How To Design MailChimp Templates That Look Totally Impressive

When you already see the significance of building an email list and you’re looking to learn how to design MailChimp templates, you’re off to a good start. Email is extremely powerful for businesses.

Seemingly since the dawn of the Internet, marketers and business-leaders looking to promote their brands and scale their businesses have found a friend in email. And for very good reason.

Still to this day, email remains a strong communication channel to reach any adult generation.

But even further, in an information landscape increasingly dominated by social media, which creates a unique relationship between marketers and consumers, wise businesses will value their email list.

Email marketing provides many of the benefits of a digital approach while also operating in a fashion much more similar to more traditional forms of mass-marketing.

Especially for small- and medium-sized business owners who want to develop a competent online marketing strategy but lack a strong fluency with social media, email marketing campaigns are easy to conceptualize, easy to track, and potentially very persuasive to potential consumers and repeated customers alike.

They’re also highly customizable to target individual sectors of your market or specific product offerings. They’re great.

And if you’re making an email marketing campaign, odds are pretty good that you’re using MailChimp to do it.

There are a number of alternatives, obviously, but MailChimp’s awesome internal campaign editor, powerful analytics, and outstanding marketing have catapulted it to the front of the pack. With a few exceptions, it really is an all-in-one package that does everything most marketers would need right out of the box with minimal fussiness.

Well, almost everything. MailChimp provides plenty of template layouts to users, but designing the email itself is mostly left up to the person making the campaign.

A lot of times, this can result in marketing emails that are supposed to powerfully represent your brand, but instead look like a stock template with your logo slapped on (because they are).

But it doesn’t have to be this way! As someone who’s been designing MailChimp layouts for customers for years, I’ve put together this list of my personal workflow and best practices that can help you revolutionize the quality of your next MailChimp campaign.

Following these instructions can help you quickly make little changes that dramatically improve the production value of your branded emails.

How To Design A MailChimp Template

Step Zero: Hire a Designer

I’m not “officially” including this on my list because if you’re reading this you’re probably trying to do it yourself, but the point still stands. If you don’t have a competent designer as a permanent member of your team, you need to hire one. Freelancers from Fiverr or unpaid interns are not enough, period.

The reason the MailChimp campaigns we design for customers (and, indeed, the myriad other things we design for customers) look professional and impressive, more than anything else on this list, is the fact that our designers have spent years and years sharpening their skills as a graphic designer.

A versatile understanding of how to apply design principles to brand communications is not something a listicle can provide.

If having a brand that looks consistently professional is a priority for your business, you should invest in that resource by hiring an expert. DIY hustle can get you pretty far, but without expertise and consistency, any brand will falter.

OK, now onto the fun part.

Step One: Understand How You’ll Measure Success

This one might seem like a given at first. But too often, companies of any size can fall into the trap of starting to lay down the groundwork for completing goals. The problem is they forget to think about why those goals exist or how they further the company’s overall mission.

When thinking about how to start composing your next email marketing campaign, I recommend thinking about it “backwards”.

What is the thing you’re trying to get the person reading your email to do as a result of having read it?

Once you’ve established what that desired action is — which can be anything from purchasing a specific item to simply clicking a link — it’s easy to think about what kind of email is necessary to incentivize that behavior.

Hopefully, by thinking about outcomes and how you’ll measure them before anything else, you’ll avoid the trap of creating emails that don’t do much for your company other than take up time and internal resources, which can be just as frustrating for your consumer base as it is for you as a business leader.

Having this singular specific outcome to promote in mind will become central as you begin the actual design process.

Step Two: Get Inspired

Now that you have a sense of what you’re trying to build within MailChimp and what the outcome you’re looking to measure is, it’s never a bad idea to take a look at what other brands in your industry have done successfully.

Here’s a portion of one email template we designed for an IT customer. As you can see, it’s not overly fancy, but goes a much farther way than the standard MailChimp newsletter.

There are plenty of potential resources for this, but one that I find myself returning to time and time again for all sorts of projects is Awwwards — their curated collections for internet-based marketing excellence are great jumping-off points no matter your brand’s tone or specific voice.

