HTML Emails

How to design custom HTML emails without coding

WebsitesCategory
3 min read
Emma Wilhelm

GoDaddy has a simple drag-and-drop email marketing composer that makes designing emails easy. But some email marketers prefer to use custom HTML emails, and GoDaddy plays nicely with that, too! Custom HTML emails aren't only for tech savvy people or those who can afford a web designer. In this post, I'll show you how to do it without coding and only with free tools.

Free tools to design custom HTML emails

Email template builder

If you're looking for a free email template builder, check out Inkbrush, a web application that let's you quickly create emails — for free! No coding experience necessary.

Images

Using photos for your marketing can turn out to be expensive. Luckily, some sites offer hundreds of photos for free. Here are a few:

If you want to create professional illustrations in any size, Canva is a great solution. It allows you to create great images in minutes. You don’t need to spend hours learning Photoshop or Gimp anymore.

Colors

When you communicate with your audience, you need to be consistent across every marketing channel. This include the colors you use. Whether you design a new banner for Facebook, send an email, or create a business document, you need to use the same colors everywhere. To do so you can use ColorZilla. It's a free extension for your browser that instantly gives you the code of the colors that you see on any web page. So if you want to create an email using the same colors as your brand, visit your site and pick some colors with ColorZilla so you can use them afterwards in your email. And if you include images in your email but don’t know which colors look good with them, you can use Pictaculous. It’s a free tool that indicates the right color panel for your images.

Free tools to improve your copywriting

Coding HTML Emails

A good design isn’t enough to get people’s attention. You also need to come up with the right message. The problem is that sometimes we don’t find the right words to express how awesome our product/service is. We find that our message isn’t catchy enough or short enough. These tools can help you improve your copywriting:

CoSchedule. We all know that writing great subject lines is important. CoSchedule can help you with that. This free tool gives tons of valuable information to improve your subject lines. It analyses various metrics such as word balance and length analysis, and it also shows you how your subject line will look in an inbox.

Hemingway. Hemingway is the perfect tool to make your message clear and catchy. The site automatically gives you the readability of your message as well as tips to improve your sentences.

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