Use Canva to Create a Mailchimp Header
Whether you’re a small business owner or a social media marketer, putting a really creative eye catching header at the top of your email is a great way to draw a prospect in to the fantastic content that you put in your email.
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Hi, I’m Jeanne from six figure business coaching and we love helping social media marketers virtual assistants and even freelancers start and grow successful business email marketing has one of the highest OI is return on investment and is recommended for any and all industries.
Okay, so we’re going to jump right in here and we’re going to create a really nice header image in Canva. Then we’re going to jump over and insert that into our MailChimp email header template.
So in canva, today, we’re going to assume that we are a social media manager who works with coffee shops.
So that’s the header image that we’re going to create. So I’ve already logged into Canva. Here, we’re going to just click on Create a design. ops, and I already started typing in the email header. So we just click on that. And you can see it already has the dimensions already set up 600 by 00, which is a really nice size. Because sometimes if you get the image and it’s too big, it may look okay in your email template header. But when it shows up in someone’s email, if it’s like 800 or 1000 wide, it will show up that big in their email so it looks really awkward. So it’s nice to have it all. set up properly from the beginning.
In the left hand side, you can see, these are templates that they’ve already got set up. And the purpose of the template is obviously that it has a really nice layout for you to use or to kind of use as a framework for your design. So if you want something very, very simple and clean, you know, you would use this little Holmes one at the top. Here, again, it’s just an image on the left, and come text that kind of overlaps the image, keeping in mind that any of these colors, any of these images, any of these pictures, logos can be added to this.
So all of this can be hanged. It’s really just to kind of get your creativity going, and maybe to pick something that you really like the way it looks and you just have to insert what you want in here.
So Canva does a really nice job of doing some nice layouts for you to use. Kind of a guide. so today I want to use this one because I like the idea of having a nice big picture on the left. And then something small on the right. I don’t necessarily want big text there, but I’m going to show you what we’re going to put in there instead. So on the left hand side, since we’re doing social media marketing for coffee shops, I want a picture of a busy coffee shop. So we’re going to go over here to the left to photos, and I’m going to type in a busy coffee shop.
So I get all these pictures, because, you know, we want our coffee shop owners to see a nice bustling, you know, excited, full coffee shop full of customers, because that’s what they want to see they want to shop full of customers. So we could choose any of these images. I kind of like this one right here. So what I did, all I did was tap on it and you can see it brought the image over to the right to our working area. So we can Delete the back image that’s already there if we wanted to, or we can just drag this picture in there.
Okay. And if you want me to I did that kind of fast. So what happened is, when oops, when I deleted the background image, it left this when it has this, you know, the sky and the clouds in the in the bottom, it means that this is a frame, which is a really, really cool idea that Canva put together. Because what happens then is when I grab my picture, I can just drop it in there and it automatically reformats it to the size of the frame so it fits in there so I don’t have to resize it myself. So I really like that.
Now over here, I can see that the bigger text and the smaller text are grouped together and I could see that because of this dotted line. And I can see that also because up here it says ungroup so I click on ungroup so I can ungroup them because I’m going to get rid of this Bigger text.
So I just click on it and then hit Delete. And I’m going to read write something on here, because I’m going to write helping to keep your coffee shop buzzing. kind of be our tagline here.
It’s kind of hard to see my cursor. There. Okay, and we can make that a little bit bigger if we wanted to.
So people are able to see it because you have to remember people are gonna look at it on mobile too. So you want to make sure everybody can see it. So mobile too. So you want to make sure everybody can see it. So actually this is my other company Mark beach marketing, and I’m just Going to add this logo in here.
So again, I did that really fast. I went over here to uploads and these are different images that we have already uploaded to Canva. And it stores them in here nicely so we can use them again and again. Then I just clicked once on the image, and it brought it over here, and then I can just drag it over here and I can resize it as any, any way that I choose. And then I’m gonna make this a little bit wider. Point two, I can bring this down a little bit, because what I also want to do is I want to put my picture in here because I want people to associate my business and my logo with me. And that’s become really, really important as far as branding goes.
