How to create an email

The email editor is where you design everything Leat sends: campaigns, automated emails, recurring emails and your own templates. Whichever one you're building, the editor works the same way.

Opening the editor

Emails live under Marketing. Start a campaign or an automated email, or open Templates to build a design you want to reuse. Pick a template to start from, or start from scratch.

You land on the Content step, which is the editor itself: your email in the middle, and a panel on the right with three tabs.

You're already looking at the HTML

The email in the middle of the editor isn't a sketch of your email. It's the email itself: the editor draws the same HTML that gets sent and updates it as you work. So there's no separate HTML view to switch to, because what you see is the email your contacts get.

To see or change the HTML of one text block, use Edit HTML in its toolbar. To add HTML of your own, drag in an HTML block. To open the whole email in a browser tab, use Webview.

Each inbox still draws an email in its own way, so Gmail or Outlook can show it slightly differently from the editor. See Why your email looks different in Gmail, Outlook or on a phone.

The three tabs

Content holds the blocks you drag into the email: Text, Image, GIF, Button, Divider, Spacer, Social, Video, Wallet pass, QR Code and HTML. Drag one onto the email and drop it where you want it.

Structure holds the column layouts: one column, two, three or four equal columns, and the uneven splits 1:2, 2:1, 1:3, 3:1, 1:1:2 and 2:1:1. Drag a layout onto the email to add a section, then fill its columns with blocks.

Settings is the whole email at once:

General holds the preview text, the email width and the email background.
Links sets the link colour.
Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, Paragraph, Buttons and Lists set the default style for each.
Base text is the font, size, line height and colour used wherever nothing above sets one.

What you set here applies everywhere you haven't overridden it on a block. Below them, Element defaults sets the starting values for new blocks and sections. Changing those doesn't restyle anything already in the email.

Build the structure first and fill it afterwards. It's far less work than rearranging finished blocks.

Preview text (preheader)

The preview text, also called the preheader, is the short line most inboxes show next to or below the subject line, before anyone opens the email. It isn't shown in the email itself.

You set it in the editor, not next to the subject. Open the Settings tab on the right and type it into Preview text, the first field under General. For a campaign that means the Content tab, even though the subject is on the Information tab.

Leave it empty and most inboxes show the first text they find in the email instead. Keep it short, because inboxes cut it off, and use it to add to the subject line rather than repeat it.

Editing a block

Click a block and the Content tab becomes that block's settings. What you get depends on the block. A button has its link, background and text colour, width, border, corner radius, hover colours and padding. A divider has colour, thickness, style, width and padding. A spacer has a height and a background colour.

Most blocks also have Hide on mobile and Hide on desktop, so you can show one thing to people reading on a laptop and something else to people reading on a phone. Dividers and HTML blocks don't. To hide one of those, put it in a section of its own and hide the section.

Click a section, or a column inside it, and the Structure tab shows that section's settings: the number of columns, background colour and background image, width, border radius, border, margin, and the same hide options. Under Column's properties each column has its own card with its background colour, border radius, margin and border.

A selected block or section gets a small bar at its top right. Drag the grip icon to move it somewhere else, or use the buttons to move it up or down, duplicate it or delete it.

Link fields, such as a button's Link, add https:// to an address you type without it, and their list offers the links this email already knows. See How to add links, buttons and social icons to an email.

Adding images

Drag in an Image block and click it. Next to the Image URL field are two buttons.

The first, Choose image, opens the media picker, which is where pictures normally come from rather than pasting an address. It has four places to take one from:

My images, everything your account has uploaded. Upload image at the bottom adds a new one.
Brand kit, your account's own logos and brand images.
Unsplash, a free stock photo library you can search without leaving the editor.
Instagram, the images from your own Instagram posts, once you've connected your Instagram business or creator account. See Use images from your Instagram posts in Leat.

A GIF block's picker offers My GIFs and Giphy instead.

The second button, Crop this image, appears once the block has an image. The cropped version replaces the image in that block only. Your media library keeps the original, and the cropped version isn't added to it. A section's background image can be cropped the same way. GIFs can't be cropped.

The rest of the panel sets the alt text, the title, the link the image opens, its width, alignment, corner radius and padding, and Fluid on mobile, which stretches the image to the full width of its column on a phone.

