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> Email Design

Email Designer Panel Overview

Article: 000050207

Updated: July 24, 2024

The Lead Gen & CRM Email Designer lets you create professional emails using drag-and-drop functionality, allowing you to push the limits of your creativity.

In this article, you'll learn about the Email Designer feature panel that is located at the left side of every email in the Lead Gen & CRM platform. If you're using the new email editor, read Overview of the New Email Editor instead.

Users:

Administrators	✓
Company Managers	✓
Marketing Managers	✓
Sales Managers
Salespersons
Jr. Salespersons

Tip: Are you looking for information about Constant Contact’s Email and Digital Marketing product? This article is for Constant Contact’s Lead Gen & CRM product. Head on over to the Email and Digital Marketing articles by clicking here. Not sure what the difference is? Read this article.

Regarding Email Creation

To create an email in Lead Gen & CRM, you must first start with a template. While using either a created template or an existing template is up to you, emails can only be created by using a template.

Refer to the following articles for more information on the email creation process:

Send Settings

The Send Settings menu allows you to edit the email's general settings. The settings are as follows:

	Available Settings		Description
	Subject		The email's subject title.
	From Name		The name of the person sending the email.
	From Email		The email address of the person sending the email.
	Reply-To-Email		The email address that any replies will be sent to. Uses the From Email address by default.

In addition, the Send Settings menu offers more technical options. These are presented in the form of checkboxes. When checked, these options do the following:

The Can Send Multiple Times to One Person option allows the email to be sent repeatedly to the same person or list. When left unchecked, duplicate emails are suppressed.
The Make Available as a Smart Mail in Contact Manager option turns this email into a Smart Mail.
The Send from Lead Owner When Sending from Automation Engine option will send the email from the user-designated owner of the lead.
The Include View in Browser Link option allows the recipient to view the email in their browser.

Content and Layout

The Content and Layout button allows you to access the drag-and-drop function of the email designer. Themed layouts, simple content blocks, and individual content elements are all able to be placed into an email.

Layouts in the Themed tab are prebuilt sections that are used to hold various content blocks.

Important: The Themed tab and prebuilt layouts are available only in Designer emails.

Content blocks in the Simple tab are premade text or image sections that can be dragged and dropped into layout sections in the email designer.

Items in the Elements tab are, as the name implies, the basic elements that make up a content block. These elements are buttons, text blocks, and images.

Once placed in the email, the content blocks can be customized as needed by using the available features found in the Content Editor.

Important: Currently, due to how Microsoft Outlook renders emails, two-column layout email templates with an image and text will flip the layout of their renders when sent to clients.

Attachments

The Attachments button allows you to add email file attachments to the email. Attached files are limited to those files uploaded to the Lead Gen & CRM platform. There is a limit of four attachments per email.

Attachments can be a great supplement to an email. However, they should only be a supplement. Large attachments can intimidate potential leads, so send one or two small attachments. That said, you should never send an email with just an attachment and no content in the body. Those emails will most likely enter the recipient's spam folder.

Lead Gen & CRM allows you to upload several different file types as attachments. Lead Gen & CRM supports the following file types:

File Types Supported by Lead Gen & CRM
• .CSV	• .GIF	• .PDF	• .XLS
• .DOC	• .ICS	• .PNG	• .XLSX
• .DOCX	• .JPG	• .TXT	• .ZIP

The safest file types to send are .GIF, .JPG, .PDF, and .PNG. While the Lead Gen & CRM platform supports their attachment, ZIP files should never be included as attachments in an email.

There are times when an attachment may be unwarranted. If you would rather not attach files to an email, you can instead use Media Center links in the email's body.

Theme Styles

The Theme Styles button allows you to modify the various color and text style settings for the email.

You can edit the following style settings:

Primary font
Secondary font
Header background color

Content background color
Footer background color
Email background color

Heading color
Text color
Link color

The email designer takes any of the styles in the HTML for Email Standard Styles, pulls them into the database, and removes them from the HTML. Do not be alarmed when these styles are removed from the HTML in the View Code mode.

The email designer will look at the first <style> element in the <head> of the HTML and find the CSS for the relevant classes. If the styles are transparent, that means the color is not in the database. It is either in the email’s standard styles or in the head of the email. If that happens, the color will be set in the database. Though it no longer shows in the head, it will appear.

Note: With Lead Gen & CRM, Professional Services are available to assist with custom coding.

Use these styles to ensure that your desired global styles are brought in by the email designer. If you make a template outside the Lead Gen & CRM application and import it, you will need to put styles in the head.

RSS Subscription

The RSS Subscription button allows you to set up periodic emails. These emails will be sent out with a certain frequency, based on new publications on your site. Like the Content and Layout features, you can drag and drop the RSS layout widget into emails.

When sending RSS emails, you will need to determine the following:

The RSS feed URL
A frequency level for how often to send emails
The list to send to
The number of posts to display

Shopping Cart Abandonment

The Shopping Cart Abandonment button allows you to send out emails containing information on shopping cart transactions that were never completed. This feature is available only after you have integrated the shopping cart on the site to be used for abandonment emails.