Campaign Email Designer designing-content-in-adobe-campaign
Once you have created an email in Adobe Campaign, you need to define its content.
The Email Designer enables you to create captivating, individually tailored emails through a drag and drop
interface. Whether you’re starting from a blank slate, or leveraging existing content fragments or templates, design and refine all content for every email, whether promotional or transactional.
Built to deliver HTML optimized for responsive design, the Email Designer allows you to easily define and apply visibility conditions and dynamic content to an email, template, or fragment directly through the user interface. You can seamlessly switch between the drag and drop interface and HTML code at the click of a button.
The Email Designer allows you to create email content and email content templates. It is compatible with simple emails, transactional emails, A/B test emails, multilingual emails, and recurring emails.
-
To discover how to create email content, see Get started with the Email Designer.
-
For an overview of the Email Designer, see Using the Email Designer.
-
For more on building content:
- From scratch, see Designing emails from scratch.
- Using existing content, see Designing using existing content.
- Using Creative Cloud integrations, see Multi-solution email design.
-
For more on Personalization, see Personalization.
When creating an email, you can choose to use a predefined template or to load an existing content from another source. See Selecting an existing content.
To increase the efficiency of your marketing campaigns, personalize your content. See Inserting a personalization field and Adding a content block.
You can also define dynamic content that varies depending on each profile. See Defining dynamic content in an email and Defining dynamic content in a landing page.
Enhance your messages and landing pages with links and images. See Inserting a link and Inserting images.
Email Designer interface email-designer-interface
The Email Designer provides many options that allow you to create, edit and customize every aspect of your content.
The interface is composed of several areas offering different functionalities:
From the elements available in the Palette (1), drag and drop structure components and content fragments into the main Workspace (2). Select a component or element in the Workspace (2) and customize its main styling and display characteristics from the Settings pane (3).
Access more general options and settings from the main Toolbar (4).
The Contextual toolbar of the editor interface offers various functionalities depending on the zone selected. It contains action buttons and buttons that allow you to change the style of the text. The modifications carried out always apply to the zone selected.
Email Designer home page email-designer-home-page
When creating an email, the Email Designer home page automatically displays upon selecting the email content.
The Properties tab enables you to edit the email details such as the label, the sender’s address and name, or the email subject. You can also access this tab by clicking the email label on top of the screen.
The Templates tab enables you to choose from the out-of-the-box HTML contents or the templates that you already created to quickly start designing your email. See Content templates.
The Learn & support tab gives you easy access to the related documentation and tutorials.
If you do not select a template, the Email Designer home page also enables you to choose how you want to start designing your content:
- Click the Create button to start a new content from scratch. See Designing an email content from scratch.
- Click the Upload button to upload a file from your computer. See Importing content from a file.
- Click the Import from URL button to retrieve existing content form a URL. See Importing content from a URL.
Terminology terminology
Templates: Templates are structures of email you can build and reuse for several deliveries.
Fragments: A fragment is a reusable component that can be referenced in one or more emails.
Structure components: Structural elements defining the layout of the email.
Content components: Content components are raw, empty components that you can edit once placed in an email.
Content design best practices content-design-best-practices
To make proper use of the Email Designer and create the best emails as simply as possible, we recommend applying the following principles:
-
Use inline styling rather than a separate CSS and CSS in the <head> section of the HTML. By using inline styling, you can optimize content fragment save and reuse.
-
If you import ZIP files containing your HTML content, use regular CSS. SCSS style sheets are not supported.
-
Settle your branding easily by creating and reusing content fragments to keep consistency across your marketing campaigns.
-
When editing email content:
Preview your messages before sending them. Adobe Campaign offers a way to test email rendering using Litmus. For more on this, see Email rendering.
-
Referrer meta tag is not supported in the Email designer.
More design and general best practices regarding messages are presented in the following Adobe Campaign step-by-step guide: Delivery best practices with Adobe Campaign.
Updating fragments email-designer-updates
The Email Designer is under continuous improvement. If you created an email content from scratch, from an out-of-the-box template or if you created fragments, you may get the following update message the next time you open your content:
Adobe recommends updating your content to the latest version to avoid problems such as CSS collision issues. Click Update now.
If an error occurs during the content update, check your HTML and fix it before running this update again.
When it comes to fragments, please note the following:
-
If you want to add a fragment to a new email or template and if you get this message, you need to update this fragment first.
-
If you have multiple fragments, you have to update each fragment that you want to use in an email content.
-
To avoid impact on the current email messages that are not prepared yet, you can choose not to update some fragments.
-
You can still send emails where a fragment that is not updated is already used, but that fragment is not editable.
-
Updating fragments used in emails that are already prepared has no impact on those emails.
Email Designer limitations email-designer-limitations
- You cannot use personalization fields in a fragment. For more on fragments, see this section.
- When editing styles, only the web fonts officially supported by most email clients are available.
- Styles cannot be saved as a theme for future reuse. However, the CSS style can be saved in a content template or in an email. For more on styles, see this section.
- Referrer meta tag is not supported in the Email designer.
- Surrogate pairs, characters not included in the Basic Multilingual Plane of the Unicode character set, cannot be stored in 2 bytes (16bits) and need to get encoded into 2 UTF-16 characters. These characters include some CJK ideographs, most emojis and some languages.
These characters can cause some incompatibility issues in dynamic text. You need to perform strong tests before sending your messages.
Related topics
Tutorial video video
This video provides an overview of the Email Designer.
To get started with the Email Designer, watch this set of videos that explain the general functionality of the Email Designer and how to design an email from scratch or using templates