Choose an editor: drag & drop or HTML

Templates & contentUpdated

Pick between the drag-and-drop builder and the HTML editor when you create a template; the choice is fixed once the template exists.

EmailFig has two ways to build a template: the drag & drop builder, where you assemble an email from ready-made blocks, and the HTML editor, a rich-text editor with a full source-code view underneath. Both produce the same thing (a template you can apply to a campaign) and both support merge tags, image uploads and the same 1MB size cap. The editor a template uses is set when you create it and can’t be changed afterwards, so it’s worth a moment’s thought before you start.

The two editors

Drag & drop gives you a block palette (Section, Title, Paragraph, Button, Image, Divider, Spacer, Menu, Table, and a raw-HTML block for anything else) that you drag onto a canvas and click into to edit. There’s no code to write, so it’s the faster path if you’re starting from nothing and want a responsive layout without touching markup.

HTML starts you in a rich-text editor (bold, links, images, tables) that edits the visible email body directly. An </> button next to the toolbar switches to a source view over the entire document (doctype, <head>, <style> block and all), so you can paste in an email exported from somewhere else, write markup by hand, or tweak head-level styles the visual view can’t reach. Use this editor to import existing HTML or when you need more control than the block palette gives you. See Use your own HTML before you paste anything in.

Two crops. Above, the drag and drop canvas with its block sidebar listing Section, Title, Paragraph and the rest. Below, the HTML editor’s toolbar with the source-view button active at the far left.

Where you choose

  • Templates → New template creates a blank HTML template.
  • Templates → Browse gallery offers two scratch links above the gallery grid (Drag & drop and Blank HTML) for starting empty in either editor, alongside every catalogue template (which always opens in drag & drop; see Use a template from the Gallery).
  • Inside a campaign’s Template step, the “write from scratch” buttons (Drag & drop / HTML) start the campaign’s own content directly rather than creating a library template. See Send your first campaign.

If you picked the wrong one

There’s no in-place switch and no way to convert one to the other. Duplicating a template keeps its original editor: duplicate an HTML template and you still get HTML. To use the other editor, create a new template in it and rebuild the content there.

Next steps