Create an Email Template in Mailchimp
Using a professional email template helps you save time and build your brand.
Today I’m going to show you step by step how to create an email template for your MailChimp account. Keeping mind if you have a virtual assistant who handles your email marketing, you can use this as training for them.
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Did you know that email marketing has one of the highest return on investments of any type of marketing that you can do? I’m Jeanne Willson with Six Figure Business Coaching and I’m excited to teach you how to create an email template that your clients, your prospects, your referral sources are going to be so excited to receive every single time you send it.
Okay, so the first thing you need to think about when you are getting ready To set up your email newsletter template is what elements Do you want to include in your email template. So since it’s a template, it’s something you’re going to use over and over and over again. So you kind of want to make sure that the structure is consistent with whatever your content is. So this is part of my email template for Markbeech Marketing. And you’ll notice here it has some elements at the top, the top right, it’s got my social, then it has a header image, then it has a quote than it had.
The first section is a letter from me and then my picture. And then after that, there’s an article that has, you know, a header text, then it has an image on the left and then has text on the right and then at the bottom, it’s got my social contacts and links and things. So those are some of the elements that you can include oftentimes
Some of our clients will have new since it’s a newsletter, they’ll have maybe three articles in there, we’d like to encourage you to make sure that at least one of the articles links to your content. So whether that’s a blog, or a video, or even one of your social platforms. So really think about what you want to include in your newsletter and how you want to visually represent that. And I’ve also borrowed an image here from somebody named Lucky Cliffy, because I thought this was a really nice visual, as to the left hand side is the template that you’re going to create.
The Right hand side would be an example of one of your monthly emails that are already designed. So What we’re going for today is the template which is the one on the left. So we’re just going to set up the elements and then you can use that template over and over and actually put the elements in it.
So this One has a logo at the top, then it has a nice big header image to kind of capture your attention, then it is just called a monthly newsletter, but it would be good if you, you know, gave it some kind of name that was interesting and unique and something that people could remember. And then this one has three different articles or calls to action or features. And Then it just says at the bottom, you know, for more information, go visit our website. So I’m going to show you how to set up something like this using MailChimp. And if you need to do any of the artwork, we recommend that you use Canva. And if you haven’t used it before, we’ve got some great tutorials on our YouTube channel. So feel free to look those up.
So first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to go to MailChimp and if you don’t already have an account, it’s free. So once you log in, you’re going to go up here and click Create and we’re going to create an email template. So the first thing it says is select your starting point. So you can either do the standard layout, these are some themes that they’ve already set up for you. Or you if you know how to do HTML coding, you know, you can go ahead and make that happen. But for today, we’re just going to use layouts.
Now some of these you have to pay extra to use the first couple I think are basic, we’re going to go ahead and just use the basic one column. And I’m going to show you how to add the different elements to it. So this is the starting point. So view your email in this browser, I usually just leave that there because some people will see this on their computer screen when they received your email, but they want to see it, you know, in a browser window so it’s a little bit bigger. Sphere they have a logo and some text and then your social elements at the bottom. So what you can do is if you want to keep this logo, which I think is fine, you could actually go ahead and replace this image with your logo. Because if that’s always going to be your logo at the top of your newsletter, you can go ahead and click Replace.
So you would come here and click Upload. Go ahead and upload. Okay, so we’ve uploaded our logo, and we want to go ahead and link this to our website as well. Because you never know if somebody as soon as they open your email, they might go, Oh, yes, I want to I want to go to their website. So they’ll click right on it and it takes them right there.
Now if you wanted to edit this, if you felt like you know what, it’s a little bit too big or, you know, what did you do differently? So if it’s too big, it has to keep the lock dimensions on because that’s going to keep it the same ratio of width and height. So maybe we want to make this 200 wide. Then we’ll save that. And see it just makes it a little bit smaller. Because what we’re going to do in here, and then we can hit Save and Close. So we’ve already set up our first element. So if we wanted to do something like this, so we’ve got our logo at the top, then we want a nice big image there. So we’re gonna go ahead and over here, you’re gonna, you’re gonna left click on your mouse and drag this over here, see where it says drop block here, and then when we let go, it automatically drops the block there.
