How to create an email template

Sending your marketing communications through email is a great way for your brand to showcase its aesthetics and personality. Upload your own images and logo and edit colors, fonts, and layout to design the template that is right for your brand and will appeal most to your customers.

To create your email template head to the sidebar in your Carts Guru app and click ‘templates’ -> ‘add template’ -> ‘email’. Now select the base template that is most relevant for the campaign you’re creating, then name it.

Once you’ve clicked ‘create’ you will be taken to a draft template with three sections, ‘settings’ ‘sections’ and ‘translations’’. Under ‘settings’ you will see your template name and will be able to add who the email is from, who the customer should reply to, the subject line, the UTM and the option to send a preview email.

Once you’ve filled in the settings page, switch to sections. This is where you will structure and build your campaign! Each email begins with a ‘body’ and a ‘footer’. These cannot be removed, only edited. Underneath the two basic sections, you will find many optional sections that can be dragged and dropped wherever you would like within your email.

First, click on the ‘body’ section to select the background of your email. The background can be either a color, an image we provide, or an image that you upload yourself.

The footer section is compulsory because it is where we include the ‘unsubscribe’ button. The footer is totally customizable, so you can use whatever font or color scheme you’d like.

The first of the optional drag-and-drop sections is ‘button’. Simply drag a ‘button’ onto the template and position it wherever you’d like, then click it to customize it. There are many ways you can customize your button; change the colors of the background and foreground, edit the font and color of the text, and embedded links. You can also edit the size of the button and the margins around it.

The next optional input is a header. The header will include an image and some text and can be dragged and dropped wherever you’d like it on your template (although we recommend placing it at the top of the page). The header is also fully customizable, and the image, background color, and text can all be personalized by you.

Underneath ‘header’ you will find ‘discount code’. Before you’re able to add a discount code into your template you’ll need to create a discount code under the ‘coupons’ section back on the Carts Guru homepage. Once this code is created, insert the discount code section into your template, drag-and-dropping it wherever you want it. After customizing the look of your discount code you will need to add a ‘tag’ into the text. Click on ‘tags’ then ‘discounts’ you will be able to find and select the coupon code you made earlier. Alternatively, under 'Discount' you will find a drop-down menu where you can select all the one you would like to use.

You will use the ‘cart item’ section when building a cart recovery campaign. After dragging the ‘cart item’ onto your template, start by editing the colors and fonts of the section to your liking. Now add the content. Use the ‘title’ box to insert any text you would like to add, then include the ‘cart recover url’ tag to automatically take the user to their abandoned cart on your website.

At the bottom of the ‘cart item’ section, you will see a box that says ‘quantity’. You do not need to fill in any numbers here, just fill in the word ‘quantity’ or ‘qty’ and the number will update automatically.

Adding an image to your email template is very simple. Just drag the image section wherever you’d like to place it in your template. Click the image block on the template and then in the options on the right you can select, add and edit your image. By clicking ‘edit’ you can add either an image we have provided or upload an image of your own. You can also embed a clickable link into the image, or create margins around it.

It’s important to note that the width of the image should be 600 pixels. If you aren’t happy with the dimensions of the image you will have to crop the image to the desired size before uploading it into the template.

The next section is ‘recommended products’. These will be selected automatically by Carts Guru. To do this we look at the customer’s history, past purchases and items they’ve shown interest in to select three products that will complement a past purchase or is similar to something they have already considered.

You can edit the look of the ‘recommended product’ section, changing the colors, fonts, and margins of the section.

If you have additional text that you would like to add anywhere within your email, just drag a text section onto your template. You can edit the design of this text box, add whatever content you would like, and insert any tags about the contact or cart details, or add a discount code.

The ‘divider’ feature improves the aesthetics and readability of your template. Drag it wherever you would like a line between sections of your template. Then click the line to edit the color, or size of the divider, or the margins around it. Under ‘line style’ you can also edit the line itself, making it a dotted line for example.

The ‘image and text’ section is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of inserting a large image and a separate text box, this section allows you to add a smaller image with some text beside it. The colors, fonts, and margins are completely customizable; please note that an image in this box will be smaller as it needs to fit side-by-side with the text.

The final section you can insert into your email template is ‘social links’. Drag the social links section onto your template, click on it, and add the links to the social sites you would like to appear. Once you insert the link the icon for that site will automatically appear on the template. Once you have selected all the social sites you would like to link, you can edit the colors of the section, as well as the icons themselves (under icon-style).

If, at any time, you would like to remove a section from the template, just click on it and scroll down to the delete button on the right side, or click on the 'trash' icon on top of the section within the template.

Once you’ve finished adding all of the drag and drop sections to your template it’s ready to save and send to customers! Unless you want to send email templates in different languages. Read this article for more information on editing multi-language templates.