How useful are email editors and newsletter kits?

Useful work relief or source of extra work?

If you don't want to rely solely on the email editor or the templates of your mailing tool when creating newsletters, you can't avoid using an external program. These email editors, newsletter kits and builders make marketers more independent of their delivery solution. Especially when a company uses several shipping tools or is about to change tools, they provide an alternative solution to the problem that the HMTL code from the CMS editors of shipping tools can often only be exported to a limited extent and is portable between editors. In addition, an external editor allows service providers such as graphic artists and copywriters direct access to HTML emails, but not to sensitive areas of the sending system, such as contacts or reports.

At the same time, a tool specialized in email creation should save time and effort. In practice, however, the opposite is the case with some programs. Another aspect: External editors can help to correctly display emails on all or at least as many clients as possible (such as Outlook, Apple Mail or Gmail) — a challenge that the sending solutions themselves are often unable to cope with sufficiently. In summary, there are three benefits for marketers:

• Independence from the email marketing platform
• Making work easier in email production
• Testing the display on various email clients

At Publicare, too, we are constantly looking for editors to make work and testing easier for our email programmers. That is why we have tested some of the most popular kits and email editors at the moment, which we will discuss in detail in the next articles — here is a first overview:

Drag & drop solutions

Simply click together emails without programming knowledge using drag & drop — this is what modular solutions such as Stripo, Taxi for Email, BEE free or EmDesigner. The principle: The user defines a higher-level layout (or uses a template) and then adapts each individual section — with layout, headline, text, image, etc. This allows a certain amount of freedom, but also means that adjustments must then be made at all individual points. As the range of functions and settings increases, some solutions quickly become confusing. And yet everything can never be adapted completely at will, because building kits naturally set limits at some point. The generated HTML code is also not always completely perfect, as is the supposedly effortless import into your own shipping tool.

Who are these newsletter kits suitable for?

For marketers who do not have the skills or time in their team to write responsive email HTML themselves, these kits can achieve at least part of the benefits of an external editor. For diehard programmers, however, none of the tested drag-and-drop solutions is a serious option due to their many limitations.

Read our detailed reviews of the following tools here: Beefree, Stripo, Dyspatch & Tabular; Designmodo Postcards, Dragit.io, Pilotmail, Publicate, Topol.io & Unlayer; Taxi for Email & EmDesigner, June.app

Solutions with ready-made HTML templates

An alternative to drag and drop kits are providers such as Foundation or Litmus Templates (only accessible via a Litmus account), which offer HTML templates that can be adapted to your own purposes in almost any way you want. So you don't have to start your programming from scratch, but can build directly on a template. Although the templates barely restrict the HTML programmer, the point is reached very quickly where adapting the template is more complex than “freestyle” programming. This depends heavily on how individual the design of your own newsletter should be and how high the quality standards are: Does the email really have to look perfect on every email client and every system, or can minor errors or discrepancies in the presentation be tolerated? Be careful: Even though the templates are advertised as “tested”, there is no guarantee that the HTML code created with them will also work properly in your own shipping system — you should definitely test that before you get started!

Who are HTML template builders suitable for?

We generally only recommend these solutions for users who have sufficient email HTML knowledge to customize the templates themselves. If you don't always need 100% perfection, you can save yourself a lot of work with such templates.

Email editors with previews

For marketers with good HTML skills who write their email code themselves, the use of browser-based platforms such as Litmus Builder or Email on Acid Email Editor , which are better text editors to start with: They offer help with writing in HTML, just like jEdit or any other text editor that you can use to create HTML. In addition to simple coding helpers, they show a direct preview of the creation of the email HTML and can also test the display in many email clients at the same time. In this way, you not only see client-specific problems, but also immediately notice whether an adjustment in favor of one client has a negative effect on another. With these tools, you either start directly from scratch or you look for a template and adapt it accordingly.

Who are these editors for?

If you program your emails yourself, you get integrated preview and test options in one — a clear added value that we at Publicare are happy to use. But: Without in-depth email HTML knowledge and knowledge of the peculiarities of the different email clients, these programs are losing ground.

External editors offer some basic benefits. Which variant is right for you depends on your email marketing requirements: the program must match your working method, skill level and your own requirements.