our recipe is going to be a pie. Here again, there were some free images and then some that cost money.
So say we wanted to use this pie for today’s recipe. So again I might have to resize it. Now we need to go and select the frame and I need to reframe it up here like that. It’s pretty good. I might move that a little bit up to see it better. I want to make sure I’ve renamed it. All changes saved, so now I’m going to download it. Today’s recipe_use this. Okay, save that and we’re gonna head on back to male MailChimp. This is our email.
Again, we can click here on browse, or here on browse to change the image and upload the new image, Today’s recipe_use this. There we go. Check it. Insert it. There it is. Again, it’s the wrong size. So we’re going to hit edit. We’re going to change the size to 600 and save it. Then hit save and close, just so we know we have that saved. Okay, then we are going to put a little caption in there. Let’s go back. We’ve already got the text here. Call it Strawberry Pie. Click on that section, center that, let’s make it the same size. It was 24. Yeah, that looks about the same size.
Now, what I put in here was that this was one of my grandmother special recipes. Visit our website by clicking on the button below. So one of the things we haven’t done yet is put in a button, and we can. So if we hit save and close, that finishes that section. You can see over here, here’s a button. You’re gonna drag that button over here, and it automatically puts a buy now button in.
That’s okay. We can change that. So here’s the button text – Get Grandma’s Recipe, and then we’re going to link this to a web address let’s say it was https://CarlysBerries.com/StrawberryPie. Now the one thing I will tell you is I do want you to click on advanced options and make sure this is checked off so it opens it in a new window. Then, if we go to ‘style’ cause it’s blue and I don’t want it blue because that’s not their color, we can go here to background and again, here’s an opportunity to put our hex color in. So let’s go back to our document.
We’ll use our blue/purple again, put that in our hex color, so people can get grandma’s recipe. And, again, you can play around with some of these things like rounded corners. You know, you could make it more round, make it look more like a button and then save and close. Then if you go up here to preview mode, you can see here’s your stuff.
Here’s your feature and you would want to check all of your links in your newsletter. You’d want to check all your buttons. We could go back here… cause it automatically puts your social media links in here, which is great. So we click on the edit and you could put the actual address, it just has twitter.com. And then you would put your user name after that Facebook, and your website, and you can add other services if you have them. Reddit, Flickr, Houzz, email, all that kind of good stuff, and you could add a section at the bottom that talked about your company. So lots of lots of good things.
Now, if you wanted to, you might want to go back here. There’s also here, there’s a little divider here, you might want to want to drag that and put that in between. It’s just a nice little tiny gray line the just separates it a little bit. So you know, as you can see, there’s really just an infinite amount of different ways to pull this together. So but, you know, it’s there’s a little bit of back and forth.
There is a learning curve, of course, but these are just some really simple ways to get a little creative in MailChimp. Some of the things that they have already set up to create your header to create some of your imagery and then use the template information in MailChimp to pull it all together.
So the end you save it and close it, and here it is. Again, you can go back and add your subject line. Now, if you want to send it to yourself, you just click here and hit, ‘send a test email’ and you would put your email address in here to send a test to and then you would include instructions if you wanted, if you were sending this to someone else for your doings for a client.
Then you just hit send test and it’ll send a test email to yourself and, like I said, that’s always a good idea because you really want to see how that subject line shows up for you…and you want to make sure that it looks good, that it feels good that it’s something that you would open yourself.
So tell me in the comments below, do you already use MailChimp for your email marketing? And if you do tell me what you think about it. I think it’s a great option, especially if you have less than 2000 subscribers. It’s a free option. There’s really no reason not to be using it. Not to be sending out to your email subscribers. Be sure to look in the comments below for the Mastering Email Marketing to Triple Your Income in 12 months. It’s a free guide for you to help you master your email marketing so you can use all the tools and tips that you learned today…and don’t forget that we also have another YouTube video that I absolutely want you to watch. It is ‘How to Build Your Email List
From 0 to 1000.’
Because once you get this email newsletter together, you’re going to need to send it out to someone. So that’s gonna be a fantastic resource for you to have the list that you need to upload to send all these beautiful emails that you’re creating too. If you found this video this information helpful, please SUBSCRIBE to our channel, be sure to share it with your friends, give us a thumbs up, and leave us a comment.
Let us know what you liked and let us know if you want us to make more videos like this. We so appreciate you being here today and we’re grateful to be part of your entrepreneurial journey.
We really look forward to seeing you in our next video, but until then, DREAM BIG!
