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Insert placeholders for sending with Mail Designer

By Team equinux Editing Text

Mail Designer 365 supports the use of placeholders to automatically insert personalized information into your template.

What are placeholders?

Placeholders are special text areas in your email that are automatically replaced with personalized information from your contacts when sending. For example, you can insert the recipient’s name or other individual data without manually adjusting each email. This ensures a more personal approach and saves time when creating your email campaigns.

Inserting placeholders for Mail Designer sending

‣ Select a text area in your design

‣ Go to "Insert" in the top menu and choose Mail Designer 365 Campaigns

‣ Choose the placeholder you would like to add:

Via Insert > Mail Designer 365 Campaigns, you can add a placeholder to your email design, which will be replaced with personal information from your contacts when sending.

A placeholder will be inserted into your text, which will be replaced with information from your Mail Designer contacts after uploading.

Managing contacts

With the placeholder feature, you can insert information from your contact list stored in Mail Designer. Learn more about contact management in Mail Designer 365 in the following articles:

 

Creating Nested Lists

By Editing Text

Nested Lists

With Mail Designer 365, you can apply different list styles within your email design to create more defined lists.

To get started, insert a text layout block into your design by dragging and dropping from the content menu in the sidebar.

Type the first line of your list into the layout block. You should notice the list tool appear in the "Style" menu in the sidebar:

Highlight the text and choose a list style from the drop down menu and click to apply it to first line of your list.

To create an indentation, hit enter to start a new line, and then hit the ⇥ key. Alternatively, you can use the indent buttons in the "List" tool to indent left or right.

You can then highlight this line, and choose a new list style to distinguish from the first line.

To include multiple list styles, continue to repeat the previous two steps:

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

All Caps tool

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Using the All Caps tool

If you have written a body of text that you suddenly want to be in all capital letters, you no longer have to manually retype the text using caps lock. Instead, you can easily capitalize the letters of the text by adding a checkmark next to "All Caps" in the "Style" section.

First, select a text area. Then in the Style section, find the "All Caps" option.

Add a checkmark inside the box next to "All Caps."

This will automatically convert the text in all capital letters.

If you change your mind and want to revert your text to regular capitalization, just simply remove the check next to "All Caps."

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

 

Adding different types of text links

By Editing Text

How to add different types of text links

With Mail Designer 365, you can add different types of text links. You can specify whether you want http, https, email link, telephone link, or custom.

First, select the text that you want to add a link to.

Second, scroll to the bottom of the "Style" tab until you see the link section.

Next, click "Add Link." You will see a form where you can type your link.

Click on the down arrow that you see before the word "Web."

You will see a drop-down menu, where you can choose the type of link that you want to set for your selected text.

 

You can choose the "Custom" option for ftp links, app links, download links, other links that do not necessarily start with http or https.

One you have finished entering the link to the landing page, notice that text that you selected is now blue and underlined.

 

 

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

 

Automatic hyphenation

By Editing Text

You have the option of automatically hyphenating your text to avoid layout problems:

Of course, you can also turn off this feature.

To access this feature, try the following:

Choose "File" > "Design Options..." from the top menu bar.

Then, check or uncheck the box next to "Force hyphenation."

Click "Ok" when you are done.

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

Special characters

By Editing Text

Special Characters

You’ll notice that some of the text objects use special characters like this: ♫.

You can find lots more of these types of characters under “Edit" > "Emoji & Symbols”

You can insert a wide variety of different emojis and symbols.

Emojis:

Arrows:

Bullets/stars:

Currency symbols:

Latin alphabet:

Letter like symbols:

Math symbols:

Parentheses:

Pictographs:

Punctuations:

Select text somewhere in an image area, choose a special character and click “Insert” to add it to your text.

Did you know?

Symbols are also great for acting as icons within a call-to-action button. It's a simple way to add captivate your reader's attention.

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

Editing text in an image area

By Editing Text

Get creative

In an image area, Mail Designer 365 offers more flexibility and you can get really creative with your text. Let's try out some creative ideas!

Open the Contents section and choose "Text Objects."

Like every tab in the Contents section, the Text Objects are also divided into multiple subsections. This allows you to easily find the font and style you want.

We have also created a few other text styles using different fonts and colors.

Drag any of these text objects into an image area and double-click it to edit the text.

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

Using web fonts in Mail Designer 365

By Editing Text

Web Fonts

Using Web Fonts is a great way to use beautiful fonts. More importantly, it makes sure that the design will display the way you want it to on your recipient’s devices. When using a Web Font for text, the font will not be shipped together with your template. Instead, it will be loaded automatically from the internet by the recipient’s device, if the font is not installed yet.

In Order to use Web Fonts in your template they must be downloaded first. To do so choose "Web Fonts" > "Download additional fonts..." from the font menu.

You will now see a Preview Window where all available fonts will be displayed. Click ”Start Download“ to download additional Web Fonts you can then use in your template.

When you click "Start download," a popup window will open that shows the progress of the download:

After the download has finished you can choose from a variety of different web fonts:

A note about font options

You will notice "Email-safe fonts" as one of the categories. "Email-safe Fonts" are fonts that can be viewed on most computers. There are the most common basic fonts available in the majority of various devices:

 

Although there are a wide range of fonts available when you download the additional fonts under "Web Fonts," we understand that some may still consider this as only a limited number of fonts. This is because the fonts are downloaded from Google's directory of open source designer web fonts. We wanted to help ensure that our users are able to create designs with beautiful fonts in a legal manner. All the downloadable fonts are free and open source, which means that the fonts are accessible to everyone and are available to be used for both personal and commercial projects.

If you're adding text to a text area, how the text is displayed depends highly upon whether the font is available within the recipient's computer. If you're adding to an image area, you can choose from a wider selection of fonts. Why? The text will be displayed as part of an image, ensuring their compatibility with most email programs.

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

Working with font sets

By Editing Text

Font Sets

In Mail Designer 365, you can define a different set of fonts, font size, line spacing and text color for every style.  In addition, you can designate what font will be chosen if another font is unavailable. This is helpful if you have multiple fonts for one style. In our case, we picked "Josefin Sans" as our Primary Font. If this font is not available on the recipients computer, then "Baghdad" will be chosen. If "Baghdad" is not available, then "Roboto" will be chosen and so on.

Click and drag a font at its handle to rearrange the chosen fonts. Afterwards, click "Add fallback font" to add an "Email-safe font".

 

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

Editing a text area

By Editing Text

Working with text

With the design more or less complete, it's now time to work on the text of your email.

What can text areas do?

There are two kinds of areas that you can find in layout blocks in Mail Designer 365: text areas and image areas. Image areas can contain both text and images, while text areas can only hold text.

Editing a text area

To edit a text area in your message, just click inside a text area and start typing – simple! You can also adjust your font and text flow options by selecting text and choosing your options from the popover.

 

A Quick Tour of Mail Designer 365

Background

Layout Blocks

TextScout

Editing Text

Links and Buttons

Configuring Text Styles

Tables

Image Areas

Images

Using Retina Images with your Design

Graphics and Other Objects

Creative Tools

Advanced Design Techniques

Blend Modes

Optimizing your Template for Mobile

Plain Text

Preview your Design

Preparing your Design for Sending

Campaigns

HTML Export

Other Sharing Options

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