Writing, designing, and sending out a monthly newsletter is a lot of work! If you’re a missionary or non-profit, finding a solution that’s easy AND stands out is essential. While I always recommend getting a professionally-designed email newsletter if you have the budget, sometimes that’s not an option. The Mailchimp integration in Canva offers a solution for those of us on a tighter budget. There are several reasons why I like using this integration to create my newsletter templates. Let’s take a look at how to do it!
- Create an Email Newsletter or Customize a Canva Email Newsletter Template
- So let’s start with making the actual newsletter template. You can custom design something or use a template in Canva and apply your branding elements to it using the Styles tab. At Elevate Design Co, we design custom email newsletter templates for our clients to use in Canva. Canva is so user-friendly and easy to customize from month to month!
- Make your template with Mailchimp in mind
- When you move this design over into MailChimp, it shows up in your media folder in Mailchimp. Unfortunately, this means you can only apply one link. That means you need to minimize clickable links to one per image. You can still have multiple buttons per page but only use one per section.
- Move your Design into Mailchimp
- Once your design looks great and optimized for Mailchimp, click “share.” Then click “more” and search for MailChimp (you can do the same thing for constant contact). If it’s not linked, when you search MailChimp, a button to saying “connect” will appear. Click this and log in to your MailChimp. Once it’s connected, when you select “Mailchimp,” your Mailchimp account will open. You should see your design in your media folder.
- Build your Mailchimp Campaign
- Go to “all campaigns” and create a new campaign. Select “regular email.” Click “edit design” and select “start from scratch.” In your campaign select your image block and click “browse images” in the editing window on the left. Select the image you loaded in from Canva.
- In the editing box to the left, select “full” for the alignment. That takes your image edge to edge. Then, get rid of the padding on the top and bottom. Set both top and bottom to zero.
- Add your logo, if you have one, into your header block and change the color of the header background to match the background of your Canva template.
- Adding Links to Your Newsletter
- Now, let’s get to the issue of the links. You might have multiple sections with a button in one image. So, how do we link to both of them? Go to “edit image.” Crop your image so it’s just the first section containing a button, then hit “save.”
- Drag in another image block right below it. Add your original image to the new block and repeat step 4.2. Crop this one to contain the next section of your image containing a button and hit “save.” Continue this process until you’ve included all sections of your original image.
ADDING VIDEO BLOCKS TO YOUR MAILCHIMP CAMPAIGN
One question I have had is how do you add a video block. When you put a video block in your email campaign in Canva and bring it over into MailChimp, MailChimp will not display that video. So, even if it works in Canva, it will not display in MailChimp. MailChimp wants you to use their video block.
So how are we going to do that? Grab the video block and drag it over. Go to the style tab and make the body color the same as the background of your Canva template.
You need to enter a URL on Mailchimp video blocks. You can’t upload a video file to MailChimp, so it needs to be hosted somewhere like YouTube or Vimeo. Go to your video and copy the shareable link. Go back to your campaign and paste it into the “source” field. Mailchimp will automatically pull your cover photo from your video.
Still confused after watching the video? Click the button below to schedule a one-hour one-on-one training for just $50. We’ll walk through building your newsletter in Canva and transferring it to your email builder of choice (Mailchimp or Constant Contact). Your training will be recorded and sent to you.
