Newbie here help regarding email design

Web Design
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#1

Hi everyone I hope you are keeping safe during these times.

I own a small business and have recently decided to try a campaign marketing email. I would like to use campaign monitor as it is for free however the best results are to upload a pre-designed theme. However I need to edit the theme and I am absolutely useless at HTML.

I was wondering if there is any software where you can edit the theme in a front end way? I use a Mac and any help will be greatly appreciated.

Mike

#2

Creating a good html newsletter theme is very hard because it has to be:

  • Responsive, meaning it works well on various screen sizes (so far it’s like a web page)
  • Work on a number of email readers, which is very hard because many don’t support standard CSS
  • All CSS (styling) has to be embedded into the html inline, which is a major pain

So, if you’re not good with HTML/CSS, forget doing your own theme.

You should find an existing theme that the software offers and modify to your needs. Change as little as possible.

Make sure test the end result on as many email readers as possible, especially various version of Outlook as they tend to be the worst in terms of CSS support.

1 Like
#3

Okay many thanks for the help. I have a theme I just need some software to change it

#4

The problem with editing your theme in a WYSIWYG editor is that it will likely not embed styles inline, or care about email reader incompatibilities. I don’t think an email specific editor exists. It would be great if it did.

#5

Have you looked into MailChimp in addition to Campaign Monitor. MailChimp’s WYSIWYG (what you called a “front end way”) HTML email editor is about as good as you’re going to find. There’s also a WYSIWYG Macintosh HTML email editor called Coffeecup, but using it is less than intuitive, and it costs money.

There are a number of free and low-cost HTML/CSS WYSIWYG editors available. The trouble is that they’re all mostly intended to build basic websites, whereas the code in HTML emails needs to be constructed somewhat differently for reason Iraszi already mentioned.

The best way to do this is with an ASCII code editor working with raw HTML/CSS code. A very basic and free ASCII text editor is already on your Mac. It’s called TextEdit, but you’ll need to change it from using rich text to plain text in its preference settings. (Plain text is another name for ASCII text.) Then again, if you don’t know how to write HTML and CSS, it won’t do you much good.

How extensive are the changes you want to make to this template you already have? Do you want to really juggle things around or are you just needing to change a thing or two?

#6

Coding HTML emails is a huge pain and is hard to do properly. A lot of people code them like website but they can’t be done that way. There is much more involved. I stopped doing them because they are a pain. And there are so many places to check them—different programs and browsers. I outsource that to someone who does it all the time. Much easier.

I like MailerLite, FWIW. I use their free version and their WYSIWYG editor. I used to use my own custom design. I was able to modify it to get it to look how my custom one did before.

#7

Do you know what guys thank you so much for everything I would not have a clue about the above so mail chimp it is! :sweat_smile: there was this free software once a long time ago and you could send campaigns from it I forgotten what it’s called