How to manage templates

Elastic Email supports both body_text and body_html in our emails. Templates in HTML can be used over and over in your emails.

The "Templates" tab will display templates saved in your account. By clicking on the "Preview" button under the three-dot burger menu of a template, you can preview any template and see how it might generally appear on any desktop or mobile device.

We offer a gallery of pre-designed templates that you can customize. To use a free pre-designed template from the Gallery, just click the desired template which will auto-save the template and place it in the "My Templates" section.

If you want to create a template from scratch, you can do so by choosing "Create Template", and then choose either "Email Designer", "Landing Page" or "Raw HTML".

The Email Designer will give you a default layout and design. The default options allow you to set a Template Name and attach a default From Email Address, From Name, and Subject. You will also be able to share this template with your subaccounts and set all the above options as default when creating future templates.

The "Design" tab lets you customize general text, links and header styles. The "Layout" tab contains layout boxes that can be dragged over and dropped into the template. Clicking in the layout box in the template will provide additional options to edit the layout box and its contents.  The "Styles" tab allows you to change the styles like fonts colors and sizes of existing template parts like buttons and links. The Email Designer creates responsive templates. The "Mobile view" button will show you what your template will look like on a mobile device.

The "Edit Text Body" feature under the "Advanced options" button allows you to provide a body_text for the email in case a recipient mail server only accepts body_text. Your account has a setting that is on by default to auto-generate a text body from an HTML template.  You can find this setting in your Sending Settings.

"Edit AMP Body" allows you to enter AMP body into your email. It will be accessible for every recipient whose inbox is compatible with AMP emails. More information on how to set up AMP templates can be found in this article.

Under "Advanced options" there is an option to send a "Test email" on any given address which will allow you how your email looks in an inbox outside of Elastic Email.

For users who know how to script in HTML the Raw HTML Editor allows you to build a template completely from scratch.

Additional Options include editing an existing template in Email Designer (with limited capabilities), editing an existing template in RAW HTML, setting template default options where there is also possibility to set a template as a default to be used when creating a new template in the Email Designer, and Copying a template.

Our templates screen can sort existing templates by tags. First, create a template and use the "Manage template tags" button: 

Here you can create a new tag and assign a template to it.

Searching for a template by this tag will now be available on the Templates screen.

A preheader is a short summary text that follows the subject line of your email when it is viewed in an inbox. It is usually one sentence long. If you do not specify your own preheader, inboxes usually pick up the first text found in your campaigns. Depending on your design choices, it may be a good or a bad thing.

Our drag & drop template editor allows to specify your own preheader text within a simple block. This way you can control what exactly is to be displayed in your recipient's inbox.