30 free great looking HTML email templates

July 02, 2007

Ensuring your emails look awesome across every major email client out there can be a lot of work. To make your job that little bit easier, we've just put together 30 free email templates that look fantastic and have been tested in all the major email environments. Not even Outlook 2007 could stop these suckers looking great.

The templates range from simple, single column emails through to more complex 2 column newsletters with different types of content. We've also been careful to keep the use of images to a minimum, so the templates look great even when images have been disabled. Changing the color scheme to suit your own brand is as simple as making a few simple tweaks to the code. What are you waiting for? Preview and download the templates now.

Posted in: Tips & Resources

12 Comments

user
July 2, 2007 4:43pm

I never seem to figure out where to get this templates.
Dave Greiner
July 2, 2007 5:11pm

Hmmm, OK. Head to this page and click the “Save” icon next to each template to save that specific template, or the big yellow “Download all 30” button on the right to grab them all as one big zip file.
Pete
July 2, 2007 10:10pm

Thanks for these - not only are they decent templates for use as future newsletters, they are also fine examples of how you would code for your system & multiple email clients. Cheers!
Richard
July 4, 2007 9:55am

How about creating a couple of “text only” templates? I’ve found it quite challenging to get my text version looking nice. It would help to see some suggestions on how to style headings, bullets etc.
Mathew Patterson
July 4, 2007 10:30am

Hey Richard,

That’s a good idea, and we’ll keep it in mind for the future. In the meantime, here is a couple of good resources for you:

Formatting plain text emails - the 4 golden rules and

Our gallery entry for the Good Experience newsletter which is in plain text.
Danny Foo
July 6, 2007 2:17am

Excellent resource! :)

Not to mention helps speed up designing email templates as samples to show clients what is possible.

Kudos!
Marc
July 6, 2007 11:42am

Hello,
I thought the golden rule was to use inline css for html emails? The first example I looked at the style was in the head. Doesn’t that get altered in Gmail for example?
Dave Greiner
July 6, 2007 2:47pm

Marc, that’s what we recommend if you want pixel perfect design in Gmail, but not a golden rule for email design in general. We went for a happy medium that still looks good in Gmail, but is also very easy to modify for your own newsletters.

Of course, if you’re looking for pixel perfection in Gmail, you can always add your own inline CSS to get that result.
Gary Shapiro
July 13, 2007 12:38pm

do you design on a per piece basis? i would just like an email reply that goes out by hotmail to prospects answering an ad to look great. it should have company logo, my pic perhaps, a list so they can choose from topics to be sent to them, and an input area so they can fill out their full info, and then i’ll start the full subscription with their reply. (in the newspaper ad, there’s only enough room to say “send your FREE info request to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). but i want more info on customer such as name, company, phone, address and fax for a database for other USPS mailings down the road. and then i’ll start their subscription. good idea or not you think on getting more info that way, or should i be more up front in newspaper ad and spend extra in the ad size to fit in extra words? either way, i’m not a designer so i need one html email design at first just to respond to say thank you and choose your subject from 30 areas leading to over 3000 reports.
Dave Greiner
July 13, 2007 3:16pm

Gary, we don’t provide any design or consulting services I’m afraid. if you’re looking for a designer to help you out, I recommend checking out our email design gallery and approaching the designer of any of the creative you like.
Nick Weynand
July 24, 2007 9:04am

So I’m a bit confused. I thought these were tested in Outlook 2007. I tried one out and here’s what I got:

http://www.adrp.org/e-newsletter/test/img/screen-outlookemail.jpg

Is this right? Looks great in the browser, here’s what I got:

http://www.adrp.org/e-newsletter/test/22.html
Dave Greiner
July 24, 2007 10:40am

Hey Nick, thanks for the screens, and unfortunately that’s spot on. Outlook 2007 doesn’t support background images and has terrible margin and padding support. As I mentioned earlier, we went for a happy medium that still looks good in clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007, but is also very easy to modify for your own newsletters. You could certainly add more code (loads of inline CSS, more nested tables) to get a marginally better result.

However, because of the lack of CSS support and even bad table support, it’s impossible to get a pixel perfect rendition of that template in Outlook 2007.

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