In this article, I’ll show you how to build emails in your platform’s Drag & Drop Email Builder.
To open the email builder, click Email Marketing in the left menu.
Let’s build a new email from scratch!
Click Create email at the top right.
You can choose an existing template or select the Blank option to create an entirely new email.
This opens your email builder. But before we get started with a blank template, let’s click the Settings tab to set up some basic information for the email.
Here, you can set up things like the sender’s name, email address, email subject line, and even preview text, which is short text that appears in some email clients, such as Gmail.
And lastly, you can give your email a name for internal reference.
Click Save and then switch back to the Edit tab.
To start, let’s delete the default block to get a blank slate we can work with.
The first thing that you want to do is add a layout block.
I’m going to click and drag a full-width block to the main email builder view.
And this is how it looks. What you’ll notice is that now our block is selected and we can see various settings to the left.
Let’s say you want to split the block into two columns. Simply select the two columns button and the effect is immediately applied.
You could also select three columns, or use ratios for asymmetric columns.
Let’s go back to a single column and then look at the next section of the settings - the Padding toggle.
This is where you can add more space on different sides of your selected block. If you want to put more space on top, just increase the padding here and you can see the adding additional space on the top of the block.
The same concept applies for the bottom and the sides.
Next, we can choose the background type for this section - either full width or we can have the block width adapt to the content that’s in it.
We can also change the color of the background or even select patterns.
Once you're good with your section settings, go ahead and click Done at the top.
Now, we can drag and drop more elements in our email.
So let's say we wanted to add an image here. All we need to do is drag and drop the image icon on the left into our main view.
And then select replace on the left side and upload an image.
Once you’ve added an image, you can give it some additional information like the image URL or alt text for SEO purposes.
You could also link the image to something or control the width and the height of the image right here in the settings.
Again, there is a padding toggle for adding space and an alignment field.
Once you’ve finished your image settings, click Done.
You can continue to add elements into your email by just dragging them over to the main view. Then, simply adjust their settings on the left-hand side to your own preferences.
Next, we’ll add a text element below the timage for some email text.
You can format text using the settings on the left side just like you would in any wysiwyg editor.
If we wanted to drag and drop a button element, these are the settings that would appear:
For divider elements, you can easily change the color, increase the divider width, or adjust other styling options.
Don’t forget to click Done to save the element in your email.
There’s even a social media element for adding visual links within the email to your social media accounts, complete with color control and style options:
The last element is the footer element.
When you drag it into your email, it will display a pre-built footer, with information automatically inserted based on your platform account.
After adding the footer, let’s select it to give it a color. Maybe we want it to be dark to contrast the light color background of our email.
And finally, let’s change the footer text to a brighter color and then save the email at the top left.
After saving, you've got your email ready to go, but before you send it off, you’ll obviously want to preview it.
At the top right, open the Actions dropdown and then select Preview.
You can adjust the preview to show what your email will look like on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.
Now, even if the email looks good in the preview, you’ll also want to send a test email to make sure it appears correctly when it’s sent.
Click Send test email at the top right.
And then add your email addresses, add a subject, and click Send a test email.
If your email is 100% ready to go, then click Send or Schedule, which opens up some sending options.
First, you’ll need to tell your platform who to send the email to. You can choose individual contacts, select a predefined smart list, or even select all contacts with a given tag.
After you’ve defined your recipient audience, the counter on the right shows you how many people are going to receive this email.
Then, you’ll select when to send your email - you can choose to either send it now or schedule it for later.
Lastly, let's check out a great time-saving feature!
We’ll go back to our email’s edit tab, and you can see the second tab is called Appearance. If we click Appearance, we get a few options that are basically global settings within this specific email.
I can open the template dropdown and change the background color, the body color, or even the width of the email.
But with the Appearance menu, you can also set defaults for things like the font, the buttons, and the dividers.
Let’s say you know you're going to add multiple buttons to an email.
The right place to start would be to set them up in the Appearance tab first. We’ll set up a default of yellow color with Courier font, size 22.
Now, anytime I add a button in my email, I won’t need to manually select the color, font, or font size each time - the settings are pulled from here.
Congratulations, you’ve finished the guide to using your platform’s email builder - now get out there and start creating amazing emails to send to your prospects and clients!