• Standard Template Tools

    Allows for complete editing of your Mailchimp template including font family, font size, color, alignment, link styling, and more.

  • Bulletproof Template Tools

    Inability to edit styling within the editor prevents employees or others from deviating from the default, and approved template styling.

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Our custom Mailchimp templates are designed using a combination of HTML and embedded CSS allowing you to adjust your template’s styling within the Mailchimp editor. This allows you to easily change font styles, background images, border styles, etc. with just a few clicks, visually, using the editor tools. The downside to this approach is that not all email environments support CSS in the head.

Which email environments don’t support CSS in the head?

Mainly certain versions of Gmail.

As a webmail client, Gmail has to take some precautions when displaying an email. Like most webmail clients, Gmail uses a preprocessor to strip any code from an email that could be a security threat or interfere with the rendering of the client interface itself.

Commonly stripped elements include JavaScript, object and embed tags, and Flash. Gmail goes one step further and strips out both the head and body tags, as well as any style tags in an email.

Once an email is run through the preprocessor, it is passed to the app and rendered by the browser. While different browsers can have their own rendering quirks, most issues that designers run into stem from styles that were stripped by Google’s preprocessing.

Take Your Styles Inline With Our Bulletproof Template Option

The quickest way to ensure your email campaign renders properly in Gmail is to place your most important styles inline. “Inlining” styles relocates the CSS and associated formatting instructions from the style block in the < head > of your email into the body of the HTML.

  • When consistent rendering in email environments is an integral part of your email marketing strategy (and it should be!).
  • When deviating from the pre-designed template styling is not a requirement. (Often times in companies deviating from the approved branding guidelines is undesirable making this a great option for those clients.)
  • When Gmail for desktop and mobile comprise a significant portion of your subscriber base.
  • When planning to push your template to Mandrill for use in sending transactional emails.
PROS

  • Consistent rendering in email environments regardless of CSS support.

  • Inability to edit styling within the editor prevents employees or others from deviating from the default, and approved, template styling.

CONS

  • Increased file size resulting from repeated inline styling.

  • Inability to edit template styling on the fly within the Mailchimp editor.

  • Increased template development cost.

  • Slightly more complicated editing process.