Drag and drop editor tutorial

This article takes you through how to use the drag and drop editor in your EmailOctopus account to create beautiful email templates for your campaigns.

Our templates and Your templates:

Our EmailOctopus templates are available to customise either from the Templates tab or directly when creating a Campaign. Once you start editing one of our templates and save it, it is then added to the Your templates tab and can be chosen during the campaign set up. Customising a drag and drop template with your logo, header, colours, and social media links is a great time saver. When you are ready to create a Campaign, both Our templates and Your templates will be available.

The EmailOctopus drag and drop editor allows you to create beautiful emails without having to know any lines of HTML. Here is how to edit a template with the drag and drop editor.

Emails are built with rows that contain columns. These are the available options for rows.

To add a row, click and drag the row into the email body, in-between, before or after an existing row of your template. If you wanted to display text next to an image, select the row with two columns. To find out what type of row a template contains, click within the background area and see the green outline and label.

In the example below, if you wanted this row to have three columns, you would need to add a new three-column row (above or below) and click and drag each content block individually to a column in the new row. You can then delete the old row. The number of columns in an existing row cannot be changed so you would have to use a new row.

Add content blocks:

Within a row, you can click and drag to add content blocks in a column or edit the existing content blocks by clicking on them.

To edit a Button, click on it and view the menu to the left. Here you change the text, hyperlink it, and customise the look of the button. 

TIP: The Radius curves the corners of a button. If you change the toggle from Content to Settings, you can now edit the block (the space around the button).

Changing background colours:

To change the background colour of a row or a content block, make sure the green outline is highlighting the desired row or block. From Settings change the background colour.

To change the colour of the grey background of the email, click the back button if you have been editing a row or content. From Settings, you can go to sections for Header, Page, Body and Footer. These are the default settings for the email template. Here you can change the Page – Background colour.

To keep consistent colours throughout your email, note the 6 character HEX code next to the colour and copy and paste the code into other content or blocks settings.

If you change the colour of a row containing a PNG image or button, you may need to change the background colour from the Block Settings to match it or you can delete the HEX code and the background will return to transparent.

Adding a link:

When adding a link into your campaign it is best to use a hyperlink or a button. It is a best practice not to add the entire URL string into your template as these can trigger spam filters. To add a hyperlink to your text, highlight the word(s) you want to add the link to, find the Insert Link button from the text box menu and paste the URL you want to include in your email. This link will then be tracked in your reports when your subscribers "Click" on the link in your campaign.

Instructions to add a link to an image are here.

Personalise your message by adding your subscribers First Name and more with Merge Tags.

Editing the spacing in your email:

Besides aligning an element, left, centre, or right you can also change the space between content with padding and margins from Settings. The padding creates space withing the block around the element. Margin changes the space around the outside of the block. Here is an example:

You can also change the margin and padding of a row by clicking on the row. To change the width of the entire email, this is done from the master Settings by changing the number in, Width.

Mobile Preview:

To see what your template or campaign may look like on a mobile device, select the Preview tab in the Editor and toggle between Desktop and Mobile.

Using company fonts not on the Font Family list:

To make sure the font you see in the editor is the font your subscribers end up seeing in their email client we recommend sticking to the fonts available in our Font Family list. It is possible to use other web fonts with bespoke HTML code in our classic email editor, however, if the font is not supported by an email client or mobile device it will default to displaying a different font that their system supports.

For logos, you may use an image file but it is not recommended to use images of large areas of text as this may trigger spam filters.

Can't see the whole menu bar in the editor / Can't scroll down in the editor

Make sure that your browser is maximised to full width on your screen. There may be a second scroll bar inside the editor.