Configuring Email Design & Branding

One of the most frustrating parts of traditional email marketing workflows is all the steps involved; the copy-and-paste between tools, the fighting with templates, etc. Our tool takes a different approach, built to save you serious time.

Introduction to Themes

Themes enable a big productivity unlock for your team. Apply consistent design and branding to your emails, and hot-swap them in real-time as you write.

Think of themes as a "design system" for your emails. You set them up once, and then your team can use the blocks within the editor to build emails that will always be on-brand and consistent.

Here's all the things you can configure at Theme level:

Header and logo

The header is edited in its own mini-editor, so it can hold rich content — not just a logo. You can customize:

• Logo image: upload your logo in .png or .jpg format (inbox providers don't support formats like .webp).
• Logo link: the website your users are directed to after clicking your logo.
• Logo width: drag to set a max width for your logo; the height scales automatically to keep the proportions.
• Logo spacing: drag to increase or decrease the space between your logo and your title/date and body content.
• Alignment: left-align, center, or right-align your header.
• Auto-inserted title/date: dynamically insert your draft's title and the date into the header — great for newsletter-style emails or when you're also publishing to your website.
• Hide the header entirely: don't want a header at all? Toggle it off.
• Inside or outside the canvas: place the header within your email's "card" (the canvas) or above it on the background.
• Header colors: inherit your body colors, or set a custom background and text color just for the header — handy for a branded top bar.
• Header padding & margins: fine-tune the spacing around the header.

Footer and social icons

The footer is also its own mini-editor with a universal block of content appended to every email. You can configure:

• Footer content: a rich text area for your address, links, legal text, or a sign-off (a physical mailing address is required by anti-spam law, so this is a good place for it).
• Social icon bars: add icons that link to your accounts across platforms.
• Alignment: left, center, or right.
• Inside or outside the canvas and inherit or custom colors: same options as the header, so your footer can sit on its own background with its own colors.
• Footer padding & margins: control the spacing.
• Show/hide the Audienceful badge: on a paid plan, remove the "Sent with Audienceful" badge to fully whitelabel your emails.

Layout

In Layout you control the overall shape of your email:

• Canvas width: set a custom max-width for your email (we recommend not exceeding ~600px for maximum compatibility).
• Contained vs. full-bleed: choose whether your content sits inside a bounded "card" on a background color, or stretches edge-to-edge.
• Desktop & mobile margins: set the side margins separately for desktop and mobile so your email breathes correctly on both.
• Canvas padding: adjust the vertical space at the top and bottom of your email.
• Corner radius per element: set separate rounding for the canvas, images, buttons, and containers.
• Full-width toggles: make buttons full-width by default, and let images and containers break out of the margins to appear "full-bleed."

Typography and fonts

Typography is set per element — body text, H1, H2, H3, buttons, containers, and captions each get their own controls:

• Font family (from our library of email-safe font stacks)
• Size, weight, and line height
• Letter spacing and text alignment
• Top and bottom margins
• Link styling, including whether links are underlined

Our font stacks were designed by professionals to scale cleanly with the right line heights and spacing for each level, so you can get a polished result without touching most of these.

Color schemes (including dark mode)

You can set colors for every part of your email — background, canvas, body text, each heading level, links, buttons (including button background opacity), containers (including opacity), captions, and social icons.

For dark mode, you have two options:

• Specify only light mode colors: recommended if you aren't a designer and aren't sure how this will play out. Inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook often force their own dark mode by inverting your colors, so this is the most lightweight approach.
• Enable a custom dark mode: turn on dark mode and set a full, separate palette for it. Many modern inbox providers will honor a specified dark-mode scheme, giving you real control instead of letting them auto-invert. Audienceful is one of the only email tools that lets you design a dedicated dark-mode palette this way — for more on the tradeoffs (especially with logos), see handling logo images between dark and light mode.

Using Block-Level Overrides

For consistency, it's usually best to solve design problems at Theme-level first. However, in the process of creating emails you'll definitely run across scenarios that require breaking out of your global theme.

This is where individual block overrides come in. Here's all the options:

• Layout: Set custom max-widths, vertical spacing (padding), collapse margins, and customize multi-column and container blocks
• Typography: Override the type styles of your theme with custom fonts, sizes, line heights and more.
• Color: Set custom colors that override your theme.