First up is a look at the newest templates in our library: Christmas-themed templates from MailChimp-certified Experts, Creative Media Farm. This month these fine folks delivered quite a selection, with styles ranging from modern:

To designs like this one, which veers in a more traditional direction:

Overall, the folks at Creative Media Farm made sure that there plenty of templates for you to choose from:

The Christmas templates above are only part of the number of holiday designs we’ve got within the pre-designed library. You can also find various designs from MailChimp itself, with a number of designs that are whimsical:

Or more traditional:

And it’s not just Christmas that we cover. You can also find a few Hanukkah templates. And if those designs don’t pique your interest, the majority of our ‘holiday’ templates are flexible in their use, and could work well for Festivus, Saturnalia (if you happen to be an ancient Roman), or whatever it is you happen to celebrate.

As always, these and any other pre-designed templates can be found once you create an email campaign and, on step 3 of campaign creation (template selection), navigate to the ‘pre-designed’ template category. You’ll find Christmas, Hanukkah, and the rest of our holiday-themed templates within the ‘Holiday’ subcategory. Just pick your desired template and edit away: many are quite flexible in their designs, and allow for a high degree of customization through our template style editor.

Enjoy. Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

In preparation, I’ll take a moment to highlight some templates and tools that can help you capitalize on the biggest consumer day of the year, and I’ll start with some templates.

First, a template styled specifically to this task:

You can find this template when you create a campaign and, on step 3 (template selection), navigating to ‘pre-designed’, then to ‘ecommerce’, where you’ll find the ‘Black Friday Sale’ template. You can then use the style editor to tweak the design to suit your needs, or just drop in your content and send away.

Maybe your users need a little more than just a product highlight, however. You can always sweeten the deal by sending out some coupons, using our selection of coupon templates:

You can find these guys in the same way: on step 3 of campaign creation, just navigate to ‘pre-designed’, and then selection ‘coupons’. You can use the style editor to customize the design however you’d like, and each coupon template also includes an example of our QR Code merge tag, which you can include to give users a simple way to redeem the coupon’s value using the Pyow! app.

Perhaps you’re looking for a template that’s a little more ‘seasonal’. If that’s the case, we’ve got you covered with our tons of holiday-themed templates:

The holiday season is ramping up right now (or it’s running full-bore, if my local Target’s decorations are any indication), and we have lots of template choices available. We’ve also got a great selection of Christmas templates on the way, courtesy of our friends (and certified MailChimp Experts) at Creative Media Farm. Here’s a taste of what we’ve got coming from them:

Selling stockings from your shop on Etsy? A book on Amazon? Maybe your band has released its latest album of death metal covers of classic Christmas carols on iTunes, perhaps? You can use our Autoconnect templates, which automatically pull your data from these services, saving you some work and letting you send campaigns quickly and easily.

Armed with this arsenal, you can take advantage of the Black Friday frenzy, but be sure you’ve set up adequate defenses. Sandbag walls, trenches, and an anti-aircraft gun or two usually does the trick. You know how people can get.

Recently, I was browsing through some holiday campaigns that are going out, hoping to find something neat to show you, when I stumbled on one from Ollie & Boo that I thought was really cute:

It’s short & sweet, not too “in your face” and has a really pretty palate of colors that aren’t your typical holiday fare.  Just as I was about to mark it down as one to feature, I realized that it’s one of our holiday templates.  Whoops!

Rather than wallow in my embarrassment at not recognizing one of our very own, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out our holiday templates to those of you who  may not know we have ‘em.    If you have a special event or holiday campaign that needs to go out and don’t want tocreate a whole new design for it, you can look under templates and select “pre-designed,” then “holiday.”

There, you’ll find a bunch of templates for all sorts of holidays, ranging from casual to more elegant styles.

If you’re hosting a holiday event, you’ll definitely want to check out our Eventbrite integration to manage tickets or RSVPs.  You could even include a QR COUPON merge tag for a cool giveaway, then use Pyow! to scan them as folks check in to your event (or check out at your store.) We recently did this at our customer appreciation event in Atlanta to give away pints of Chimpenheimer Crunch, created by Jake’s Ice Cream.  Everyone who checked in with a QR code from the email we sent got to take some MailChimp ice cream home with them. Pretty sweet.

Are you doing a cool holiday promotion?   We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Follow these best practices and you are sure to create awesome emails that your clients will love:

• Your email layout should be no wider than 600 pixels for best viewing in various email clients
• Avoid using the following CSS in your templates:
  • Floats
  • Positioning
  • Background images (doesn’t work in Outlook and Gmail)
• Use this wonderful reference created by our friends at Campaign Monitor to see what CSS is supported in major email clients http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
• It’s a good idea to limit the number of editable spaces in the template to keep things simple
• Name all editable spaces consistently. The name you assign via mc:edit="somename" is used to create a field in the database to store the user’s content. If they switch templates after writing content, they could lose their copy if the editable space names aren’t consistent. Use the following conventions common content areas:
  • mc:edit="header – used to name the header
  • mc:edit="header_image" – used to name an editable header image
  • mc:edit="sidecolumn" – used to name an editable left or right side column
  • mc:edit="main" – used to name the main content space
  • mc:edit="footer" – used to name the footer
• Editable images should not be placed within an editable content container
• Set the @theme declaration in your CSS for the page background, header, footer and content space so templates can be quickly customized with the MailChimp color themes. See the template language docs for the correct names to be used.
• Be creative with the use of merge tags. Use the social merge tags to provide readers of your email new ways to connect with you and share your content. Use The table of contents merge tag (*|MC:TOC|*) to create an automatic list of links to the <h1> and <h2> headings in an email.
• Be sure to include the required CAN-SPAM info in the footer (*|UNSUB|* *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* *|LIST:ADDRESS|*)
• Include target="_blank" in links to ensure they open a new browser window or tab when emails are viewed in browser based email clients
• Include a link for users to update their subscription preferences <a href="*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*" target="_blank">change subscription preferences</a>
• Include a link to let users view the email in a browser: <a href=”*|ARCHIVE|*” target=”_blank”>view this email in a browser.</a>
• Include a link to your website: <a href=”*|LIST:URL|*” target=”_blank”>visit our website</a>
• Feature the forward to a friend link somewhere prominent <a href=”*|FORWARD|*” target=”_blank”>forward to a friend</a>. Make a cool button treatment for it where possible to encourage sharing
• Once you’ve created a template, put test it in a campaign and try customizing it by changing color, adding content, etc to make sure it will work well for others who might be using it in different situations.

Although you can’t embed video in your HTML email and have it play within your recipients’ email program, it will work when they click the link to “view this email in a browser,” because at that point the email is being rendered as a web page.

This was a pleasant surprise for me. Just received an email invitation to our accountant’s holiday “client appreciation party,” and I thought, “Wow, that’s a nice design for an accountant.”

Then I noticed she was using our own free email holiday templates!

Neat! I hadn’t even considered that these could be used for holiday party invites.

I know she’s not a graphic designer, and she’s no email coding expert. And it’s the thought that counts. But the design is um—not so professional. And they CC’d my email address along with dozens of others, so we all have each others’ emails now. Hope nobody hits “reply-to-all.”

This is EXACTLY why we just launched our free holiday email template tool.

Just choose from one of our beautiful designs, customize the message, and send it to your clients.

Now anybody can send professional looking holiday templates. Please spread the word, and help us put an end to holiday clip art forever.