MailChimp Email Templating

In the early days when I was working for Leisure Outlet I introduced the company to MailChimp to grow and develop our audience, send interest specific email campaigns depending on the subscribers’ interests. Operating purley as an online retailer, the deployment of digital technologies were crucial to maximise sales and conversion rates.

As I started to expand the marketing team I set forth to implementing solutions to make tasks efficient. The marketing team were having to building email template structures as well as writing the content. What if we just had to write the content?

I spent some time during work and outside of work hours learning how to build custom MailChimp templates. After trial and error I created a bespoke MailChimp compatible email template that featured multiple layout options, for the placement of elements.

With half a dozen or so different variant layout options in one template, the team chose the master template when building a campaign with in MailChimp. Once they had chosen the master template, the team can then select from a drop-down which block they required to suit placement their content. Press the ‘+’ icon to then add another block either the same as the previous block, or using the drop down to select another variant layout option.

This allowed my marketing colleagues to write and send email campaigns freely by selecting reusable layout blocks. Marketing were able to send emails frequently as they didn’t have to code, they could just focus on the content of the campaign.

By building a template, this ensured our marketing campaigns were cross-client compatible as I built and tested the master email template vigorously. Testing the master template in Gmail, AOL, Outlook (web and application versions), Apple Mail just to name a few clients.

Using our in-house template rather relying on MailChimp’s pre-made templates we were able to keep the header and footer of the email consistent, and a keep a single version of the truth which made the team work from the latest updated version of the template.