If an image's address doesn't work, because of a typo or because the file was removed, the block shows a red warning, "This image can't be loaded", with the address it tried. Your contacts would see a broken image in that spot, so check the address or choose another image. An address that's a merge tag isn't checked, because it's only filled in when the email is sent.

Writing text

Click into a text block and type. A toolbar floats above it while you write, holding:

the paragraph or heading style (Heading 1 to 4, or preformatted), the font, the font weight, the text size and the line height
bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and clear formatting
alignment, links, numbered lists and bulleted lists
text colour and highlight colour
emoji, Edit HTML to change that block's HTML directly, and More, which holds superscript and subscript

When you're editing a campaign, automated email or recurring email, the toolbar also has Merge tags, which drops in a tag such as a contact's first name. It isn't there while you're editing a template, because a template isn't addressed to anyone yet. Add those tags once you've started the actual email.

Text on a button gets a shorter toolbar with the font, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and clear formatting.

Reusing a section you've built

A section you'll want again doesn't have to be rebuilt. Select it, click Save as block on the bar at its top right, give it a name and save it. It joins your account's block library. Only whole sections can be saved, not single blocks.

Saving several sections as one block

A section holds columns side by side, so a layout like two columns with a full-width row underneath is 2 sections. To keep a layout like that together, save the sections as one block:

Click the first section.
Hold Shift and click the last section. Every section in between is selected too, and the bar shows how many, for example "2 sections".
Click Save as block, give it a name and save it.

The sections are saved in the order they have in the email, whichever one you clicked first. Shift-click works on the edge of a section and on a block inside it, so it also works for a section that's one full-width image. Click a section without Shift to go back to selecting just that one. While several sections are selected you can only save them, so to change one of them, click it on its own first.

Using a saved block

The Content tab has two views, Blocks and Saved. Blocks is the palette above. Saved is your library, and you drag from it exactly the same way. A block made of several sections adds all of them, in their saved order. Saved blocks belong to the account, so everyone on your team can use one, and you can rename or delete them from that list.

The same library is under Settings > Marketing > Saved blocks, where Edit design opens a block in the editor so you can change it, including adding or removing sections.

Dragging a saved block into an email places a copy of it. Changing the saved block afterwards doesn't change the emails it's already in, and changing the copy in an email doesn't change the saved block. So there's no setting that changes the footer of every email at once. Save your footer as a block so each new email can start with it, and replace it in the emails you already have one at a time.

This is for a piece of an email, like a footer or a standard header. To keep a whole design, save it as a template instead.

Fonts and colours

The font picker groups fonts by where they show up. Fonts added to your account's brand kit come first, under Brand fonts. Then come the fonts under Works in every inbox, which look the same everywhere, and then Web fonts. Brand fonts and web fonts carry the note "Won't load in Gmail or Outlook", because those inboxes show a standard font instead. The editor records your choice, so inboxes that do load the font show it. See Why your email looks different in Gmail, Outlook or on a phone.

Font weight only lists the weights the chosen font actually has. A font under Works in every inbox, such as Arial, has Regular and Bold. A web font can have more, such as Light, Medium or Semi Bold. Gmail and Outlook can't show those in-between weights, so each one says what those inboxes show instead: "Regular in Gmail and Outlook" or "Bold in Gmail and Outlook".

Your brand kit's colours appear as swatches under Brand colors in every colour control, so you can pick the brand's own colour instead of matching a hex code by hand.

Checking your work

The top bar has Undo and Redo, then Desktop preview and Mobile preview, then Save, which stores the design. The previews switch the canvas to the width of a laptop or a phone, and you can keep editing in either. Check both. Most contacts read email on a phone.

Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac) undoes as well, and Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y redoes.

Attaching a reward

A campaign, automated email or recurring email can hand out a voucher, a gift card, points or a loyalty token. That's set up in the Actions panel on the left of the editor rather than in the design, and a block you drag in only displays what the action issues. See Adding a voucher, gift card, points or a wallet pass to an email.

Tips

Keep the text short and give the email one job. Think about who's receiving it and what you want them to do, then make that the button.

For ideas, open Templates and look through the ready-made designs. You can start from one and change everything about it.