If you have a message to send to your fans but don’t know how to present it, you aren’t alone. When you have a blank canvas to work with, there’s a lot of potential to make a great email campaign. But where to start? If you need some help, consider these steps and tips to guide you through the process of concept to finished product.

1. Plan ahead: Before you go to the Campaigns tab, think about what you want the end result to look like. Components you’ll want to have ready before you start include the layout, images, and the general content you’ll want as part of your email campaign. Don’t know what you want in an email message? Get inspiration from websites of artists you enjoy, visit everyday, or take a page from our own designer, Tyler, with the places he goes for inspiration.

2. Lay down the framework: Once you start building your email inside FanBridge, you’ll want to lay down the foundation first. If using a table to organize your content, start with the total number of rows and columns you’ll need, width and height (for the width, you don’t want to go much further than 600 px wide), alignment, and other properties. Follow this up with merging any cells that need to be combined and your email is on its way.

For my sample email, I’m using a centered 600-pixel wide table of four columns and five rows.

3. Input content: With your framework ready, upload and insert any background and foreground images as well as type in your text and insert your hyperlinks.

For my template, I need to upload social media icons (to find a variety of different icons to suit your needs, try icon libraries like Iconfinder), a header image, “tweet this” buttons, and an image for my merch store post. I can use FanBridge’s video thumbnail tool for the section about my new video.

4. Test. Send. Reuse: After creating your plain-text back up, you can test out how your new HTML campaign looks in your inbox. When you are completely satisfied with the end result, you can schedule and target your campaign to send out to your fan base.

And when it comes time for the second email campaign, you don’t have to worry about starting from scratch.  If you scroll to the bottom of the Campaigns tab in your account, you’ll see an archive of everything you’ve sent out through FanBridge with a link to reuse your campaign. So if you want to use the same layout but only need to change some text and/or images, the reuse link will be a big time saver for you. And as we’ve seen, a consistent look can make for great results as well.