Okay, now, you could upload an image here, but since this is our template, we’re just going to leave that as a placeholder because we know that we’re going to want a nice big header image. And like I said, if you don’t have a header image to use, you can always go to Canva sign up for a free account, they have some photos in there that you can use, you can also really easily put text on top of it. So it’s just a great resource. So the next thing we want to do is we want to put a text box there so we can have the name of our newsletter. You can see this is selected here. And so we’re just going to hit save and close so we can get back to our blocks. So our next block is going to be text. And we’re gonna have to like grab that and drag it over here, and then let it go.
So right now it says this is a text block. So what we could do is put a newsletter because that’s not going to change and whatever our cool creative name is for our newsletter, So we’re we can also do some styling here. So we might want to center it. We Let’s see what else we can do here, we can change the size, make it smaller, make it bigger, we can add some color to it, make it whatever our brand colors are. Yeah, so that’s a, you know, you’ve got all the usual Bold Italic, maybe we want to bold that.
Maybe you want to put a little squiggly element on either side, you know, however you want to want to do that. But That’s going to be the name of our newsletter. And that’s not going to change from month to month. So it’s okay to go ahead and style that now. So the next thing we want to do is we want to have it. This one has an image on the right. I like to put the images on the left and the text on the right. So we’re going to have an image on one side and some text and a button on the other side. Let’s see how we can make that happen.
Okay, so we’re gonna save and close, we’re done with that section. So right here we have image and text, that’s the one we want. So we’re going to grab that and drag that over here. And when we go to settings, we can tell it that we actually want the picture to be on the left hand side, or if you want it on the right like that one was or you can have a top or bottom. I personally like inhere on the left, so we’re going to close that. And we again, we don’t need to actually put an image in here or put text in here because this is going to change every month. Now if you were happy with this, if you wanted to have it set up this one where there’s three of them.
The one thing we do need to add in here though, is a button. So we’ve added or blocked here. Now again, if you want to change the settings, let’s say you wanted to have two images. You could do it that way. I’m going to show you how to do that a little differently, though, but if you wanted to have them, like next to each other, you could do that.
I Caution you on that one only because you need to ensure that the text description for each one has the same amount of lines, because otherwise it looks a little wonky when you’ve got two next to each other and the images line up perfectly, but you want the text to line up perfectly as well. As you can see the process is pretty easy. So if you’re feeling more confident right now about creating your own template, be sure to comment below with the word Yes.
So we’re going to go ahead and leave that with one there. So the next thing we’re going to need to do is to add a button because we want people to be able to click to get to the article. That we’re going to promote or the video we’re going to promote or whatever it is that you’re going to promote here. So unfortunately they don’t allow us to put something really nice in here like this, this button so we’ll just put a button underneath.
I could show you how to do some HTML in a minute but this is the easiest way to do it. So just grab this button and put it into there. And that gives you a nice, easy way to go ahead and style it. You can change you know the color of it and settings. You can have it you know the full width if you want. You can fit it to the text. I like you can align it to the right if you want it to look more like the one that we were kind of styling and after And then the button text is here, by now or visit this article.
The usual you know, read more, and then you can put an address in here, if this is always going to be if this will probably be whatever it is that you’re going to be linking to. So you can put that, but you can style this like I’ve Done here. If you want it to show up the same way every time. So so that’s really going to be your article section right there. And then if you want to, I would probably go ahead and put a divider in here. So it just kind of breaks it up a little bit. And anytime you can go over here and click Preview and enter preview mode.
So you can see why it’s kind of looking like at the moment now doesn’t have a picture here so it’s a little hard to see envision, but it doesn’t have the image up here either. But you know, if you wanted to just kind of see how that button was looking, that’s what you could do there. So if we like this, we can just go ahead here and duplicate it.
