Review: Campaigner's Smart Email Builder

Email marketing is no easy task. Getting subscribers to open your email is only half the battle. Once prospects open the email, you still have to provide an engaging design that encourages them to read and click through to your site and landing pages. Unless you have experience with graphic design and HTML, creating a professional-looking email can be a challenge for most small business ecommerce site owners who manage a mailing list. Campaigner's Smart Email Builder offers more than 700 professional templates for email marketing campaign design. (Click for larger image). Campaigner's newest email-marketing tool looks to remove the rocket science aspect from email marketing by automating the process developing professional emails with a new tool called Smart Email Builder. The Smart Way to Design an Email If you're unfamiliar with Campaigner, it's an email marketing service that small businesses can use to create and send email communications to subscribers and customers. Campaigner is a hosted service that takes care of storage and reporting, email list subscribes and unsubscribes, and it also helps you to meet email regulations like CAN-SPAM.  The company also offers Campaigner Free for very small and individual ecommerce marketers, providing the service completely free as long as you maintain a contact list of 500 or fewer contacts. Since we last reviewed Campaigner Free, the company has released a new email editor tool that's designed to help those unfamiliar with design and code to create and send professional-looking email communications to list subscribers.  The tool is not an extra add-in and no additional subscription fee is required to use it. You simply start building a new email campaign using the Smart Email Builder instead of the Full Email Editor when logged in to your account. When the Smart Email Builder loads, you are presented with a number of basic options to get you started. This is the main design area (called Smart Templates), and you choose a layout and design for your newsletter. For example, choices include single column, two columns or right side bar. In total there are five options for layout, but each layout offers a number of theme templates with placeholders for graphics, headlines and the content you will include in the email message. Each template and theme combination can be customized in different colors.  After choosing a template, you go to a full-screen edit mode where you provide the content for your email communication. In total the Smart Email Builder provides more than 700 templates, themes and color schemes to help you design an email newsletter to match any type of content, promotion or seasonal newsletter you want to create and send. Why Campaigner’s Smart Builder is an Easy Builder The Smart Email Builder interface is designed to provide you with a lot of design options with minimal work required to create the email. For example, when you upload images they are the right size, and you have a simple “resizing slider” that maintains image proportions so your email images are never dithered and unsightly.  Smart Builder's template-based, drag-and-drop interface makes creating your email newsletter an easy task. (Click for larger image). You can also drag-and-drop blocks of content around on the page. Depending on where you place a block of content in the template, the Smart Email Builder automatically designs the text according to that area's pre-defined format. The workflow process makes the Smart Email Builder to use. The template display automatically updates on-the-fly as you add your text and make changes.  As you work on putting your own text and assets into the email, you can also go back and change any aspect of your layout, theme or color template if you decide your content doesn’t quite look right in the one you initially selected.  This is useful for getting the right look and layout for your marketing communication without a lot of fuss. Working in a live design mode and seeing how the email will look as you create your copy saves time compared to saving changes and going back screens to make basic template layout and color changes. Available for free Smart Email Builder is available in both the Campaigner Free version and in subscription-based paid versions. It’s a handy tool for people who find it difficult to create nice, professional looking email newsletters -- but at the same time anyone with a little more experience can still choose the Full Email Editor when creating an email marketing campaign in Campaigner. More Email Marketing Tips From beginner guides to expert tips, our selection of email marketing tips and articles can help you to better manage your small business marketing tasks.  Email Marketing Tips: Segment Lists for Targeted Campaigns Ecommerce Conversion, Email and Other Marketing Words to Know  A Buyer's Guide to Remarketing Services How to Find an E-Mail Marketing Service Provider Review: Campaigner Offers Free Email Marketing Service Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.