Last month, Aarron showed off 33 new templates that were introduced in the v6.1 release. This month, for v6.2, I’m showing off an additional 42 new templates that are being added to the pre-designed section of the app’s email template library.
Here’s what we’re adding to the library:
The guys from MailChimp DesignLab just uploaded a bunch of new, high-quality email templates for your enjoyment.
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…
I thought for sure Gmail would fix the cellpadding problem that popped up last November, but I guess they did all that on purpose. Oh well.
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).