Email editors remain one of the most sought-after tools for optimizing the time and effort of email marketers. In November 2025, a new player emerged in the world of email marketing: Canva email design maker. This article explores its main cool features, which can help email marketers create great email designs.
What Canva offers for email design
Canva Email is a tool within the Canva environment that allows you to create visually appealing email designs in a consistent brand style without any knowledge of coding. Once it is completed, you can download the design as HTML and upload it to platforms like Gmail, Mailchimp, or any other HTML-enabled email service for sending.
Layouts and templates
Clicking on the new email design option lets you choose a basic layout and start from scratch or select one of over 100 customizable email templates.
Blocks and elements
Next, you can work with the selected template, customizing elements and adding the necessary blocks. Each email block can be replaced and edited using the familiar Canva methods, so if you’ve created designs for SMM or other purposes, you’ll certainly understand how it works.
Element and media library
I like Canva’s design of individual email elements and its extensive image library. This is what has kept Canva at the forefront of design tools for years. You can also easily and intuitively upload your own images and media and use them in your design.
From the drop-down menu, you can select a category, such as headers, and then choose the element that best suits your design.
Preview and share options
To see how the email will look in an inbox, you can send yourself a test email directly from the editor, share the link, and export it to Gmail. Exporting to Mailchimp is also already implemented; you simply go to your Mailchimp account and configure the message delivery settings, without needing to edit the email itself. You can also download the .zip file to upload later as HTML to your ESP.
Canva warnings
In the guide to using this tool, Canva warns of the following potential complications:
- only email-safe fonts are supported (author’s comment: Even though all fonts supported by Canva are available in your design, you must monitor this yourself);
- videos will be converted to GIFs (author’s comment: Unfortunately, a test of emails with videos showed that the video quality in emails drops significantly when they are exported);
- some interactive features, such as videos, polls, and quizzes, aren’t supported in most email platforms, so polls and quizzes will appear as static content with no interactivity (author’s comment: Stripo has a solution for this issue, which we discuss below).
Benefits of Canva email design
Here are the main advantages of creating emails in Canva that I’d like to highlight:
- if you’re accustomed to working with other designs in Canva, you’ll find everything clear and convenient, as the basic principles remain unchanged. You may also appreciate it if you already have a Canva account, as it provides another tool;
- it offers over 100 templates; the number will likely grow, but you can already find something interesting;
- the library boasts a large collection of images, videos, and ready-made elements, enabling you to create a visually stunning email design;
- working with text is easy, and you can change fonts, size, and all other parameters. Just remember to test it in email clients to ensure that recipients can see your beautiful design;
- it’s easy to send a test email, share a link, and export to Gmail.
Canva is ideal for people who want to create visually appealing emails for personal use rather than for bulk email campaigns. So, check it out, test it, and form your own opinion. In the context of bulk email campaigns, we discuss below the challenges our clients describe and potential solutions at the email production stage.
Key email production challenges that formed modern email marketing
Email marketers face numerous challenges in their work when it comes to creating engaging email designs. We recognize these challenges and continually improve our product to address each one. Here are a few examples of such functionalities and why they are critical for professional email marketers in email template builders.
A large library of diverse pre-built templates
Email marketers value having a large library of templates at their fingertips, organized by industry, email type, and promotional season. That’s why the Stripo editor offers over 1,600 email templates and extensive customization options, allowing you to retain your favorite structure and tailor the template to your specific needs. We’ve gone even further: In the Stripo editor, you can also build a library of saved modules, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Integration with over 90 ESPs/CRMs
We use Stripo internally, syncing our email templates to ActiveCampaign and HubSpot, and we also recommend Stripo to our clients for Pardot, HubSpot, and the like, and they have all adopted it and have been very happy with it.
Choosing an ESP or CRM is usually one of the first steps in implementing an email marketing strategy. Therefore, it’s important that your email builder offers seamless integration with most of these systems. With Stripo, you can export your emails to over 90 ESPs/CRMs in just a few clicks, without the hassle of uploading HTML files.
See all Stripo integrations.
Ability to edit HTML code
Email marketers want to edit HTML code directly in the editor to make changes to email templates easily and see the results right away. That’s why Stripo provides a full built-in code editor. This empowers email marketers and developers to refine their email designs in Stripo by editing the code and instantly previewing the changes in the visual editor. The code editor provides access to three tabs: HTML, Default CSS, and Custom CSS.