Typically, the types of designs that get curated in lists like these are there for a reason. And some of the really flashy designs can be a little hard to replicate for a smaller business.

MailChimp’s own limitations can create some problems here, too. While convenient, MailChimp’s modular approach to email design means that only people with a lot of technical savvy will be able to pull off, for example, highly detailed background graphics that extend through multiple sections.

However, with a little creativity and familiarity with MailChimp’s editor, many of these styles can be remixed and applied to your brand without losing too much impact via MailChimp’s existing templates.

Standing on the shoulders of giants in this way can already give you a strong advantage as you try to maximize the impact of your design.

Step Three: Build a Design Hierarchy

So, you’ve taken a look at some great designs, and have identified some elements of other email campaigns that might be a great fit for yours.

Now it’s just a matter of refining those ideas into something simple, focused, and powerful.

That’s what makes thinking in terms of design hierarchy so useful: if everything in your email is screaming for a users’ attention, nothing will make an impact.

Think about how you want to encourage users to engage with your email.

What should they look at first, second, third? And then use the elements of your design — size, color, typography — to encourage that behavior.

Start by isolating the one or two things you want to really stand out at first glance. This may be a colorful one-sentence headline or a large photo.

When adding other elements, bear in mind that they should work to compliment this focal point, rather than compete with it for the users’ attention.

If you want users to be wowed by a photo of your product, for example, opting for a smaller logo design and call-to-action button can help put that photo front and center in their minds.

Especially for new designers, nailing down a hierarchy that seems intuitive to users can take some trial and error. But it’s worth the effort.

Because by thinking deeply about every moment of the user’s experience with your email campaign, you’ll be creating a design that is not only visually impressive, but which also features great internal consistency as all the individual elements work together to accomplish your specific goal.

Step Four: Use Professional Tools

At this point, you know exactly what’s going in your email, where it’s going, why it’s going there, and what it’s going to encourage people to do when it’s all said and done.

All that’s left to do is to actually compose the thing, and to do that, you’ll likely need more than just MailChimp’s internal editor.

I promised best practices toward the start of this article, so here’s a major one. Typically, when designing for MailChimp, I don’t even touch MailChimp’s internal editor until I’m simply uploading the pieces of my already-completed design. I actually do the designing part of the design — playing with ideas, establishing a clear and intuitive hierarchy — in Photoshop.

Why? Good question. MailChimp’s internal editor is convenient, but as I’ve previously stated, the way it handles content via “blocks” with edges that can never be crossed can be a surprisingly constant limitation.

So I start by making a design that looks visually impressive, and then figure out how to retrofit it to MailChimp’s editor after the fact.

This opens up tremendous possibilities. Previously impossible overlapping design elements can be uploaded as a single high-resolution PNG image, for example, creating the impression of a very dynamic design despite the rigidity of MailChimp’s editor.

Additionally, you won’t be limited to the narrow selection of typography compatible with most email inboxes, instead uploading impressive titles in custom typefaces as high quality images.

These design details that are impossible when just using the MailChimp editor on its own are what can really set apart your next campaign and make it look extremely impressive.

Of course, to make these impressive custom designs, you’ll need raw materials: this article about how to brand your company features a lot of the free design resources I typically pull from, but especially for email design, Unsplash is an outstanding resource for free high-resolution stock imagery that I can’t live without.

Ultimately, with professional tools in your toolkit, you’ll be able to create campaigns within MailChimp that look eye-catching and professional, using custom-crafted resources that you select. The workflow that I use to create MailChimp templates is definitely on the more advanced side of the spectrum, but even simply adding custom titles and inspired colors to an otherwise-basic MailChimp template can take your design to the next level.

Ultimately, by simply investing some time and careful thought, you can create a MailChimp campaign that is both incredibly visually impressive and also very specifically encourages your consumers to engage with your brand in a way that’s conducive to your goals. If you follow these steps, you’ll come away from your design process with a winner.

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