How to Create a Navigation Bar in Your Email Template

Creating an Email Template is one of the first things you want to do when you start with Klaviyo. A template ensures that you have a consistent look and feel from one email to another, and that it matches the styling and branding of your website.

One of the most recognizable parts your email is the navigation bar. This is the first thing your subscribers see when they open one of your emails.

To create a navigation bar you can use the “Header / Link Bar” block, the “Table Block” or even editing the HTML of a “Text Block” to create your fully customized navigation bar. In this guide we will talk about the “Header / Link Bar” block because this is Klaviyo’s built-in feature for creating navigation bar.

Using the “Header / Link Bar” block is the easiest way to add navigation bar with your logo and links to your most valuable website pages.

In Klaviyo’s template builder, among other useful blocks, you can see the “Header / Link Bar” block. Drag and drop the block to your email template (usually at the top of your email).

After you drop the block at the preferred location a pop-up will appear with 4 different layout options from which you can choose.

Click on one of the options that you find most appealing to proceed. Note that matching your website’s navigation bar here is an important part of brand recognition.

After choosing your layout option the navigation bar will appear in the designated location and you can start applying settings and styling.

Click on the navigation bar and in the “Block” section from the left sidebar you can add your logo, links and images in your navigation bar. In most cases, you want to add the same links that are in your website’s navigation bar. Although Klaviyo’s navigation block allows you to add as many links as you want, however, if you have too many links in your website navigation choose the most important links that you think best represents the important sections of your website.

The next thing you need to do after you add the content in the navigation bar is to apply the right font and styles.

You can do that from the “Block Styles” section in the left sidebar. From here you can change the initially chosen navigation bar layout, change margins and padding, fonts, colors and more.

Once you finish designing the navigation bar for Desktop view, you need to switch to Mobile view and check how it will look on smaller devices.

To switch from Desktop to Mobile view, click on the Mobile icon in the top right corner from the template builder.

As you can see from the image, the default settings for Mobile view of the navigation bar is all the elements to stack vertically.

You can change the alignment settings by clicking on the navigation bar and selecting the “Block Styles” option.

Additionally, you can choose to show the navigation bar block only on Desktop, only on Mobile or both on Desktop and Mobile.

That means you can have one block that shows both on Desktop and Mobile, or you can have two different blocks where one will be shown only on Desktop and the other one will be shown only on Mobile devices. Note that when using different blocks for Desktop and Mobile they act as completely different blocks, which means that changes made into one block won’t affect the other. For example, if you want to change a Link in the navigation bar, you’ll have to change it in both blocks.

In the case where you’re using one block to show both on Desktop and Mobile, any changes to the navigation bar will only have to be applied in that single block, regardless if you’re in Desktop or Mobile view.

You can change these settings in the “Block Styles” section.

If you select your navigation bar and you click on the “Block” section from the left sidebar, you can change these settings for each link in the navigation bar individually.

If you want to see how your navigation bar will look on different devices and email providers you can use the “Preview” option in Klaviyo’s template builder to send yourself a preview of the email template.

Click on the “Preview” option from the left sidebar. From the pop-up, select “Send as an email”, write the email address on which you want to receive the email template and click “Preview Now”. You should receive an email shortly where you can see how your navigation bar will look for your subscribers when you sent them an email.

From here, you can test if the links in your navigation bar work properly and see how your email looks on different devices.

After you finish creating your navigation bar, we strongly recommend to save the navigation bar block so it’s easier to reuse it in the future and to protect yourself of accidentally deleting the template and your work with it.

If you click on the block you can see a couple of options appear on the left side of the block. Click on the star to save your block.

From the pop-up that will appear, write a name for the block and click “Save”

After you save the block, you can reuse this block in any email template in your Klaviyo Account.

To reuse the block that you saved you need to use the “Saved” block from the email template builder.

Drag and drop the block on the place you want your navigation bar to appear and a pop up will appear where you can search among saved blocks and select which block you want to use.

After you find the block you want to use from the dropdown menu, click on “Insert Block” and the block should appear in your email template.