The Work
I offer solutions and consultancy for building email systems that will get brand designers and marketers both closer to an outcome that addresses their priorities.
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Brand marketers want consistency and visibility for their brand, and maybe also the ability to create occasional new design outcomes.
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Marketers want to be able to deploy tactics and initiatives quickly, without bringing in a designer or an engineer, and they want to be able to access the full suit of their automation platform’s personalisation and data integration features.
Let’s get both priorities working together.
I take a couple of different approaches:
Customise In-Platform Design Tools
Midmarket ESPs usually offer some way to customise their design tool. This might be a templating language for marking up your own HTML, a block within their design tool that allows for some limited HTML, or a hybrid of the two.
The results are sometimes a bit hacky and not always well supported – the platforms would prefer users to stick within the designed parameters of the tool – and someone in the client team will still chafe at the compromises involved.
But we can explore native solutions before looking at third party or bespoke systems
Work in Bridging Tools
Bridging tools are design tools or services that stand separately from the ESP.
Marketers and designers can use them to compose emails – sometimes based on custom code, sometimes using a no-code solution that improves on those in-platform tools.
Sometimes the standalone tools can actually also be found integrated directly into an ESP. The standalone builder tool BeeFree is also used for Braze’s native email designer, for example.
Good examples of custom code based tools are BlocksEdit and Stripo. Each have their strengths and weaknesses.
Bespoke Builder/Compiler Tools
Creating a custom solution allows for tailoring everything around the production of emails to suit your team’s workflows, your marketing tech stack and data integrations, and your brand’s visual presence and language.
I’ve developed a couple of bespoke solutions, and consulted on a few more.
A good scenario is one that gives a marketing team the autonomy to create email designs during the course of their regular week; that reassures the brand team that guardrails are in place; but also that changes, adaptations or new designs can be shipped without either a total overhaul of the tool, or frustrating and unstable hacks being called for.