How to use: Select a specific structure or block in your email template, click the “Code” button, and the editor displays the exact code for that element, so you can edit it directly. After editing, press the “Apply the Code” button, close the code window, and continue working with the layout.
Modular email design
Last year, we worked on a project in which we created fully personalized welcome emails using 3x blocks based on user actions (what they had or hadn’t done at that point in their journey). I used the module feature in Stripo to build the different options, so when creating the 94 emails, it was simply a case of dragging and dropping the modules in. I don’t want to consider how long that would have taken without this feature!
Managing, storing, exporting, and modifying numerous emails can be hard and very time consuming. With the modular email design, you build email elements just once and reuse them across multiple campaigns as many times as required. Modify the content as needed.
This approach also enables you to synchronize your modules, updating the design or data in one module, and then automatically apply these changes to all existing emails. Modify just one module to update everything at once.
Interactive email elements
Creating interactive and gamified email content often intimidates email marketers due to the significant effort and time required to develop such tools. It also requires deep coding skills or the assistance of developers and third-party tools. You may also recall the Canvas guide’s warning that interactive elements don’t display in all email clients. So, will the effort ultimately be wasted?
Stripo has worked on the use of gamification in email for a long time and offers solutions for all these challenges:
- many different useful microservices let you build interactive emails with no coding skills;
(Source: Showcase Stripo email) - the Interactive Module Generator gives you modules with games that contain an AMP version of your email, an interactive fallback that works on all devices and email clients that support HTML5 and CSS3, and a text fallback version for email clients that do not support HTML5 and CSS3, such as some Outlook apps.
Thanks to this approach to interactive elements in Stripo, creating them requires minimal time and effort, and they are guaranteed to work in all major email clients.
Responsive email design
When designing an email, it’s essential that marketers see how each block and the entire email appear during production, not only on desktop but also on mobile, as mobile rendering can differ dramatically. In some email editors, you see only the desktop version of the email and have no idea how it will appear on mobile devices.
And this is very inconvenient.
A good example was when I wanted to highlight four product features. Traditionally, I would either have to present them as a two-by-two grid on both mobile and desktop or stack them as four individual rows. On mobile, this would often mean the layout felt too long or repetitive, with images, text, and CTA repeating down the page. With Stripo, I could keep a two-by-two grid for desktop while ensuring the mobile version stacked neatly in a predetermined way.
In Stripo, you not only see the mobile version immediately but can also edit it separately, ensuring that both versions are always appealing. Use the mobile settings preview to adjust padding, alignment, and image scaling for smartphones. Toggle between desktop and mobile views to confirm that CTAs and images remain legible and easy to tap.
Rendering in different email clients
When it comes to email design, it needs to look perfect not only in the editor but also for all recipients on all devices. How can you quickly ensure this as an email marketer, especially if you send several emails a day to large databases?
One of the brightest moments in working with Stripo is using the email client testing tool. This automated feature allows me to quickly see how an email looks across different clients, significantly streamlining the testing process compared to other, more manual methods. It was a real “wow” moment when I realized how much time and effort this tool could save us.
Stripo features an integrated email testing tool, Email on Acid, for fast and seamless email previews. Preview your email across over 90 popular combinations of major email clients and devices directly in the editor, thanks to our direct integration with Email on Acid.
Email localization
Another pain point for email marketers working on international campaigns is localizing emails into multiple languages. While the email layout remains roughly the same, creating emails in different languages that incorporate all the necessary elements consumes a significant amount of time.
One of the biggest time-savers for us was using Stripo’s built-in Email Translate Service and saved modules. Instead of rebuilding every email from scratch or copy-pasting blocks between files, we leaned heavily on Stripo’s ability to save components.
With Stripo Email Translate Service, you can go global effortlessly thanks to translation and can design your emails in up to 25 languages simultaneously with just a few clicks.
AI Email Assistant
Email marketers now expect AI assistance in any marketing tool, and they’re even surprised when developers don’t leverage the potential of AI to speed up processes. At Stripo, we offer the ability to leverage existing LLM capabilities in email production when creating subject lines, images, and image alt tags.
Furthermore, we’ve implemented an AI Email Assistant that generates emails in minutes, saving you hours while maintaining the design and tone of your previous communications. Now you can quickly generate a series of new emails based on your previous campaigns, complete with all necessary content, in just minutes.
Wrapping up
As email marketing and associated technologies continue to evolve, marketers face increasing challenges and higher expectations for their tools. We’re excited to see new tools offered to email marketers that will make them more effective and creative and undoubtedly have a positive impact on the development of the entire email marketing tools market.
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