See Manage Your Templates to learn how to manage your organization's templates in the Admin interface.

Template Designer is the tool you'll use to customize your account's templates, giving you full control over their structure, theming, branding, and more to ensure their associated messages meet your organization's needs.

NOTE: Updating these templates affects their use across your account, meaning these changes are reflected for ALL users; make sure to communicate any template changes to others in your organization so everyone is aware.

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Design tab

The Design tab is where you'll likely spend the most time, as this is where you'll be designing the template's structure, allowed content, and theme properties, all of which are applied to messages leveraging the template.

This tab includes two sub-tabs, Build and Theme.

Build sub-tab

The Build sub-tab is where you build out a template's structure and content, as well as configuring the properties of the content itself. You can perform actions such as:

• Dragging-and-dropping purpose-built layouts and elements onto the canvas; these “building blocks” simplify design and include groupings such as Structure and Static Elements.
• Adding Static Elements (e.g., image-based blocks, dividers, video, dynamic RSS) directly to the template; these become part of every message that uses the template.
• Enabling a Preheader by clicking the “Click here to add a Preheader” prompt on the canvas; its position is fixed and cannot be moved.

Our knowledge base provides several articles discussing every aspect of the Build sub-tab. Refer to the articles in the Template Designer Layouts section to learn more.

See Import Content to learn how to import content into a template and then customize that content to make it unique to your template.

Theme sub-tab

Click the Theme sub-tab to set the properties (e.g., spacing, background colors, fonts) for the template's elements (e.g., text, hyperlinks, lists). These become the default styles for each element. Now, when you add elements to the template, they "inherit" those properties.

NOTE: The text element (shown below) is where you configure the properties (e.g., font, size, color) for the template's styles (headings, sub-headings, and text).

The elements and settings that are available on the Theme tab are detailed in Manage a Template Theme.

Properties tab

The Properties tab is where you'll set high-level properties for your template.

While not explicitly displayed on the page, this tab has two "sections":

Template properties

This section includes high-level properties used to locate and identify your template:

• Status - The "status" of your template is indicated above the options: In Progress or Active. Note that only Active templates can be used in messages.
• Template Name - Enter a name for your template. Changing this name automatically updates the name located in the top right of the designer.
• Folder - Click the dropdown to select a folder where the template can reside.

Envelope

These are the default envelope properties associated with messages:

• Sender Profile - Click the dropdown to select a Sender Profile to automatically populated the envelope fields below. This reduces the chance of errors and it saves time having to repeatedly input the same values in message after message. See Sender Profiles (MD2) to learn more.
• From - Enter a from address that subscribers see in their inboxes.
• Friendly From - Enter a name that subscribers see in their inboxes. This name is associated with the from address.
• Reply To - Enter an address that subscribers can reply to.

Review & Activate tab

After you've finalized your template design, you're just a couple steps away from seeing it in your organization's messages. Let's look at the Review & Activate tab, where you'll be able to take a final look at your template before it's ready to go.

The Review & Activate tab is divided into three sections:

• At the top, checking your template content;
• next, activating (and deactivating) the template;
• lastly, performing a virtual inbox test.

Let's look at each of these sections in a little more detail.

Check content

As mentioned above, you’ll want to review the look and feel of your template before you activate it. You can review three main versions of your template:

• Desktop Version
• Mobile Version
• Online Version

To see how each version of your template looks, click the corresponding button.

Activate

The Activate your template section shows the status of your template. There are a number of tasks you must complete before activating a template; these are listed in this section. After completing these steps, you will be able to activate your template and use it in a message.

NOTE: For active templates, this button updates to Deactivate; click it to deactivate a template.

This message displays: "Deactivating this template will not affect any in-progress, published, or scheduled messages that are using it. Any current or future versions of messages using this template are preserved in Informz."

Notes

• Any template that has been used in a message (In Progress, Scheduled, and/or Sent) is considered in-use.
• If an in-use template is deleted, any messages that are currently using it are not affected; the messages maintain the template's details. Deleted templates are no longer available for new messages, though.

Virtual Inbox Test

The Virtual Inbox Test provides two services:

• It allows you to see how your message will look in various email environments (desktop, web, and mobile) and email clients.
• It checks whether your message passes the spam filter test, which scans your message for common spam triggers.

To learn where Virtual Inbox Test is available, how to run the test, and what to do with the results, see Virtual Inbox Test.

Edit an activated template

To edit an activated template, simply deactivate it and edit it like you would any other template.

NOTE: Updating a template automatically prompts the people creating messages to let them know that there was a template change. They'll have the option to update their messages accordingly.

Create a template from scratch

Depending on the type of message you want to create, it can be helpful to start with an empty canvas. You can do this using the Blank Canvas template.

1. Navigate to Messages > Templates.
2. Click the plus sign icon to the right of the page title.
3. On the dialog, select Template Designer from the dropdown to open the designer.

4. On the Template Gallery tab, select the Blank Canvas template.

5. Drag elements from the "palette" to the design canvas to create your template.

Best practices: Deliverability

• The Deliverability section of our knowledge base has recommended deliverability tasks and best practices, troubleshooting information, and more.