You can create engaging email experiences using the drag-and-drop builder to design professional content without technical restrictions or coding requirements. This flexible design tool enables you to maintain brand consistency across campaigns while streamlining campaign production through reusable templates and content blocks. When properly utilized with compelling visual elements and optimized layouts, these types of email typically perform better than basic text emails by delivering more visually appealing and interactive subscriber experiences.
The drag-and-drop builder also improves operational efficiency by reducing the time needed to create professional email designs, allowing marketing teams to focus on strategy and messaging. At the same time, the intuitive interface handles the technical aspects of email layout and formatting.
The Drag and Drop content builder gives you the flexibility to design your content without any restrictions, as compared to a traditional content builder. It also provides the convenience of having all the formatting tools at your disposal, allowing you to control the design aspect of your email content in real time.
Thus, an easy-to-use interface, combined with great compatibility on several platforms, makes it an ideal tool for both experts and novice email content creators alike.
Some of its notable features are:
- Separation of structure and content: Each content block in the drag-and-drop builder has its own independent design layout and behavior. This means you can style every piece of content differently without affecting the rest of the email.
- Flexible and compatible: The builder provides a versatile set of tools to craft dynamic content layouts while ensuring consistent delivery and display across various email client applications.
- Structured and distinguishable workspace: The editing interface is designed for intuitive navigation. The blank canvas sits on the left, while the formatting and properties panel is anchored to the right. To build your email, drag and drop the formatting tools onto the canvas, then use each region's properties panel to fine-tune the appearance and behavior of both structural elements (such as a single-column row) and individual content blocks (such as a text block).
- Highly customizable: The builder supports a wide range of multimedia elements, including dynamic images, GIFs, and URLs, thus allowing you to embed custom HTML for more interactive and tailored email content.
- Supports reusability: Content elements such as rows, email templates, and footers are built as self-contained blocks with their own design properties. This makes them easy to reuse across multiple campaigns, significantly reducing the effort of recreating content from scratch.
Creating Content using Drag and Drop Builder
Perform the following steps shown below to access the drag-and-drop builder tool and use it to create email content:
- To access this builder, head to the navigation panel, click on Marketing > Content, and select Email Content from the expanded menu.
- On the Email Content Index page, click New Content.
- In addition to creating your own personalized email content, you can also browse our extensive library of ready-to-use drag-and-drop templates, ranging from vivid themes such as fashion, manufacturing, media & entertainment, spring, festivities, newsletters, business, events, e-commerce, and more. Such themes are arranged across Industry, Automated, Seasonal, and Usage categories, respectively.
- To create content from scratch, click the Start Designing button.
- Choose the Drag and Drop template.
- Select a template layout from the list and click on Next.
- Enter a new title for your content draft in the Name field.
- The builder page will be divided into two sections. On the left is the editing canvas where you can see the layout of your email message. On the right are the formatting tools to help you design the email content. Depending on the template you selected in step 5, the content blocks will be preloaded in the canvas region for you to work on.
- The elements present in this builder are explained below:
Editing Canvas: The editing canvas provides a blank space where you can drag and drop structural/content elements and edit them to create your desired content. To learn more about editing content, view our Drag and Drop Builder: Editing Content article.
Properties Panel: The properties panel is divided into three subsections, listing rows and content elements for you to select and use. It enables you to edit their properties and contains the general settings for the entire content.
Content: In this section, you can choose and edit the specific content elements that make up your message, for example, buttons, images, text blocks, and so on.
Rows: In this section, you can select different structural elements to organize your content, for example, a single-column versus a three-column row.
Settings: In this section, you can edit the overall settings that affect the entire message. For example, a default font family.
For more information about the properties panel and its sub-sections, view our Drag and Drop Builder Properties Panel article. - Once you have finished designing your email content, switch to the Footer section and either create a custom footer or choose a default one offered by Marketing Cloud. Ensure that you include all the necessary details in the email footer. For example, in compliance with anti-spam email laws, an email content should contain the address information of the email sender “{{campaign.address}}”, and an unsubscribe link to a particular campaign “{{campaign.unsubscribe_link}}”, “{{campaign.unsubscribe_url}}” or “{{campaign.one_click_unsub_url}}”. To learn more about creating custom footers, view our Footer Management article.
- To check how your email content will appear to your clients, visit the Preview section. Select a contact or a list to preview the email content as it would appear to them. Read our Previewing Content in Content Builders article to learn more.
- To ensure the ease of email deliverability to your clients, we have included an email scorecard in the preview section. With the help of such ratings, you can make adequate changes so that only necessary details are mentioned in the email or newsletter, thereby keeping the file size as small as possible. A smaller file size ensures minimal processing delay, allowing prompt delivery of email content to the intended recipient.
- Currently, Marketing Cloud displays three types of labels that denote the email score and size parameters. They are, namely:
Excellent: Email content size is less than 100 KB.
Good: Email content size is between 101 KB and 249 KB.
Poor: Email content size exceeds 250 KB.
Do remember, these ratings don’t prevent you from sending email campaigns to your clients. However, for faster email delivery and a smoother user experience, we do recommend optimizing your email file size whenever possible. - You can also add web tracking parameters and content feed details for your content templates under the Advanced section. With web tracking, you can collect various parameters to understand how your audience interacts with your content. With content feeds, you can reuse your email templates that display specific information to your users. To learn more about these features, read our Web Analytic Tracking and Content Feeds articles.
- Use the Custom Row Categories section to save and store customized row templates, allowing you to reuse them in email campaigns whenever needed. To learn more about customizing row categories, read our Drag and Drop Builder: Custom Row Categories article.
- To save the draft, click on Save and Close.
