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.

Here’s the rundown:

• Photography: 11
• Real Estate: 5
• Mobile-friendly: 8
• Holiday / Seasonal: 16
• Halloween (by Creative Media Farm): 10

With Holidays on the horizon, we’ve expanded our offerings for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and we’ll keep on going through November and December.

For October, we’ve added a number of Halloween-related templates. Some of them come from our in-house designers,

but the majority come from our talented friends (and MailChimp experts) at Creative Media Farm, in A Coruña, Spain:

Add these up with our existing Halloween templates, and I think we’ve got most of the paranormal bestiary covered.

It’s not just Halloween we’ve added; there’s also a smattering of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, and fall- and winter-themed templates. There are even a couple of templates specifically made for that most riotous of days, Black Friday.

Perhaps you don’t want to send anything holiday related. Maybe you, like me, see all of this Christmas Creep and you despair. Worry not. I’ve got some interesting stuff for you as well, like the new ‘Photography’ templates:

These templates are built for one thing: displaying an array of images. Text is very secondary, and generally reserved for captions and short descriptions. If it’s visually appealing, and you want to show it off, these templates are for you. In fact, you could even use them alongside our new Real Estate templates:

Rounding out the additions for this month are what we’re calling “Mobile-friendly” templates. These templates are built to a 320px width, and are limited to single-column layouts, both properties well-suited to mobile screens:

These templates come at a time when mobile email readership is booming, but they’re just one way to send to mobile devices. We’re working on adding support for media queries, so those of you who are handy with HTML and CSS will have the option of adding mobile-specific styling to your templates. We’re still researching and experimenting, but I’ll blog more about media queries once our support for the feature is finalized and implemented.

Next month’s collection of templates is already in the pipe. We’ll have more templates from Creative Media Farm, along with some of our own design.

Here’s what we’ve got for you:

• Newsletter: 12
• Non-profit: 9

While we’ve added another healthy batch of general-use newsletter templates, I think the big blip on the radar here is the expansion of our non-profit category, with easier-to-use, more stable templates.

You’ll find 3 different designs with 3 variations each, but they’ve all got one focus: getting the word out about your cause, and compelling others to help. To that end, each design features prominent donation buttons and social sharing toolbars. Depending on what your message is, you can either be dramatic in style…

…or you can serve up a more muted tone:

Or you can ignore the designs altogether and use your own style; as always, the templates are fully customizable.

That customization is handy, but sometimes you just need to send out content without playing the part of graphic designer. That’s why we continue to expand the ‘Newsletter’ category with a variety of different template options. Need to send a quick note to your subscribers, and want to stay classy? You can use this elegant template:

Maybe you want to send something a little more attention-grabbing in addition to your usual content, like a coupon. We’ve got you covered:

Combined with last month’s batch of 42 templates, and the month prior’s 33 templates, this month’s 21 templates bring us to a nice 3-month total of 95 new email templates. Not too shabby.

We’re already working on next month’s batch, with more non-profit templates, templates tailored for photographers, some that’ll work well for real estate listings, some new Halloween and fall-themed templates, and more coming down the pipe. Keep an eye out.

Here’s what we’re adding to the library:

• RSS-to-email: 9
• Fitness: 6
• Technology (iPhone & Android Showcase): 12
• Restaurant: 15

For this release, our focus was on creating some template variations for a category we felt was very under-represented within the library: restaurants. To that end, five designs were created and three variations for each of those designs were built, for a grand total of 15 templates.

These templates allow quite a bit of design leeway to make it easy for you to match your branding, whether you own a coffee shop or a burger bar. While we’re on the subject of entrepreneurship, let’s talk about the new iPhone and Android templates:

Using these guys, you can quickly get a campaign for your new app up and running, using a simple and elegant template design that puts your work up-front and center-stage without you having to expend too much effort.

Maybe you run a small gym or hold yoga classes. If so, boy, are you in luck! We’ve added a new pre-designed category, fitness, and its first batch of templates. You’ll find six templates that let you send out class schedules, news, and featured content to your subscribers:

Each template can be easily changed to fit your branding needs while still retaining a nice, clean design that will hold together across email clients.

For those of you who publish RSS content straight into an email campaign, we’ve added a collection of RRS-to-email templates that are easy to style and are pre-filled with the all of the merge tags you need for a solid RSS-based campaign:

We’ve also moved our Designer Templates – emails designed by web design titans like Veerle Pieters, Mike Kus, and Matthew Smith – out of their “Premium” section, making them available to everyone for free within the pre-designed library.

Finally, we’ve created an expanded look at our email template gallery, showcasing the hundreds of customizable email templates available within the application, made for everyone from beginners to veterans of HTML email.

Spin those campaigns up and keep an eye out as more templates keep streaming in – we’re not done by a longshot.

They included some beautiful new holiday templates, plus some new themes like “Environment” (for all the green and earth-friendly businesses we’re seeing in MailChimp) and “Functional” for use in very specific applications, like, say, Autoresponders.

What’s cool is that since we’re using our new Template Design Language, some of the templates have some unique MailChimp features baked right in. I’ll show you what I mean…

To find them, create a campaign. When it’s time to pick your template, go to the “Gallery” tab:

You’ll notice a pulldown menu where you can sort the template by category:

Under “Holidays” you’ll notice some elegant options, like:

Mmmm, turducken (what the heck is a “turducken?“).

Under the “Functional” category, we have new templates that you can use for very specific cases, like an annual autoresponder when it’s time to come in for a checkup:

Under the “Environment” category, you’ll find this template:

Let’s take a closer look at this one.

In the right column, you’ll notice a series of tips. We’re using MailChimp’s nifty ability to create addable content blocks:

Just keep clicking the little “+” icon, to add more tips.

Yes, Style and Versatility

I know this template is called “Live Green,” but this particular template is actually versatile enough to be used for other applications.

Like, saaaay, a plumber’s newsletter.

Let’s use the iStockphoto integration in our image gallery to search for “plumber” pictures:

and plop it into the left column of our template:

After that, I can tweak the colors, fonts, and other styles to match my brand.

Exportable for Template Hackers

Here’s a power tip from Fabio (yes, that’s his real name). He’s one of the DesignLab scientists who contributed a bunch of these templates, and is working on many more.

“Most of these pre-built templates are kind of rigid, but if you’re handy with HTML/CSS, you can take any one of them and export the code in order to tweak it exactly the way you want:

Tip: You’ll want to brush up on our Email Template Language (here’s a handy video tutorial).

Then, re-import your custom template back into MailChimp by clicking this button:

just copy-paste your code into our template editor and hit save:

We hope you find these useful. Stay tuned, because we’ve got a lot more email template announcements to make!

So we just upgraded our HTML Email template designer to work for Gmail. It uses inline-CSS to add the padding for proper Gmail rendering. In other email programs, where CSS doesn’t work, our templates fail gracefully to use the old-fashioned cellpadding. Here’s a before-and-after screenshot (click to zoom in):

MailChimp users: This only applies to brand new templates, created after February 15th. Normally, we like to make changes like this retroactive, but this was one of those changes to our code base that just wouldn’t allow for that.  So if you want your templates to work perfectly in Gmail, you’ll need to create all new ones in MailChimp. Otherwise, your templates will work fine in all the other major email programs. If you’re looking for an excuse not to go through the work of creating new templates, you can always say, “That’s Gmail’s problem, because they’re still in friggin’ beta.”

For me, this was just a good excuse to sit down and tweak all my old templates, and to go ahead and make a few more (see: 7 basic email templates every business needs).