I remember looking at the first email where I was asked to edit the code and saying, “What? Why do they have all these tables! And then "fix" it to make it work on my Apple Mail. Somehow, this email got me working on a marketing team to create emails and landing pages. This may sound familiar; it seems most people fall for email marketing. One of the things you don't realize you're also tripping over is creating a lot of emails in a short time. As a developer, this can be a daunting task. Using the right tools can mean the difference between an email that takes all day to create or one that takes 10 minutes. In this blog post, I will share my personal journey from a long process of creating emails to a much shorter one. Hope this inspires you! Dipping my toes in time-saving tools from a developer's toolkit More recently, I have coded pharmaceutical (pharma) emails.
There are a few sectors of email marketing that have huge oversight and tons of requirements, which means you have to be very creative in coding their emails. Pharmacy is one of them. I don't know how many hours I've spent trying to align a footnote exactly or get the font size just right in Outlook. So I was always looking for products or ways to reduce my development time so I could spend more time on the little quirks of email instead. Mail frames E-Commerce Photo Editing Service One of the first things I found was messaging frameworks. They allow you to write a lot less code using their specialized markup language which is then compiled and translated into normal HTML and CSS for your email. Yes, that means you have to learn a new coding language. But once you've done that, you can get whole blocks of code by writing just a few lines. So. Easy. If you don't have time to learn a new language, this might not be for you.
Inliner CSS There are several CSS inlining tools you can use so that your styles can be written once in the head of your HTML and then incorporated throughout the body later. This is important because some email clients will remove CSS styles in the head element, ruining the look of your email. But go line by line to insert style elements for each paragraph, link, etc. was really painful. Automatic inline to win! One of my favorite tools was a Gulp workflow for creating emails that compiled HTML and Sass files into email-ready HTML. However, when I moved to the pharmacy, these tools became less convenient. With all the nuances in the designs (eg one <p> tag might be one color while another <p> tag had to be a different color) I could no longer rely on CSS in the tag <style> or in automatic inlining. I had to manually code the inline styles. So what to do with all of this? At the end of the day, I stored the code snippets (reusable email modules) in a code editor while the templates were placed in a folder on Dropbox. This system cut development time in half. Which is great for a one-person messaging team, but when we started growing the team, the process fell apart.