Here at Intilery, our aim is to make marketeers the best they can be and one way we can achieve this is to provide you, our users, with an easy-to-use platform.
This short guide looks at how to use our simple email builder to create fantastic looking emails.
Where to begin…
Before we get into how to start crafting your emails, we should probably tell you a little bit more about the email builder. You can easily drag and drop each element into your email, enabling you to move features around and trial different looks before you decide on a final design.
When using the email builder, you have full control of several features and their design, and the best part is you need no prior knowledge of HTML to be able to successfully design and build your email.
When on the Intilery platform, you can locate our email builder by selecting ‘Email Assets’ on the menu to the left-hand side. From here, you can view all your drafts, as well as live and archived campaigns. To begin building your beautiful email campaigns, select the ‘+New EMAIL’ button at the top of the screen, this will then take you to the email builder.
On the right of your screen, you will see a menu with three tabs, this is known as the properties panel, as this is where you will control and change the properties of the elements you drag and drop into the email. Separated into three tabs there is…
Content
From here you will be able to include and subsequently edit content such as text, images, buttons, videos.
Rows
This panel allows you to edit the structure of your email with regards to the columns and rows.
Settings
Here you can determine some general rules, such as default font or the background colour of the email.
Let’s look at this in some more detail…
Content
There are plenty of features that you could include in your email, we’re going to look at a handful in depth to give you a head start when creating emails.
Note: The options in the Content properties panel will alter to suit the block that you are editing.
Text
Of course, your email is going to need text, how else are you going to get your message across? Therefore, knowing how to input and style text blocks is incredibly important to the email building process. To add text, all you need to do is select the ‘Text’ block and drag and drop it into place.
From there, click inside the text block to bring up the text editor toolbar. This will appear directly underneath the block, providing you with an easy way to edit elements such as the font size, font colour, alignment, and formatting, you are also able to add in links from here.
Images
Including imagery in your email campaigns is crucial in bringing your story and message to life. You can insert an image by selecting the ‘Image’ block. From there, you can choose to either drag and drop an image from your desktop, or you can use the File Manager.
A fantastic feature of the Intilery platform is that you can edit your images without leaving the email builder, by selecting the ‘Apply effects & more’ button found in the properties panel, you are directed towards an image editor, where you can crop, rotate, or change the size of the image, as well as add stickers and filters.
Videos
There are two ways to insert videos into your emails.
The first is to select the ‘Video’ option and drag it into place. Your video will appear as a thumbnail and when your audience click to play it, they will be redirected to whatever site you have first published your video on e.g., YouTube or Vimeo. If you choose to go down this route, our advice to you would be to ensure that there are other quality videos on your YouTube or Vimeo account, the chances are once you’ve directed your recipient to a new site to watch the video, they will stay a while and check out your other content. There’s also the possibility that the next video will automatically play following on from the one they have been directed to, meaning it’s crucial to ensure the quality of your other videos.
The second option is to select ‘Viewed Video’, this will enable you to embed a video into your email, which will automatically play. You must have an account with Viewed Video to be able to take advantage of this option, but it is well worth it if you want to keep your audience viewing your email rather than redirecting them elsewhere.
Social Media
Everyone knows that social media is a great way to easily access information, you can help your customers to learn a lot more about your brand by adding links to your social media.
To achieve this, all you need to do is drag and drop the ‘Social’ block into place. Once inserted, the icons for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn will appear, with the option to add the links to your socials in the properties panel on the right.
Hang on, you’re probably wondering about including links to your other social media networks, or even your website, perhaps you want to change the order of the icons or have them appear in brand colours. Well don’t panic, all those options are available to you. Simply click the new icon button and either choose from a pre-set list or include your own custom-icon.
Menu
Like the social media links, including a menu can help to direct your audience to certain links you may want them to find. Inputting a menu into your emails can help make the customers experience better as they are able to easily navigate your content. As with all the features, all you have to do is drag and drop into place and then input the relevant information in the properties panel to the right. You are also able to edit font and link colour from this panel to customise the menu how you see fit.
Rows
Moving onto the structure of your email, the Rows panel enables you to completely change the layout of each email. By using the rows and columns, you can organise your content how you want to.
It will depend on the content of your email and how you want to present it to your audience. Imagine you are sending out a Blog Newsletter, you may want to start with a single column in the first row, this is so that you can introduce the newsletter with a single, branded header image. Beneath this you may want to include a row with three columns in, to highlight the top three blog posts on your website.
Having separate rows within the same number of columns can also be beneficial if you wish to change the background of the individual rows.
The editor within the properties panel allows for a great deal of flexibility. You are easily able to add, delete and resize columns, and as previously mentioned you can edit the colour of the background of either the row or the content within said row.
Settings
The settings panel allows you to make general changes to the email you are building. These changes will be applied to the entire message and will only change if you specify elsewhere in the process that you’d like to change it (for example if you set a background colour for a specific row, that will override the general settings).
Modifications you can make from this panel include:
- Content Area Width
- Content Area Alignment
- Background Colour
- Content Area Background Colour
- Default Font.
- Link Colour.
Like always, there’s much more to learn about our email builder but we hope that this article has given you a good overview of the basics so you can go ahead and get started today. For more information on our platform and some more in-depth information on how to use our platform, check out our guides.
