Create Beautifully Designed Emails to Engage Customers

Select Your Starting Point & Create the Email

1. Create a new Single Email Campaign or Automation email
2. When asked which email builder you'd like to use, select Visual Builder
3. Select either one of the following  starting points:
1. Drip templates
2. Saved templates
3. Recently edited emails
4. Start from scratch

Craft your Subject & Preheader 

1. In the Subject text field, enter the email’s subject line.
2. In the Preheader text field, enter the email’s preheader text.

Design your Email

Header

1. Hover over the Header Section > click "Click to Edit" > a notification will appear > Click Place Your Logo Here
2. In the Source field click the X to clear the yourlogohere.png file
3. Add your logo file, Upload or Select an image file or insert an image URL
4. To navigate the recipient to your store or another destination when they click on the logo, enter a URL in the Link text field
5. To make your email content more accessible, enter an accurate and concise text description in the Alt Text field
6. To keep your logo from becoming blurry at large sizes, keep the toggle button at the bottom on
   

   

7. Click the < circular button next to the title of the section to navigate back to the list of Sections

Body

Each template contains various Section types with prescriptive content suggestions, like Call out, Image collage, and Grid. For ideas on how to construct your email, see the stylized templates, like Welcome Email, Free Shipping, Special Offer under the Pre-Designed Emails tab.

1. To edit the Section content, click the image, text, CTA button content block
2. To delete a Section or content block, click the Delete trash can icon

Footer

• Hover over the Footer Section > click "Click to Edit" > click Edit Background, Edit Layout
• Edit the text format, style, and content > click the Footer text

Add Social Icons to the Footer

Add social icons to the footer of your email to connect with people through social media. You can add these icons to any visual builder email with the HTML code below, or by using the Social links content block instead. What you'll need for the HTML code: 

• Externally hosted social media icons, as Drip does not include in-app social icons. Popular hosting solutions include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Photobucket, or any other hosting service where you can store and access an image through a hosted URL. 
• Exclaimer is a free service hosting icon versions for many popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Social Media Icon HTML Template

<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; margin: 0 auto;"> <tbody> <tr style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0;">

<!-- begin social icon 1 -->

			<td align="center" style="-moz-hyphens: auto; border-collapse: collapse !important; hyphens: auto; margin: 0; padding: 0; word-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/getdripapp"><img src="https://68ef2f69c7787d4078ac-7864ae55ba174c40683f10ab811d9167.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/facebook-icon_32x32.png" style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0 12px;" /></a></td>

			<!-- end social icon 1 --><!-- begin social icon 2 -->

			<td align="center" style="-moz-hyphens: auto; border-collapse: collapse !important; hyphens: auto; margin: 0; padding: 0; word-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://twitter.com/getdrip"><img src="https://68ef2f69c7787d4078ac-7864ae55ba174c40683f10ab811d9167.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/twitter-icon_32x32.png" style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0 12px;" /></a></td>

			<!-- end social icon 2 --><!-- begin social icon 3 -->

			<td align="center" style="-moz-hyphens: auto; border-collapse: collapse !important; hyphens: auto; margin: 0; padding: 0; word-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/dripecrm/"><img src="https://68ef2f69c7787d4078ac-7864ae55ba174c40683f10ab811d9167.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/instagram-icon_32x32.png" style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0 12px;" /></a></td>

			<!-- end social icon 3 --><!-- begin social icon 4 -->

			<td align="center" style="-moz-hyphens: auto; border-collapse: collapse !important; hyphens: auto; margin: 0; padding: 0; word-wrap: break-word;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/dripecrm/"><img src="https://68ef2f69c7787d4078ac-7864ae55ba174c40683f10ab811d9167.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/linkedin-icon_32x32.png" style="margin: 0 auto; padding: 0 12px;" /></a></td>

			<!-- end social icon 4 -->

		</tr>

	</tbody></table>

Insert HTML Code Into the Email Footer

To insert the code provided above into the footer of a visual builder email:

1. Open an email you've built with the Visual Builder 
2. Locate the footer section of your email 
3. Unlock the Footer section > click into the text box
4. Click the Source Code <> button 
5. Paste the HTML code into the pop-up editor
6. Click OK

You should now see the social icons in the default footer area. 

Replace Default Social Media Profile URLs

To replace the placeholder social URLs included with the HTML code block now placed in your email footer:

1. Reopen the Source Code editor, where you placed the HTML social icon code block
2. Search the code and locate each section, differentiated by HTML comments: <!--  begin social icon x → <!-- end social icon 3 -->
3. Locate the URL to Drip's social media within each section: <a href="https://twitter.com/getdrip">
4. Replace it with the URL to your social media page by copying and pasting it between the double quotation marks in the HTML anchor tag: <a href="URL"> 
5. Click OK

Your footer will have social media icons with links to your profiles in them. 

If you’d like to add more social icons, copy an individual code block, including the comments, and paste the block of code in the order you'd like for them to appear. Or, delete a code block from the template to remove a singular icon from the email

Optimize your Email for Mobile Devices

Roughly 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device. Toggle over to Mobile in the email editor to optimize your email for mobile devices. Drip’s mobile controls include: 

• Flip this content on mobile. This option allows you to flip the order in which content is displayed when the email is opened on a mobile device. 

• Stack this content on mobile. This option allows you to stack and unstack columns when the email is opened on a mobile device. 

As you’re scrolling down through your email sections, click on the flip icon to flip content within a section, or click on the stack icon to stack or unstack content within a section.

Preview & Send a Test Email

It is an important and recommended best practice to preview your email and send a test email before you send it to customers.

1. Click the Preview button
2. Select Desktop, Tablet, Phone to inspect the format of the email for each of these devices
3. Click Preview As and enter a person on your list email address to view the email as a specific person. If formatted correctly, the person’s Profile Fields will populate the Liquid code.  In addition, if the person's Profile Fields do not contain the data point, it will not populate the Liquid code.
4. Click Send a Test Email and enter an email address in the text field. The recipient of this email will not see the Liquid code populated with the Profile Fields.

The Preview As functionality is available in any Email Series Campaign, Single Email Campaign email, and Automation email. To preview an email as a specific person, they must be added as a Recipient to the Email Series Campaign or Single Email Campaign. 

Send & Monitor your Email

Once you’ve previewed your email and completed a test email send, activate, and schedule your Email Series Campaign, Single Email Campaign, or Automation email to send.

Evaluate the results of your email’s performance through the Email Series Campaign, Single Email Campaign, or Workflow dashboards.