You understand that custom design is important to an email campaign as it better represents your company’s branding. You understand a custom design needs proper coding to output the design as intended and work across all necessary email providers. To make sending emails regularly more efficient, you decide to use a template with patterns that can be reused depending on the email’s content.

Of course, it’s most likely not you doing the design or coding. You just write the content. So, with an email template built, how do you go about adding in what is actually said? You need to incorporate design elements so it all looks good and plug in your copy to see how it all works together.

Working with your custom template

For the design, the designer can get you a style guide of all the elements and pieces that you can use with your content along with some guidelines on how to best use them. This way, you can bug them less and come up with your own ways to lay out creative pieces for your email as you’re writing your content. However, to put all the pieces together and get your copy plugged in, you still need to work with your developer, which can be a cumbersome process. Ideally, you’d want to be able to do it all yourself and see results instantly. This is where a tool, much like a content management system for a website, can come in handy.

Using an email editor

Your email service provider probably has an editor for building email templates, but you have to follow their format which can be limiting for your email’s design. You can use independent free-form email editors, but they often have too many options and an interface that can be overwhelming to work with for someone that’s not a designer. You can utilize the talents of your designer to put together a template in said editor, but they often end up spending a lot of time figuring out how to get their design to work and in the end still have to make compromises to their original vision. Does that mean using an editor is out of the question?

Custom email template editing

How about another way to use an editor, where the editing is built around your template instead of the other way around. A way that lets your designer focus on a proper design, and your developer code it to make it functional as a template, and then allows you to use an inline editor on top of the template to build and edit your emails. That’s the idea of a custom template editor. It:

• Incorporates your designer and developer’s work so you have the best overall quality of an email template
• Saves a developer’s time from having to make design and content updates
• Saves you time from having to go back and forth with your developer to get content plugged in
• Lets you see results in real-time so you can fine tune as needed

"How about another way to use an editor, where the editing is built around your template instead of the other way around."

It ultimately allows you to put together content in a way that feels more natural and come out with the best quality email each time.

We’ve built a custom template editor for ourselves and our clients to use and have made it available as a product for you to use as well. You can sign up to start using it for free. The best part is it’s super easy to setup for your current template and start editing your content.