End-to-end Research, design & development
The ultimate email template feat. Emarsys
The process of developing the email template that impacts 20 million users with 500 million emails delivered annualy
WHO: 70 SOS Children’s Villages Associations
WHAT: Email marketing platform
WHEN: 11/2020 – 06/2021
Summary
Develop a pixel-perfect email template design with various sections and colors that needed to be transformed into a responsive email template and integrated into Emarsys. A piece of cake, you’d say.
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Problem Statement
The tricky part was that this template had to be fully implemented into the Emarsys marketing CRM across the whole SOS Children’s Villages Federation (70 countries, 250 teams). And to make the challenge even greater, the email template also had to be templated and fully editable in the Emarsys native email builder. So, ended up with every heading, paragraph, button, color, picture, and link in this template being editable, plus having the ability to add/remove different sections within the prebuilt templates for:
- Fundraising & Marketing
- Marketing Automation flows
- External Communication Teams
- Intranet Communication
- Thank you, confirmation & error emails for payment and non-payment forms
- HR Responding Emails
Challenges
A. Cross Mail Clients Support
We all know that email templates are challenging to work with because of the code structure they use. In addition, every mail client (Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail) renders the code differently via its own style rules. Therefore, the code has to support all specific requirements to look identical on all mail clients.
B. Responsive design
Responsiveness is almost impossible due to the cross-mail client support and the limited CSS rules.
C. Implementing in Emarsys
I had to use the Emarsys syntax to implement our template and make it modular and editable for the interactive web builder.
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MJML Base
The template was developed with MJML as a component-based design system.
- 7 x Headers
- 5x Footers
- 40 x components
- 15 x templates
Alongside the template, I started facilitating workshops and developing an internal e-learning platform to build knowledge capacities within the teams of email editors for template localization.
- Editing existing templates
- Building new templates from existing campaigns
- Creating custom Emarsys controls with own syntax
- Tracking & marketing automation
The Real Impact
With this project, I provided the digital marketers in the organization with more flexibility, eliminating their need to work with designers and developers to create an email template for their email marketing campaigns. Thus, they can reach more people more quickly and easily. Plus, it saves a lot of resources by freeing up more of the designers’ and developers’ time across the organization.
Knowing that this template will influence more than 100 million people makes me proud of being involved in the project and for earning our client’s trust.
Let’s create something great together.