So remember, I was talking about frames, so What I want to do over here is go over to elements and type in frames. And so these are all the different frames that are already set up. So if I wanted a frame that was a circle, I just click on that. And then I resize it the way I want it. So that’s pretty, pretty good, I think. So that’s my frame. So then I want to come over here to upload because I know I’ve uploaded a picture of me in here somewhere. Find that real quick. There’s me. So now I again I just clicked on me. And then I’m gonna go over here and drag the picture to the frame and it automatically puts it right there and drops it right in there. So now they’ve got picture of me so they know that I am Mark beach marketing. And then I could change this to another color up here. If I wanted to. Maybe use more of a this to a different font, maybe
I have a branded font that I branded color. I could change use.
I can take this element here again maybe I want to change that to a branded color. And when you have the upgraded version of Canva, you can put your colors your your logo colors in here, and it it they will be right here. So that you can select those first instead of having to put in the color number now if you wanted to put in your color number, you just click here and the whole palette will come up here. But you can see the nice thing too is it also pulls out photo colors.
So these are all the colors that are used in the photo here in the logo in my picture. So if we wanted to match any of those Canva does a really nice job of already selecting those.
So the last thing you want to do while you’re here is to go ahead and name this. So when you come back into Canva, you can see over here it says all changes saved. So we know that this image has been saved. And then over here, we want to name it. So let’s call it email header. mm for Mark beach, marketing coffee, and then generic. So we could use this anytime. And then we’re going to go ahead and click over here on download. And I would go ahead and download it as a PNG. It’s a nice small file, so it doesn’t take too long for people to see it when they’re your email gets to them.If it’s too big of a file, it takes a couple minutes for them need to compress it or anything. So a PNG is just perfectly fine.
So let’s go ahead and download that your design has been published gives you a place to save it. So we’re going to go ahead and save that. And then I’m going to go over here and this is just one of our, our dummy accounts that we use. And we’re going to go ahead and create an email.
We’re just gonna call it email example. Social media marketer begin.
And then here’s where you know, you can add your recipients. So that would be you can click there and it’ll go to your audience section. And you can select what lists of people you want to send it to. And here’s where you click from. So that would either be you or your business. Here you would add a subject. And that’s a really important aspect of your email because you want it to be something compelling that’s gonna excite them and want the to open it. And here’s where we want to go to go to design email.
So here is where they’ve got some really nice layouts. These are all templates that you can select from the first couple, come with the free edition. And then some of these are available if you wanted to upgrade. And then I have just some basic ones, one, column one, column four with one and two columns. So but we’re just going to go ahead and select the first one, which is the one column because then I’m going to show you how you can use the different elements on the right.
So this is all you start out with. Okay, so don’t worry about view this email in your browser, go ahead and leave that there for people to have an option to go ahead and click on view in their browser because then it will make the email a little bit bigger, and some people like to view it that way. So It just starts out with a logo image and some text and then a few items for the footer. So we’re going to go ahead and change this logo.
So all I do is click here, and go over here to the right and hit replace. And then I’ve got the image here, but if I didn’t, I would go ahead here and click Upload. And I would select the image and then I would open it and it would upload the image to MailChimp. And then I would insert the image in so you can see it inserted the image on the left.
So that’s our email that we’re working in. On the right it gives you the information so it’s 600 by 200. That’s perfectly fine. You can hit all so if for some reason somebody didn’t see the image in their email because their email was Sometimes the email protects them from different images and doesn’t always render the images, you could just put, you know, the name of your company. And then the other thing that’s nice that you could do here is you could put a link.
So I would always if this is talking about your business, I would go ahead and put a link to your website. And then I would always in the advanced options, make sure it says open in a new window because you don’t want them to be looking at your email and then click on that and then all of a sudden, they’re no longer in your email.
