Legacy, Simple, and Designer Email Template Differences

Constant Contact's Lead Gen & CRM offers several different folders of email templates, enabling you to either start from scratch or use a pre-made template to quickly customize your emails.

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.

Differences Between Email Templates

The main difference between legacy, simple, and designer email templates is the email designer.

Legacy emails use the old email designer, whereas simple and designer emails use the new email designer.

Important: Though legacy and classic templates are no longer available for creation, all of your existing emails and custom templates will continue to be available.

There are more differences between the three email types:

Email templates in Lead Gen & CRM are set, by default, to 800 pixels wide. While the application does not have any specific image size requirements, consider keeping image file sizes as small as possible to facilitate quick downloads. 
 

Reasons to Stop Using Legacy Templates

You should begin phasing out legacy and classic templates and emails from your marketing campaign. Simple and designer emails are more suited for the task in today's marketing automation world, and using them can only serve to benefit you. As such, Lead Gen & CRM has made its simple and designer templates as intuitive as possible.

Why else should you switch to simple and designer templates? Consider the following:

• Quickly create beautiful emails from our professionally-designed templates
• Better experience with the updated email designer
• New template emails are more compatible with modern email clients
• Add buttons and pre-header text
• More layouts are available
• Write with AI for easy content writing

How to Switch from Legacy to New Templates

If you're ready to move to the new email designer, click the Create button and select the Create Email or Create Email Template options from the dropdown. You can also navigate to the Email Templates tab. 

Read Overview of the New Email Editor to learn all about the available features in the new email editor.

While you cannot move your existing Legacy templates into the new email designer, you can recreate some of your most successful emails by selecting a similar template. For further customization, use an HTML Element in the new email designer to modify your new template as necessary. 

Email Rendering Assistance

The problem with legacy templates is that older versions of Outlook (2007, 2010, and 2013) use Microsoft Word to render the HTML of their emails. This causes the formatting of emails to be rendered differently from other email clients (like Gmail or Apple Mail) due to the fact that Microsoft Word is meant for print design and not HTML.

The new simple and designer email templates aim to correct this issue. The simple and designer templates have built-in code that allows them to render properly in Outlook and other email clients. Before, this would have to be done manually. As this is impractical when quickly creating and sending emails out, the application has made it easier to send beautiful emails that look good across the board.

Regarding Email Creation

If you are still using legacy emails, be aware that templates created using the legacy editor will continue to create legacy emails. There is no direct way to convert legacy or classic emails into simple or designer emails. You will need to recreate the emails as a simple or designer email.

As legacy emails lack more modern and involved features, consider using simple or designer email templates. Those templates will generate their respective emails, and those emails will provide you with more ways to create and customize your content.

Questions?