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The Library: where templates and designs live

4 min read

The Library is in the left menu, in the Assets group, under Library. It has two tabs, each holding something different:

  • Templates: the content of an email, meaning the subject, the preview text and the body. Example: “Welcome email”.
  • Designs: the frame around the content, meaning the header and the footer. Example: “Logo header”.

A design is made once and wraps any number of emails. A template is made for a type of email you send often.

The Templates tab

A template has a name, a type, a subject, preview text, the content and an Email design field. When you create a draft you pick From a template or From scratch. With From a template, the draft starts with the template's subject, text and design.

The Designs tab

Each design is a card with a badge. Platform means it is one of the five made by ClevMail, Custom means you made it. The five platform designs:

  • Classic newsletter: simple and modern, easy to read on a dark background too.
  • Welcome: gradient header and boxes that bring what matters to the front.
  • Promotional: for offers, with price boxes and a banner showing the deadline.
  • Minimal: just text, in a classic typeface, with no background colour.
  • Logo header: your logo centred at the top, on your brand colour.

The Preview button on a card shows the design as it appears in an email.

The “Email design” lists also offer a no-design choice (“No design” when you create a draft, “None (full HTML)” in a template): a plain email, with no header or footer, like one sent from Gmail. If you paste HTML into an email with no design, the HTML must contain the {{unsubscribe_link}} link. Without it, the email is not sent.

How to make a new design

  1. In the Designs tab, press New design.
  2. Give it a Design name, for example “Blue newsletter”.
  3. Choose how you write it. With Paste HTML you paste the header and footer yourself. With Generate with AI you describe the design in at least ten characters; the AI uses your brand's colours, logo and tone, and you can edit the result before saving.
  4. Fill in Header HTML, Footer HTML, or both. A design needs at least one.
  5. Press Preview and, if it looks right, Save design.

The rest of the email, meaning the container, the phone layout and the unsubscribe link, is added by the platform on its own.

A header and footer that work

A header with the company name centred, with a line under it. Replace the name and the colours with your own:

<div style="text-align: center; padding: 32px 24px 20px; background: #ffffff; border-bottom: 2px solid #0C5C4D; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 28px; font-weight: 700; color: #1F3A52">Company Name</div>

A simple footer:

<div style="text-align: center; padding: 24px; font-size: 12px; color: #6b7280">Thanks for reading.</div>

Start with <div>, not <td>. The platform already places your fragment inside a table cell. A second <td> is dropped when the HTML is cleaned, along with its align and style, so the centring and the colours are lost. The grey example in the box uses <td>: do not take it as a model.

Pick a safe font. Gmail does not support @font-face, and Outlook on Windows does not load web fonts, so a brand font from your website does not reach every reader. End the font list with one that exists on every computer, like Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif or Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif.

New design, not “Clone for client”

The cards of the platform designs have a Clone for client option in their menu. The resulting card shows up as “Custom”, but without the Edit option, so you cannot modify it. For a design of your own, always start from New design, even if you want something close to a platform design.

For agency accounts

The page says “The email templates and designs for [client]”. The Library belongs to the client selected in the top bar. Change the client in the selector to see another client's Library.

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