Now they’re at your website. So what you want to happen is you want a new window to open up and then go to your website. So if they decide Oh, okay, now I’m on their website and they close that they’re still going to be in your email, and then if we go to style, okay, so if I click here on the left You can see, see, if I click down here, you can see that the header image doesn’t have any kind of border, it’s just white, like the rest of it, which is fine. I mean it you know, I think it looks nice. If you wanted to give it a border, that’s when you would go to style. You could give it you know, a solid border, you can, you know, round the corners, youknow, you can play around with this and see, you could give the border a color, you could give it one of the colors that you’ve used.
So, you know, feel free to kind of play around with that and see, you know, see what you like. And then you can each time you click in these boxes, it’s going to correspond on the right hand side is going to be where you make changes to that. That’s why when I clicked in this bottom make changes to that. That’s why when I clicked in this bottom media icons, and then You can even add some more on here. Save and close that.
Okay. So once we’ve saved this, we get the blocks again on the right. So I’m just going to mention a little bit about those. So if you wanted to add a text box, if you wanted to add a button if you wanted to add any of these aspects on the right, maybe you want a divider between, you know, the header image and your text. So if you wanted to add a divider, let’s say you can see the divider is one of the blocks on the right hand side. You just go over there and grab that drag that over here to the left. And you can see once you do that, you now get a bunch of different options here on the right, whereby you can choose padding on the top or bottoms how much space you have. You can choose whether it’s dotted or dashed or grooved. You can choose how thick it is. You can choose the color, you can choose if there’s a background.
So you look any way that you like it to look. And that goes with any of these areas, you can add buttons, you can add a footer, you can add any custom HTML code videos, a group of images. So, you know, by all means, feel free to play around with this and make this look as custom as you want.
So we’re going to go ahead and go back and design another header image. So but for right now, we’re going to go ahead and continue. And then so when we were in MailChimp, this would go ahead and bring you back to this area.
So you could if you wanted to send yourself a test email here, you click on that and you can send yourself you put your email address in here. You can write yourself a note and you can send yourself a test which I always recommend you do, just to see how it looks when it when it arrives in your email, and that’s especially important for your subject line. And but also for your content to make sure everything looks good, check all your links. And just to make sure that everything looks the way that you want it to before you send it out. And then you can also schedule your email to go out at a later time, which I think is fantastic.
So let’s go back over to Canva. And let’s create a new header image.
Okay, so for this example, we’re going to pretend that we are Suzy Q’s virtual assistant services. So we’re going to create a nice generic header that we can use in Suzy Q’s emails anytime she sends them out. So we’re back in Canva. We’re going to create a design which is going to be an
Email header. And as before, we’re working on the right hand side. The left hand side is where all of our examples are. And I think we’re gonna, we’re gonna use this one, because I’m thinking we’ll put Suzy Q’s logo in the middle and then we’ll use the four squares to kind of represent what she does for her clients. So I’m going to see if I already uploaded Suzy Q’s. Upload Suzy Q’s logo.
Okay, sorry. Going to get rid of market picks. Okay, so market picks is the example that they have here. And I could see that it has a dotted line around it and has more than one box. So there’s a solid box in the middle, there’s a dotted box on the outside. So I know that it’s a couple boxes grouped together. I also know that because up here it says ungroup. So I’m going to go ahead and hit ungroup. Because I want to keep the outside box, I just want to get rid of the logo there.
Okay, I’m going to put Suzy Q’s logo in there. Okay, and I’m going to click on this image because I’m not sure if there’s a frame behind it. If there’s a nice frame behind it, then we can just pop that image in like we did before. So if I delete that, now, unfortunately, there’s no frame in this one. So I can go up here and hit undo.
