Best email design template sources?

Anonymous

December 11th, 2014

I’m trying to streamline email design for transactional and promotional emails. Curious to hear if people are having their designers design their emails or are you using templates from places like theme forest, mail chimp, etc? If you’re using templates where are you getting them from?

Alper Cakir

December 11th, 2014

Hi Firouzeh,

We use combination of all of the above at our design agency fakecrow;

We've built some templates inside MailChimp and we've repurposing them.

We've also used 3rd party templates especially when responsiveness is a big deal (we look for templates that will make our lives easier; it is easy to design a good looking template but harder to make it perform well on different devices, email clients, etc.)

And when/if there is a special need we design the newsletter (including how it should look depending on the client) and get it developed: We use HtmlBurger (www.htmlburger.com) we've worked with them over a dozen projects so far and the code is always clean. They are also very reasonable in price, responsive and fast. (they can also deliver as a MailChimp template)

@thomas, we send html but give the option to view as text only (MailChimp has it built in).

Best,

Alper

Neville Franks

December 11th, 2014

I've modified templates from mailgun. After reading about the endless issues trying to cater for all the different email clients, I've opted to keep the templates as plain and simple as possible while still looking modern and stylish.

I also looked closely at antwort but decided that although they are clean and simple, they are a bit plain.

I use Mailchimp to send email's and do this from within Clibu as part of the workflow when people sign up. I couldn't see a way to accomplish what I needed using Mailchimp's automation.

Eva May Purposeful Program Developer and Marketing Professional

December 11th, 2014

I would recommend selecting your template design sources based on your database size and email marketing needs. For smaller databases or ones that you'll be customizing for different mailers, Constant Contact has a lot of template options that are easy to use. You can also ask designers to build you a template that you can easily update with new photos and content, if you like one format that you will use for a lot of different mailers. Good luck!

Peter Chalkley VCQ Media Ltd - London, UK. Public Relations and Communications social Dating Platform

December 12th, 2014

Hi Firouzeh Lorzadeh

Try this :!

Template #1: Follow up Email After First Time Meet

This template is good for the misplaced business card you find… 2 weeks later…

Hello John,

Hope this email finds you well!
I recently re-discovered your card (after meeting you at XX) and wanted to say hi. Things are going really well with my company StartupX, and I would love any of your opinions or thoughts on our platform.

Are you available Friday at 11:00 AM for a brief phone call?

Looking forward to reconnecting,

StartupX

Some Key Points:

People tend to be indecisive - Don’t be afraid to give them an exact date and time. They’ll look at their calendar and get back to you accordingly.
Feel free to be yourself and give a SHORT one sentence update about your company (ex: We raised 500K and are interested in building new partnerships within xyz…)

Template #2: Follow Email To Follow Up Email

Ever send an email and not get a response… (Oyy!) We’re with you. One thing we always tell our team is be compassionate in your emails. Remember that everyone has their own life and some people don’t exactly know or remember who you are. 3 days after you sent the email and they didn’t respond, shoot them with this:

Hi John,

Just wanted to check in with you and see if you got my below email. Hope you had a great weekend!

Best,

StartupX

Some Key Points:

Two sentences max. No joke! One that says you’re just checking in.. and the other one that says something slightly endearing.
Here is a good time to add a P.S. if you talked about something funny or interesting and didn’t write it in your last email.

Template #3: Reconnecting Follow Up Email

This email template is for that helpful/important person you kind of lost touch with. It all happens, life catches up, we become busy, we blink for a second and the whole year has passed by. This is for you:

Hi John,

I hope this email finds you well! Its been a little while since we last talked and I came across your email as I was scrolling through my Inbox and I felt like we were over due for a check in.

I just wanted to let you know that we have officially started to sell. We wanted to have 100 experiences in our network before we began actively selling and we have reached that point.

I’d love to hear your input/feedback on what we’ve done so far. Let’s reconnect over coffee/tea sometime in the new year. Are you available the week of the 12th?

All the best,

StartupX

Some Key Points:

Keep it light and personal
Tell them what has changed/what has kept you busy/what you have accomplished. Again, no more than a few blurbs - These are busy people too

Summary

We have been integrating this follow up emails technique into the core of our sales department. If you meet someone, you email them. If they don’t respond, email them again 3 days later. It works. Using these email templates, we was able to sign 150 businesses onto our network in 6 months!

In today’s world, consistency can be hard to come by. Be different, be better, build positive relationships, and then enforce it by following up.

Not mine but a good set of templates to go with what you asking

Peter Chalkley - VCQ Media .com

John Skelly Founder, CEO at GasAnywhere

December 11th, 2014

Email design is and likely forever will be based on tables. Templates available on ESP's like Mail Chimp and others are certainly the cheapest to work from. If you or your clients need custom templates, any HTML person can put these together for you, on the cheap. Cheers, John John Skelly v.971.400.5420 [http://500lb.com] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnskelly] [https://twitter.com/johnskelly] [http://johnskelly.com]

Giorgos Yfantis Marketing & Strategy Executive

December 11th, 2014

Hi Firouzeh,

I think it has to be a 'successful combination' of all of them. Email campaigns, is about what you want to bring to readers. How you inspire them on your products and how you keen their willingness. You have also to consider what is the main aim of your campaign and who do you target. So, in most cases, you find something ready (from theme forest templates, or from mailchimp or any other email client that support email templates) and your designers has to transform it to make it suitable for the current purposes of your email campaign.

In every case, you have to run A/B tests. You have to learn each time from every past email campaign you have run, so to make your next campaign, better according to goals you set. A short example on this, is the following case. You have run a campaign and your Click To Action didn't reached from your recipients as you expected. You have to test, in which way (if you change the position of the banner for example) is reached in maximum

I think it's not the design that makes the difference as is how you put your content and how you present it in an email to make the readers to want to learn more, to reach your products and how you guide them as well after reaching the email.

I believe that can help you if you study how some companies send their emails (ex. Apple's campaigns are light and simple enough, but keen you to see more, even if you already know what is about, and this is incredible).

For templates, you can always find great ones in themeforest and if you have creative designers, you can transform them to great email campaigns.

Best regards,

Giorgos

Jeff Lougheed Next Gen Sales Leader l High-Performance Team Builder

December 11th, 2014

Hi, I've used templates from Mail Chimp and just used the designer in MC to create my own. There is a good amount of research out there saying the best emails are just plan text and very short. Finally, contents has some amazing courses (free) on the ABC's of design that I'd highly recommend if you have a couple hours and want to have the flexibility to design your own amazing templates. Good luck! J Please excuse the errors, I'm all thumbs on this thing!

Michael Brill Technology startup exec focused on AI-driven products

December 11th, 2014

Does anyone have any ideas on theming for transactional emails - especially those that have repeating data (e.g., a list of events, products, etc.)? I've used templates from Themeforest and custom-developed templates (these guys do a good job: www.emailmonks.com), but find that I have to tear them apart and reassemble them because I can't just do a simple value substitution.

Dara Moore Digital Channel Manager at Rairdon Auto Group

December 11th, 2014

I deal with mostly promotional emails and my staff and I design them in house. We have greater control over how the message is conveyed. I know people, and have in the past, that use These Forest for templates to send out in their own CRM with great success as well as using the templates available in Mail Chimp.

No matter who or how they are built what is important is that your brand is communicated the way you want it to be.

Richard Titus CEO/COO, senior executive and experienced board director

December 11th, 2014

WE are struggling with this as well. Love to hear better solutions. For now we're using Fiver to get designs (very unreliable) and then manually integrating. We use Campaign monitor...

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