• Your Monthly (or Quarterly) Newsletter Template: This one goes out to the general public who opted-in for your company news. You’ll probably want it to be a 2-column layout, so you can put self-gratuitous promotions in the side column. Be sure to keep the “main” column full of useful content.
• Company Letterhead Template: Use this for rare announcements, such as pricing changes, shipping problems, billing errors, or “system is temporarily down” alerts. But read this before you send any public apologies with it.
• Special Promotions Template: Use this when you have big, splashy product photographs to promote a big sale. We recommend MailChimp’s “postcard” email template.
• Holiday E-card Template: This can be a variation of the postcard template. You’d insert a nice, beautiful graphic into the postcard image slot. Here are some free templates for your holiday e-cards.
• Event (e-vite) Template: Use this when you want to invite people to a company event.
• Event followup/Survey Template: Use this after your event has taken place, and you want to thank your attendees for coming. You might include a link to an online feedback survey (we recommend SurveyMonkey) and you might include digital photos from the event.
• Internal Newsletter Template: Use this for sending internal newsletters to your staff.

If you’re a MailChimp customer, just use our built-in HTML email template designer to go ahead and create these templates now. Save them in your templates gallery, so that when the time comes (trust me, it will), you can just pick the template, add content, and click send. Our free email templates have been tested to work in all the major email programs, and they can be customized to look like a big expensive agency designed them for you (see some examples).

If you’re not a MailChimp customer, you can customize the free HTML email template code we provide here.

If you prefer to design your own HTML email templates, here are some coding tips and tricks from MailChimp’s Email Marketing Resource Library. Just be sure to test your email designs in all the major email programs before sending.