Okay, so I have uploaded some images that I want to use. So this image is going to represent the fact that security does some transcribing for her clients. And this image is going to represent Suzy cute does email marketing for clients. I’m just gonna can see I’m just resizing these now this one overlap so I could go up here and hit position and if I hit backward, you can see it moved it behind the text. So I need to go ahead and select it again and then I need to hit backward again. And now it moved it behind the box and the text. And then this one is going to be because Susie q does some she does some grammar checking and editing for her client.
So again, you can see that it’s on top. So we’re going to position this and move it backwards. So now it’s behind the text backward again, now it’s behind the box. And then we’re gonna hit this last one One. And this represents all different kinds of things that Susie q does for her clients. She does social media marketing, and she does all kinds of design work.
Now, this is really nice because this is black, you could actually create an image of something that you do on your website, and you could put that on top of there. So that’s really kind of cool, too. So if you like this, we could download this just as it is. I kind of like it with the black accent, but maybe Susie q thinks that’s a little too dark. For her purposes. She’s a brighter, more energetic kind of person, and so is her business. So maybe you want to change this black to something a little bit lighter.
So let’s pick oops black actually pick her this is kind of a close to her orange color. And then we’re not going to use this color, but it’s kind of close to her orange color. So at least it gives us a good starting point, then maybe we make it really really light up here by adding more white to it sounds kind of nice soft color. And maybe we want to use this instead of the white behind Suzy Q’s logo, so you have to make sure it’s light enough so you can see the door and I like the door on her logo because to me that’s opening the door to new clients. That’s what that kind of represents.
So I’m going to copy this number here because this number represents our color. And then I’m going to go over here, and I’m gonna move Susie’s logo out of the way and I want to select this. And you can see here’s the, the out outline color, and here’s the inside color and oh, this right there for me, so I didn’t even need to Copy the number, we’re going to go ahead and click on that. And now put Suzy Q’s logo back in there. So, so I think that looks really nice.
However, I think the black trim on the inside is a little too too much. So let’s keep with Susie’s logo colors and see if we can change that black to something closer to her logo color. And if you have if you know she probably is going to have her logo color, so to hand so you would actually be able to go up here and click on new color. And then you put in what’s called the hex code, which is the code that represents your logo color.
So, so overall, I really like that it’s nice and soft. It’s got all the different things that are represented there. And then like I said, you could go the extra mile and put another Nice image in here so you wouldn’t have that black there.
So again, we’re going to check up here all changes are saved. Excellent. We’re going to rename this email header, Susie Q. And then we’re going to wait until that says all changes saved. We’re going to download it. Again we’re going to download it as a PNG. We’re going to save it on our computer. And then we’re gonna go over to MailChimp and we’re going to create an email and we’re going to call it email to Susie Q.
Begin and These are the choices that you need to make who you’re going to send it to. It’s going to come from you or your business, and I’ll put a compelling subject line, which will get them to open it and we’re going to click on design email. These are the different templates you can choose from. These are more basic templates you can choose from. I’m going to go ahead and just hit the one column one. It’s my favorite. And again, we’re going to go to the top and we’re going to click on the box and we’re going to hit replace, we’re going to upload her Susie q header.
So first, it uploads it to MailChimp. And then we have to select it to insert it into our email. I like that I think it looks really nice. Now a couple things we want to do with that is selected and make sure it’s selected and then we’re going to click alt are going to type in Susie, Susie q virtual services, spell that right and update that so again if the image doesn’t show up, then at the top of your email it’s going to say Susie q virtual assistant services so people know who this is coming from. Then we can also click on a link and put in her address,which is doesn’t really exist.
We want to click on Advanced Options, make sure it says open in a new window. And then we can go ahead and do any kind of editing we want to do to the rest of the email. So that is how you create a another header in Canva and bring it on into MailChimp to get started on your email newsletter.
Now that you know how to create amazing creative eye catching headers for your email using Canva to do the design and popping them into your MailChimp email newsletter, be sure to click on the link below to get our free guide master email marketing to triple your income.
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