Constant Contact's Lead Gen & CRM offers several different folders of email templates, enabling you to either start from scratch or use a pre-made template to quickly customize your emails. Simple and designer templates are email templates that provide a layout for you to quickly and easily customize your marketing emails without the need for a designer or developer.
Legacy templates, on the other hand, are basic email templates that lack the enhanced, modern elements that are available in the simple and designer templates.
This article will detail the differences between legacy, simple, and designer templates available in Lead Gen & CRM.
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Differences Between Email Templates
The main difference between legacy, simple, and designer email templates is the email designer.
Legacy emails use the old email designer, whereas simple and designer emails use the new email designer.
Important: Though legacy templates are no longer available for creation, all of your existing emails and custom templates will continue to be available.
There are more differences between the three email types:
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Template Type |
Feature Differences |
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| Legacy |
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| Simple |
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| Designer |
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Email templates in Lead Gen & CRM are set, by default, to 800 pixels wide. While the application does not have any specific image size requirements, consider keeping image file sizes as small as possible to facilitate quick downloads.
Reasons to Stop Using Legacy Templates
You should begin phasing out legacy templates and emails from your marketing campaign. Simple and designer emails are more suited for the task in today's marketing automation world, and using them can only serve to benefit you. As such, Lead Gen & CRM has made its simple and designer templates as intuitive as possible.
Why else should you switch to simple and designer templates? Consider the following:
- Quickly create beautiful emails from our professionally-designed templates
- Better experience with the updated email designer
- New template emails are more compatible with modern email clients
- Add buttons and pre-header text
- More layouts are available
Email Rendering Assistance
The problem with legacy templates is that older versions of Outlook (2007, 2010, and 2013) use Microsoft Word to render the HTML of their emails. This causes the formatting of emails to be rendered differently from other email clients (like Gmail or Apple Mail) due to the fact that Microsoft Word is meant for print design and not HTML.
The new simple and designer email templates aim to correct this issue. The simple and designer templates have built-in code that allows them to render properly in Outlook and other email clients. Before, this would have to be done manually. As this is impractical when quickly creating and sending emails out, the application has made it easier to send beautiful emails that look good across the board.
In addition, Lead Gen & CRM has a Litmus test feature built into the email designer that allows you to see what your emails look like in Outlook and other email clients. While your emails may look fantastic in Gmail, they may sometimes fall short when it comes to Outlook. When using the new email templates, you will notice in these Litmus tests that they look much better in other email clients than the legacy templates do.
Regarding Email Creation
If you are still using legacy emails, be aware that templates created using the legacy editor will continue to create legacy emails. There is no direct way to convert legacy emails into simple or designer emails. You will need to recreate the emails as a simple or designer email.
As legacy emails lack more modern and involved features, consider using simple or designer email templates. Those templates will generate their respective emails, and those emails will provide you with more ways to create and customize your content.