The ActiveCampaign Email Designer (launched in 2022) simplifies the process of making beautiful and effective campaigns for your business needs.
The Email Designer is primarily divided between two easy-to-use tabs to help you create your campaigns:
- Content
- Global Settings
The difference between these two tabs is simple – the Content tab helps you construct your campaign, and the Global Settings tab allows you to format what you construct.
Under the Content tab, you can add multiple structures, containers, and content blocks to your campaign to add things like images and text.
For more information on the Content Tab, please refer to the Email Designer overview.
This article specifically covers the design functions under the Global Settings tab and how they apply to your campaigns.
What is under the Global Settings tab?
The Global Settings tab is for your overall campaign appearance. You'll want to apply your global settings before you apply individual settings.
The Global Settings tab houses five sub-categories of design functions:
- General Settings
- Sections
- Headings
- Button
- Mobile Formatting
General Settings
Under General Settings, you can make several background adjustments to your campaigns. For example, to change the background color of your entire campaign, simply click on Global Settings, General Settings, then Background Color and select your preference.
Here is the complete list of formatting features under General Settings of the Global Settings tab:
Message width: The measurement of how wide or slim you want your campaign to be. You can set any size between 320 and 900px.
Default padding: This is used by default for all new structures added to email from the Content tab or while adding new Sections (rows).
Padding is the space outside of the container but inside of the structure. Here are two examples:
This example has the same padding all around.
This example has increased padding on the top.
Background color: If you would like to use color rather than a background image, you can use this control to select your preferred color.
Font: Choose a font for the whole email.
Line spacing: Choose your preferred amount of spacing between all text elements.
Paragraph bottom space: An extra space below paragraphs.
Underline links: You can choose whether to have all links in your campaign underlined or not.
Responsive design: enabling this option may help to improve the mobile display. However, notice that results may vary on different devices. If this control is disabled then the mobile version of your email message will look like the desktop one. Please note that if this setting is enabled, blocks will stack.
RTL (right-to-left) text direction: If this control is activated then text direction will automatically go from right to left.
Background image: If you would like to use an image rather than a background color, you can use this control to select your preferred image.
Sections
Under Sections, you can set the default font style, size, color, font color, and link color for any sections you have in your campaign.
Under this sub-tab, you’ll find these formatting options available for all of your headers, footers, content, and info areas.
Headings
In your campaign, you may decide to use one or more headings to break up the content. To format these headings, you can use the Headings sub-tab under Global Settings.
Here you can set the default font style, size, color, bold and italics fonts for H1, H2, and H3 headings.
Button
Any buttons you have in your campaign, such as a button linking to a list subscription landing page, can be formatted to your preference under the Button sub-tab under Global Settings.
The Button menu allows you to set some default parameters, such as color and font, that will be applied to all buttons in the email. You can set button color, hover effect color, button font style, color, size, bold and italic settings as well as set border radius (the default setting is 30px).
You can also set button borders and their colors here, for each side separately, the same for all sides, as well as the option to change button border color and type on hover.
In addition, you have the following global button options to toggle on or off:
- Highlight hovered buttons: This allows you to add a hover button and text color for the whole email. When this is turned on, you can hover over (desktop) or click (mobile) the button, and the button and text color will change. This is toggled Off by default and must be enabled in order to set the hover button and text color.
- Support of Outlook: This allows you to improve buttons displayed in Outlook by inserting a special VML-code element. The "Support of Outlook" button will be toggled On by default.
Mobile Formatting
Mobile formatting menu settings are only used to configure emails displayed on mobile devices.
You can set the font size for header, content, footer, info area, text size for block menu, headers H1, H2, H3, and their horizontal alignment.
You can also set text size for the buttons, enable their full width displaying and set content margin for mobile.
Please be aware that using mobile formatting may cause a horizontal scroll if one of the containers contains a non-responsive image with a large size or font size for the text.