First look: the new Email Designer in Dynamics 365 Marketing

The email editor in Dynamics 365 Marketing has evolved from version to version, and generated a lot of feedback and ideas from our customers.

Today we are previewing a fast and fluid editor with a modern look and feel, offering a completely new way of creating engaging and relevant content.

The new designer offers

• Advanced image manipulations
• More fonts and styles
• Reliable email previews
• Quick and easy test sends
• and more

Toolbox

One of the first thing you will notice is a simplified and more intuitive toolbox. The concept of building emails is the same – you drag tiles from the toolbox on to the canvas. Emails are now based on a table layout. If you drag a tile on to the canvas without sections the editor will automatically add one for you.

The dynamic field are now inserted using the Personalization button on the (now fixed) toolbar (used to be the ‘</>’ button)

Having created the text we also notice the simplified way of setting inner spacing – we can set equal for all sides with one click (used to take eight clicks at least)

If we move one level up, the task pane offers a bunch of settings for the column holding the text area

Also here we can leverage the ‘set equal’ options and more

As before we can add column layout sections to the canvas

Column layout

What’s new is the (heavily requested) capability that allow us to resize the individual columns

Images

A very welcome new capability is the ability to resize emails in the canvas. Having dragged an image tile on to the canvas..

.. we can select an image from the files..

..and the inserted image will show eight handles you can use to resize the image right there on the canvas.

Obviously you can use the task pane to format the image as well. You can even link the image to a so-called attribute (event, page, survey etc) – let the image double a button.

Button

You may have noticed that certain elements appears to be missing in the Toolbox – Marketing Page, Survey, Event, and Teams check-in. These elements are now available as attributes to the Button element.

In the Edit button task pane you can select what the button should link to – URL, Event, and Teams check-in, Marketing Page, Survey

In this little example we can click Event, and point to one of our live events

You can change the style of the button, eg color, and more

The spam checker is found in the Check content drop-down in the upper right corner

In this little example you are advised to add a subject and other things

To add a subject you can click the Add a subject (1) which will open the Email header task pane. I the task pane you can add subject and pre-header, as well as configure other settings

Previewing

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback around the reliability of email previews, and how emails renders in various clients and browsers.

To preview an email navigate to the Preview and test tab

This tab has been redesign and offers you a preview of Screen sizes..

.. and Email clients (generated by Litmus)

You can get a reliable preview of how your email will look in e.g. Outlook 2019

HTML

As before you can do advanced editing using the HTML editor, which now is accessible from the </> button in the upper right corner

There are lot of other hidden gems in the new editor (e.g. the ability to clone a section) – more on that in coming posts.

I for one find the new editor very fast and intuitive – and I encourage you to take it for a spin.