Templates. Jigs. Patterns. We never want to take the time to build them. But they’re soooo worth the effort.
Email templates are important for saving time and maintaining brand consistency. Say you’re a 30-person organization and 5 different people send campaigns. With everyone using the same templates, your mailings will be as consistent as possible. Or you’ve hired a designer for company branding and you want to maintain uniformity across platforms. A Mailchimp expert can create matching templates so you never have to think about how your marketing looks; you can concentrate on content.
Templates provide
- Shorter campaign build time
- Stylistic consistency
- Custom branding colors
- Consistency in buttons, typefaces, and font sizes
- Uniform design elements such as image borders
- Up-to-date style suggestions when you want to tweak or keep up with trends
Mailchimp offers
- Pre-made templates that you can customize
- The option to build templates from scratch
- Free accounts so you can try out their platform and see a sampling of their templates
- Premium designs available with a paid subscription
- The option to add your own code for truly unique designs
Template vs. Campaign
The difference between a campaign and a template is the difference between “What am I going to say today?”, and “How is it going to look?”. A campaign is a single mailing. A template is the framework you use to make that mailing look the same as all your other mailings; the template gives you design consistency.
How to use Mailchimp templates, step-by-step
Mailchimp templates work by providing a stencil that you select then fill in with the copy you’re sending today.
From your MC Dashboard, choose Email Templates.
Select the template you would like to use by clicking on it.
Name your template.
Mailchimp will populate the new template with your logo and you can adjust the design using Mailchimp’s standard tools. When you’re happy with your new template, click “Save Template and Exit”.
You’ll now see your new template in the Saved folder. To use the template, click the carrot menu on the right and select “Create campaign”.
Template FAQ
Yes! As I publish this article, Mailchimp has over 100 templates even in the free version, many of which are for newsletters.
Yes! Mailchimp automatically configures your content to appear nicely on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
In the classic builder, yes. Mailchimp has an excellent tutorial here.
As of this article’s publication date, it appears that you can’t share a template from the new builder. Hmmm…something for Mailchimp to get on, huh?
Mailchimp’s campaign width is predetermined – you can’t change it. The length of a campaign is determined by the amount of content.
Good to know
- You can build a Mailchimp template from an existing campaign.
- You can build a template from a recent campaign or draft.
- You can edit existing templates.
