Marketing - Email templates

Thanks everyone for your feedback and comments, I will see how I go.

Hey Sally, hope you are well. I think both the previous suggestions are good - the Xplan email wizard is a little limited, but it can give you some good ideas on layouts etc.

You can manually design the layout of an email template in Xplan by inserting a table with 3 rows - insert your banner into row one as an image, use row 2 for content and insert a footer image into row 3. Centre the table in the email editor and add in some basic code for recipient and sender sign off.

Once you've got your base email template set up, test it across different mail clients (gmail, outlook) and devices (desktop, tablet, phone) to make sure the formatting and images appear as you want. Each time you want to create a new template, copy the source code from your base template and paste into the new template.

There's good article in the Community around Email Templates: Design Tips from a few years back with useful tips like including images or video to make content more engaging or how to include an unsubscribe option by creating a hyperlink in the template that links to a custom boolean unsubscribe field.

You can include social media icons as images and hyperlinks to your pages.

It can take a little time to get right, but once you do, emails out of Xplan can look super professional and engaging.

Hi Sally,

I have found that using a HTML converter can sometimes be helpful and easy. You can build a good looking email template then copy and paste it into the converter to get your source code. This source code can then be copied and pasted straight into an email template. But beware of using CSS styling as this can cause issues, so keep it simple.

Also, if you use code in your template, its also useful to use the preview button to ensure the code works. This is faster than testing the email template on a test client.

Yes I have tried using the email template wizard - but find it very restrictive. 

Do you use the template wizard? and how do you find them (would be good if xplan could update the selection).

Hi Sally, in terms of banners and presentation, have you tried using the email template wizard?

Great question Sally.Warncken and can't wait to see what the community has done to make their email templates more engaging for clients!