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Choosing the Right Email Editor

We have several different editors available for email creation. The editor best for you depends on your use case and experience with code.

The editor choice menu

Whenever you start composing a new email, you’ll see a menu that looks like this:

From here, you can choose exactly which one of our editors you want to use to compose that particular message. If you’ve already composed or created some emails before, they’ll be available for selection in the tabbed Start from existing email menu below.

The options at the top allow you to start an email from scratch in that editor, while the tabs allow you to select a previous email built in each editor as a starting point.

Our three editor types

Drag-and-drop

Our drag-and-drop editor allows you to quickly build responsive emails without coding. It looks like this:

You can quickly add blocks of content, columns, and easily drop in items like images, buttons, social links, and set global styles. When clicking your email to edit it, you can see that it was built using the drag-and-drop editor:

To learn more about the drag-and-drop editor, check out these resources:

• Getting started with drag-and-drop: the basics of how to use columns, images, customize your headers and navigation, and so on.
• Drag-and-drop editor FAQ: some of the most common questions we’ve received about this editor and upcoming features.
• Troubleshooting your drag-and-drop emails

Rich text

This editor is great if you need a little more control over the code compared to the drag-and-drop editor, but don’t need a highly-stylized message. You land on the WYSIWYG editor, but you can click HTML to edit code. You can use layouts to structure your emails and create a re-usable header and footer.

You can switch to our code-only editor, but once you confirm this action and save the email, you cannot revert the message back to the rich text editor.

You can identify emails using the rich text editor in the workflow by this icon:

To learn more about the rich text editor, check out these resources:

• Email layouts overview
• Customizing your layouts

Code

The code editor is a great option if you want complete, granular control over your email. Like the rich text editor, you can use layouts to create a global, reusable header and footer.

We’ve partnered with Parcel to help you code better emails. Our code editor comes complete with syntax autocomplete, responsive previews, and an Inspect Element mode that helps you find code when you click elements in your preview.

You can switch between tabs for writing HTML exclusively and AMP.

You can identify emails created using the code editor in the workflow with the icon.

To learn more about the code editor, check out these resources:

• Our email code editor, powered by Parcel
• How our Layouts work with this editor
• Customizing your Layouts
• Disabling CSS pre-processing

Starting from a previous email

As mentioned above, you can choose previously made emails as a starting point. Search by its name or select from the options below the search bar.

Don’t worry about your old design being overwritten; this will be saved as its own unique email!