Whenever you create a new campaign in MailChimp, you’ll notice something new under the “My Templates” tab. We’ve added an email template gallery with 8 pre-built HTML email templates for different occasions (coupons, sales, events, newsletters, etc):

There are a couple nice little features in these templates we think you’ll like…

Easy To Export, Customize

You’ll notice there’s a new “export” link under these templates. Actually, they’re under all your templates, everywhere now. That link will allow you to download the HTML email code, and customize it yourself. Even cooler, when we export the template, it’ll automatically come embedded with our new email template language.

Social Links Embedded

More and more email marketers are sharing their content with twitter and facebook (check out this MailChimp study that shows 9% of emails now include a social link, or this similar study from Email Data Source). If you subscribe to just about any online retailer’s newsletter nowadays, you’ll get links to follow them on twitter, or friend them on facebook. So we’ve added similar links in some of the templates in our new gallery.

All you have to do is modify the links to point to your own pages.

Repeatable Elements

The “ecommerce grid” template includes a new feature that lets you repeat a product grid over and over. Just look for the little green (+) icon:

If you’d like to make your e-commerce email templates consistent, you can actually program your own repeatable elements and save them in templates with our new email template language.

This is just the beginning

Eight options is a nice start, but we’ll be expanding the gallery soon. And our new “export” link for templates actually makes it extremely easy for users to share their designs across accounts, or even submit their templates to the gallery for fame and glory (hint hint).

Related template awesomeness

While we’re on the topic of email templates and email campaign design, don’t forget these other cool MailChimp features:

• MailChimp’s integration with Picnik
• Integration with iStockphoto.com
• Automagic email designer
• MailChimp autograbs colors from your website
• How MailChimp used Mechanical Turk to narrow down 700,000 header/color combinations
• Built-in color palettes for the artistically challenged (or lazy)
• Import your emails via URL or ZIP
• Using Apple Mail’s beautiful stationery w/MailChimp
• TemplateZone integration for 101 free HTML email templates