As 2010 drew to a close, we wrapped up a pretty important project that’s gonna make designing professional emails even easier in MailChimp. We created 36 new Start From Scratch email templates that introduce a plethora of layout options, and a host of new controls to repeat and hide content modules, auto-resize images to fit in a template, and a whole lot more. Fabio, our resident email template master, already blogged about all of the fancy features and layout possibilities, but you may have missed it while sipping eggnog by the fire and enjoying your favorite holiday program on the tele.
These new templates help newbies and pros alike make some pretty sophisticated designs quickly. Since these templates are so useful, we’re releasing the source of all 36 of them as an open source project called Email Blueprints on GitHub. You can download them and use them as a starting point for every email you build. If you’re a coder designing and building templates for your clients or even just yourself, these starter templates will help you big time. Here’s how:
- they’re tested in all major email clients
- they use our template language to tie into the MailChimp template design interface your clients will use to customize design
- they contain all of the hooks for new MailChimp template controls like repeatable modules, hideable modules, and module variants
- they contain merge tags to generate dynamic content like archive and unsubscribe links, address, and all the CAN SPAM requirements
- the have social networking links for Facebook and Twitter built right in
- they use Facebook’s Open Graph so your campaign can be shared on Facebook more elegantly
In this set of 36 templates, we have examples of basic newsletters, sophisticated photo gallery layouts, stationary style layouts, and even mobile specific layouts among others. With all of the hard stuff already done for you, you can focus on making really great designs and writing content that’s going to get you and your clients better results from your campaigns.
Awesome, thanks for doing this guys!
These are actually quite nice. Thank you! :)
And I like the use of the space up top for a summary of the email and to give the right text for Facebook posts. But I notice there isn’t a Facebook Like or Share button in the template — if we were to use one of the Mailchimp codes for the Like button, would that text up there (once I had customized it) automatically be added to a reader’s feed?
Hi Alex. At the moment, that preheader text does not appear when sharing the email using the Like button, primarily because of how Facebook pulls in that data.
Those short descriptions are populated using Facebook’s Open Graph protocol (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph), and they are generated through the use of Meta tags in an email’s HTML <head>.
At the moment, there’s no good way that I know of to pull content automatically from something like the preheader and push it into the meta tag description, but I’ll talk to our developers about it. Maybe they’ll have some ideas or pointers.
Doing it manually (going into the code and editing) is another story. You can set up the following meta tag in the head of your template HTML:
<meta property=”og:description” content=”content goes here” />
What you place within “content” will then show up on a subscriber’s Facebook feed when they click the Like button.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, Fabio — that does help. I can certainly manually code it for now (and I’ll run some tests using my own FB account to see what the results look like.)
But if there’s someway the developers could make it happen automatically — well, that would of course be lovely. :)
RE: Article about 36 Open Source Email Templates on GitHub
I followed your links but could not make sense of anything I saw. I never found the templates. Am I right in assuming this is for programmers only?
FYI – I love MailChimp service and use it frequently, but find little in the blog updates that I can understand or use because I am not technical enough.
Hey, Dave. Yeah, if you are not a coder, these templates are not going to be much of a help to you. But all 36 of the templates are already in the app for you to use without touching any code. In the campaign builder, you will see them in the Start From Scratch section of the template library.
This is really a wonderful resource! Thanks so much for everything you did and are doing to help the community!
Kathie
[...] If you want some code to start with, we just open-sourced our 36 new start-from-scratch templates, and posted them to github. [...]
[...] If you want some code to start with, we just open-sourced our 36 new start-from-scratch templates, and posted them to github. [...]
[...] MailChimp Email Marketing Blog [...]
This is great, thanks. The templates look great once populated with content !
[...] http://blog.mailchimp.com/36-open-source-email-templates/ Posted on April 4, 2011 by admin. This entry was posted in Design. Bookmark the permalink. « Tutorial – Design a Modern & Stunning Web Layout [...]
Hi
I’m not too familiar with the terms of the license, can I customise these templates with my own graphics and maybe move the layouts about a bit and then sell as a template?
I misunderstood your title. I thought this was going to be mail *system* templates … like roundcube, horde, etc.