Resources Hub » Knowledge base » How do I Use HTML Email Templates?

HTML email templates make it easy to build and edit responsive emails that look great and perform even better. These templates can be reused to help provide a consistent look and feel to your email marketing messages, ensuring your branding always looks perfect.

Campaign Monitor, in fact, offers email templates you can start building for free. Once you’ve found and customized a template you like, you can update the elements for every message you send out. This means your subscribers will always see a professional looking email that works the way you designed it to.

Source: Campaign Monitor

This makes designing a marketing campaign or regular newsletter quick and easy. The elements and objects that make up the template are customizable, allowing you to insert new content every time without having to start from scratch.

Especially if you’re a small business, blogger, or entrepreneur, this can save you precious time.

What are HTML email templates?

Although knowing a bit of HTML coding doesn’t hurt, with template builders (such as those provided by Campaign Monitor) you can build your templates using simple drag-and-drop editors.

You can choose a template that you like and modify it how you want quickly.

What objects can I use in HTML email templates?

Modern HTML email template builders like Campaign Monitor’s support text boxes, images, video, dividers, and buttons. You can drag and drop the elements into the template and then set the specific values for the emails you are creating.

Modern HTML email template builders support text boxes, images, video, dividers, and buttons.

Source: Pinterest

These building blocks allow you to create any type of responsive email campaign without needing any HTML background. You can utilize the user interface to design the way the email should look, while the template builder does the coding for you automatically.

How to measure HTML email templates

It’s important that you keep your emails responsive, meaning you want readers to be able to access your emails from either desktops or mobile devices and still have a great experience on either device.

The way to do this is to make sure you test your templates on different displays. You also need to check compatibility between different email clients, as not every client operates in the same way.

Once you’ve designed your templates and sent your campaign, you’ll want to track your analytics so you can see what elements of your email marketing campaign work and which ones don’t. This will include open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and more.

Consider A/B split testing your HTML email templates to determine if one design engages the readers better than the other.

What else should I know?

Backward compatibility is just as important. Although HTML5 is a great improvement on HTML4, it doesn’t support deprecated tags and attributes. This may cause rendering issues, so it’s better to use the XHTML 1.0 Transitional Document Type.

The list of HTML5 deprecated tags is quite long, so not using the right document type may cause your email content to overlap and misalign on the screen.

How do I check the doc type?

You can find the document type at the top of the HTML email page.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional //EN” “https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

If you were using older document types for your email templates, now would be a good time to update them to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Does it really matter?

HTML email templates make it easy to create responsive emails that render correctly on every type of device. As there is little effort required to create them, you can design complete lifecycle marketing campaigns quickly.

Email marketing is still the number one preferred method consumers choose to engage with businesses. If your emails don’t look consistent and render correctly on some devices, you’ll eventually notice a drop in your subscribers.

What now?

Now that you know how easy HTML email templates are to build and how valuable they are to successful marketing campaigns, build your own using Campaign Monitor’s easy-to-use template customization tools.

Building your templates in XHTML 1.0 Transition document types will ensure they are backward compatible and will be responsive across most devices. Research shows that readers are prone to delete badly formatted emails almost immediately. If you don’t want to risk losing your hard-earned subscribers, update your email templates today.

This blog provides general information and discussion about email marketing and related subjects. The content provided in this blog ("Content”), should not be construed as and is not intended to constitute financial, legal or tax advice. You should seek the advice of professionals prior to acting upon any information contained in the Content. All Content is provided strictly “as is” and we make no warranty or representation of any kind regarding the Content.

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