So when you hit that actually creates a new one. And then you can use this to drag it down because we actually want it to show up underneath that horizontal align. That’s that’s marking the section and then we can go ahead and duplicate this button and drag that down as well. So now we’ve got one, two articles. Then we could go ahead and just duplicate this again if we wanted to go ahead and do that. The third article in here between copy this Get down to.
Okay, so we’re getting there. We’ve got pictures and text and a button. We’ve got that three times, right. So we’ve got a picture to the left the text and the button, picture on the left, the text and the button. We’ve got picture on the left text and a button. Now they just have you know, for more information down here at the bottom, what I like to do is, is have a section that maybe says you know, about, you know, about our company. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It doesn’t necessarily have to be big and bold, but I just like to remind people what the business is all about.
You know, we are a marketing and coaching company that helps our clients outsource, you know, any tasks that they shouldn’t be doing themselves. And that’s what we do. So I like to put that in here and then I would probably put a link so I would replace this text. We teach smart entrepreneurs how to make more money, less tasks. And it can be something just as simple as that and then I would put six businesses you know, reach out, If we can help you. That’s a signature, I could put a little squiggly line and I can italicize that. And then I Would like to link to our website.
So I can highlight it and go up here and click the link, and then put the website address advanced options. I do like to make sure that this is checked off open in a new window, which means that it’s going to open a new tab in your browser so they can visit your website. But the more important thing is when they close that web browser is that they’re still on Your Email.
So I always like to make sure that’s set that way. And then here is a really nice option, because they’ve already got these different elements for the different social platforms. So here you could just put Twitter you know, SF is coaching and then Facebook and then Instagram. So it’s really nice here because then they go ahead and pull the image and they also pull the address if you know, up until you need to put your custom address. And then you know, you can style this any way that you want.
You’ve got some settings here, if you want to just display the icon or the text, or both icon and tag. Again, aligning center full width, you can do it like this like this. Obviously, if it’s at the bottom, you probably want to do something like that. But if you want them to be bigger, you know, you can make that change the icon styles. So that’s a really nice option. One of my clients told me recently, that every time we send out their newsletter, they get inquiries for new business. And we’d love that to happen for you too. So there you go. So we’re gonna save and close that.
Again, we can preview it, it’s just not gonna, it’s missing the imagery, so you’re not gonna see pictures in here. So we’re going to go ahead actually, we’re going to give it a name up here. Okay, so we’re going to give it a name once you hit save and exit it gives you the chance to so this is going to be monthly newsletter template. You can see it comes up here monthly newsletter template. So What you’re going to want to do when you sign into MailChimp, you can go ahead and hit campaigns and then email templates. And that’s going to get you here. And we call it our monthly newsletter templates.
If we go over here, and click on Create a campaign, it calls your email campaign, then it will use the layout that we’ve just set up. So if we go here to edit, you can see that all the elements are here, they’re just waiting for us to go ahead and put it in. So you know, we could browse and drop an image in there, that could be our header image. And when we go here, we would put the information.
Click on that. So here’s where it gives you the option to upload the image which is going to show up on the left. And then here’s the text where you put the text on the right and then Here is when you click on your button, that’s where you’re going to put the button address. And you’re going to do that all three times. And then this is just going to stay as it is. So that is how you create a newsletter template, create an email template in MailChimp that you can use over and over and over again each time you send out a newsletter.
Now if you find that you need to make changes to it. Because you know, over time, you’ve decided that you only want to do two articles instead of three or you want to change the look of the or the name of your newsletter. You can always come back here to campaigns and then templates and then go ahead and click here on the template. And you can go ahead and make any changes that you want to make to the template. And that’s it. Now That you have a professional looking email template, it’s time to start growing your business and growing your email list. So be sure and check out our video we’re gonna post it here or below that talks about how to get your first 1000 subscribers.
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