Email Marketing: MailChimp and Free Templates

If you haven’t already done so, check our latest blogs 8 Important Stats About E-mail and Marketing Automation and 10 Tips for Better E-Mail Marketing . Today I wanted to continue with the email marketing blog post theme and give you all a quick guide to finding free email templates to make your next newsletters look more creative and ensure they are mobile responsive.

Now you might be asking yourself, why should I care about making my newsletter mobile responsive? Well, according to Click Z research, “Mobile email will account for 15 to 70% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and email type.” So, now knowing this particular statistic, it’s key to make sure your email newsletter is responsive.

We currently use a mix of MailChimp and HubSpot for our emails. However, for our newsletters, we use MailChimp as our main email marketing platform. If you have never used MailChimp, give it a try, it’s very intuitive and they offer a free tier for those just starting to get into email marketing.

Now, MailChimp offers a great drag a drop option (mobile-responsive ready) as you can see in these screenshots:

MailChimp also offers pre-made templates, but to be completely honest, they are not the best-looking ones out there:

Lastly, MailChimp has the option of pasting code, uploading HTML, or uploading a ZIP file:

Although we could just use the first two methods offered by MailChimp, let's be honest, I do work at a web development agency, so of course I like to dabble in custom responsive themes. However, my skills in CSS are limited, so what better than a few Google searches, and boom, a few great sites offering starter themes I can then customize myself with basic HTML.

Here are my top 3 websites for free starter email templates any marketer with some soft skills in coding can take and make it their own:

1. Litmus
   Litmus is an email template paid service, however, they offer plenty of free basic templates for download. They also offer a community edition of their paid service that allows you to design on their browser platform that can then be download as an HTML file that can then be imported to any of the big email marketing services available, not just MailChimp.
2. ZURB
   This company offers 5 templates that are mobile responsive and can be customized by the user in either MailChimp editor or a code editor like Atom. 
   
3. CakeMail
   Even though CakeMail is actually similar to MailChimp, they allow you to download their templates for free to use on any email marketing service. 
   

Now that you have some free resources for jazzing up your next newsletter, will you take the time to code the next time you send a new newsletter campaign? Let me know in the comments below!