Just last week, Daniel’s post about Emma’s new Template Gallery spurred a flurry of excitement among customers and fans.

Daniel mentioned that the templates will work with our new drag and drop editor, and I’m here to fill in some of the details of what you’ll see when we release the editor and Template Gallery a little later this month. Our goals for the new editor and Template Gallery are simple:

Provide world-class, accessible design

Whether you use one of the new, hand-crafted templates in our Template Gallery or a custom design by an Emma designer, our new editor gives you the tools to create stylish, professional-looking campaigns that represent your brand.

Keep the workflow simple

Let Emma auto-save your work, and if you’ve created a campaign you want to use as a starting point each time, you can save that campaign as a template for future work.

Make layouts flexible

Drag and drop text and image blocks into your campaign, add a sidebar with a couple clicks, then rearrange the whole thing in no time flat if you change your mind.

Hand the creative controls over to the person creating the campaign

Within minutes, you can customize a template with your brand colors, adjust margins and padding, move your content around, and give your images an extra polish.

Want even more details on the many ways we’ve made our new editor simple and fun to use? We’ve listed ‘em (and added more sneak peeks at how it all looks) below.

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Workflow that makes sense

We’ve designed the editor with a streamlined workflow to save you time.

• An auto-save feature that saves as you go. No more clicking back and forth between edit and save.
• A nice big canvas for work. Get a view of the campaign’s look without a whole lot of scrolling.
• Live preview and proofing.
• Move or lock your editing toolbar. Place it wherever makes the most sense to you as you work.

Customizable templates

With our Template Gallery offerings, you have control over the color scheme and branding.

• Change a template’s accent colors with just a couple of clicks.
• Add your logo, tagline and contact information in editable areas.
• Save your changes as a new template to skip a few steps next time around.

Flexible layouts

Choose from one column, left column, right column or three column layouts, then customize them as you please.

• Assemble text and image boxes easily by dragging, dropping, rearranging and editing them as your email campaign comes together.
• Adjust the alignment of your content blocks, add captions and set text-wrapping to suit your campaign’s content and style.
• Use our Smart Sizing feature for images to automatically make them the same size — and make sure they’re in proportion to your campaign.

Creative formatting

Give your campaign a professional look with a bunch of handy features.

• Background colors. Call attention to important blocks of content using color, or set the background color of your entire campaign.
• Borders. Highlight a section of content and add design interest, plus create coupons and call-out boxes.
• Styles. Quickly apply coordinated styles for headlines, body text and captions.
• Images. Choose an image from your computer or Emma library, or connect to pictures on Facebook and Flickr.

Built-in testing features

It’s super-easy to make sure your campaign looks great before you send the real deal.

• Send free tests to up to any 25 people.
• Emma automatically adds “test” to the mailing’s subject line.
• Add a note for your test recipients to call out sections you’d like them to proof or pay extra attention to.

We’re testing the Template Gallery and new editor with a small group of Emma customers, and we’ll let you know when they’re available in your Emma account. If you don’t have an account but still want to know when the Template Gallery and new editor go live for everyone, sign up for our emails so we can stay in touch.

And if you’d like to see a few more of the Template Gallery designs that we’re working on, click to view an album here.

Not yet an Emma customer? Sign up today.

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