Create Mailchimp campaign templates - MailChimp Tutorial

- [Instructor] There are many advantages to creating templates to support your email marketing. The first, of course, is the efficiency of a template. You create it once and use it over and over, and that saves time. The more important advantage, however, is that you can reinforce your brand with your readers by using branded templates. In this video, I'll show you how to create a branded template. At the time of this recording, MailChimp was working on a new interface for designing email, but it was not complete yet. We're using the classic builder. You can check which builder you're using by selecting your account, and choose Settings, Details. You can scroll to the default email builder. If you need to switch from the new builder to the classic one, you can do that here. And we're going to be showing the classic builder in this case. To create a template, you'll start at the Campaigns dashboard. Click Create a Campaign. And you can select an email template. This is where you'll see all the templates that are available. When you create a template, it will appear here and you and everyone else with the login into your account can use the same template. Let's create a new template for the Two Trees Olive Oil member newsletter. MailChimp offers a bunch of layout options you can use. You can even select one of their themed templates and change the colors and fonts to brand it as your own. If you want complete control, you can even code your own by dumping in imported HTML. For the purpose of the Two Trees newsletter, we're going to use this Tell a Story layout. This layout will work for our newsletter, but I don't like this logo at the top, so let's switch that out. I always recommend that you link images in your emails. When readers are looking at it on their phones and they tap any of the images, they should go to a useful place on your website. If you don't link the images and a reader taps one, it's a missed opportunity, because the image opens rather than your website, and that's not so useful. We can copy the URL from the Two Trees website and put it in here. In addition, it's always a good idea to include alt text for your images. This is not only to support the sight impaired, alt text will appear in the inboxes that don't automatically load images, and that gives more information to your readers about what's in the email. As you move down the template making changes, keep in mind that every change you make will appear when others in your organization open it. So if you want to use some of this text, for example, for instructions, you can do that. Let's make sure that the email style is branded for Two Trees. To set the style for any of the individual blocks, you can select the block first and then select the style pane. We're going to choose a different font, and set the size to 16. We want the text in the emails to be in Two Trees colors, so we're actually going to change that value here. We're going to select to apply these changes to all of the existing text blocks. You'll notice that the color change does not extend to the other components. That's because they're not in text blocks, but image plus text instead. You can change the text in these blocks to something else if you like, or you can match the color in the text block. Work your way down the page, making style changes and providing instructions to those who will use this template. When you're finished, you'll click Save and Exit and you'll name your template. Click Save. The template will appear in your list of templates. I recommend trying to create a campaign with this template before you share it so you can make sure that it includes all of the branding that you wanted. If not, you can click Edit here and set those options so that everyone that uses it afterwards won't have to make the changes every time.