Creating an Email with a Drag-and-Drop Builder

Many email service providers like MailChimp and Klaviyo have powerful and well tested email builders with Drag-and-Drop Functionality. This guide will help you navigate any drag and drop builder!

Set Details for the Campaign Within the Email Service Provider #

These details are usually never publicly accessible, as they help to organize content within the email service provider. In most cases, this is simply the campaign name (message name, email name, etc) that will be used to display within the email service provider.

For apps with automation and drip campaign capabilities, there will be an additional point to set up the automation’s name, and then each email within the automation will have a name as well.

Example for a Welcome Series…

The above 3 examples are the exact same welcome series, but each platform calls their automations a different name. Just know that they are all essentially the same (customer journey, automation, drip campaign, workflow, etc.).

Set up details for the recipient’s inbox #

The details we set up for a recipients inbox are in most cases always the following:

• From name
• From sending address
• Subject
• Preview text

The from name and sender address are used to tell the recipient who sent them the message (the sender’s name, like “Argyle Interactive”, and the sender’s email address, “contact@argyleinteractive.com”).

The subject is the primary text that is displayed within an inbox preview or notification window. The preview text is the string of text displayed after the subject text, and helps provide a brief summary of what the message is about.

Time for fun: designing the email with Drag-and-Drop builder! #

Now it’s time for the really fun part – composing the email message with an email service provider’s drag and drop builder!

Set Up Email Styles #

Before getting into the details of the email, you’ll want to review the overall styles set within the email builder. This can usually be found under a Style’s option. Changes here to text styles, template padding, and other global style changes for this particular email will apply to the entire message.

Some typical style options for an email include:

• Page and section settings
• Document styles
• Mobile style options

If you are making changes and only seeing them apply to a specific block, you’re likely making changes to a specific element’s style instead of the email as a whole.

Set up the Email Message #

To help compose an email, drag-and-drop builders typically provide you with a few options:

• Text block: this is a rich text editor where you can type text content, and it will take on the document styles set within the builder
• Image block: This is a block that you can use to place an image from the email builder’s media library (you typically upload these – either before hand or during email creation)
• Button: this is the block you’ll use to add a standard button into the email message

Different builders have an array of different options to help edit and compose an email. The above three are pretty much standard across all email builders.