AKAutomating Email Development
Has anyone tried automating email development?
I work for a medium/large agency. We have a huge client base and email is starting to become the base of all of our products that we offer our clients. We recently had a 10x increased workload. Instead of hiring a ton of developers to hand code everything, we templated out our products. But still it's not enough to keep the time spent.
We currently use adobe products throughout the agency and I don't see that changing seeing as how we work with designers/copywriteres daily. Has anyone tried automatiion?
We already implemented automation on the design side. They use photoshop and excell to feed in information for graphics. Wondering if this could be done with code.
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks email friends!
Hi Alyssa,
Nice to be in touch with email geek!
Email Automation and Coding projects has been flooding recently.
We have done a lot of projects on Salesforce - Pardot and Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, MailChimp, and several ESP's for design,coding and Automation. Perhaps on Adobe as well some time back if I recollect. Please share more details and I'd get it checked on how best we can help on this line!
Regards,
Florence, QeInbox.com
Right now my team uses Adobe Dreamweaver to develop emails. It's used across our entire agency since we work so closely with designers so I know switching probably won't go away anytime soon.
I've done little research and was told javascript and other programming languages can help but my team and myself included were designers before we became developers. So back end coding is not our strongest
Have a look at knak as it supports agencies really well and would allow you to support Pardot and Marketo clients, Also I would consider using figma for quick mockups for the client and then use knak to rapidly create them with coding knowledge and they can be easily deployed directly to Marketo and copy and paste html to Pardot and then just add your pardot regions, repeatables and removeables. I don't work with Knak but I have used their product and for an agency its a great fit without having to have a expensive dev team to support email dev and design.
Brian,
Does knak implement images, text, as well as links as well? We already can create the template part pretty easily. It's carrying that template across hundreds of clients filling in address, phone, images, copy, etc. That seems to be where we struggle.
Yes Alyssa it does allow for Images, text and links as well. The key is to setup flexible modules that allow clients to personalize the content as they need too.
Also, Taxi for Email is a great tool that enables stakeholders to utilize templates to create their emails: https://taxiforemail.com/
Hi Alyssa! Our team went through this challenge about a year ago. In the end, I actually built a tool for our team which can take the clunky Photoshop "Save For Web" version of a template, and turn it into a responsive email template.
It does this by crawling through the DOM of the original output, and building a new DOM in the structure required for our normal email templates. So while it's not quite as pretty as a WYSIWYG editor, it is still quite powerful for our team and saves them from even really having to touch any HTML code.
Hi Alyssa,
A place to start is by taking an inventory of your current production process.
Identify the most time-consuming, repetitive tasks — whether that's asset preparation and optimization, copy and content, or spinning up templates from (hopefully) your library of snippets and partials. It's much easier to approach things in chunks and learn ways to batch or automate those, rather than expecting to automate your entire process in one fell swoop. Work up to that.
Once you know your biggest bottlenecks, you've got options. If it's related to Adobe products there are scripts and image processors. For templates, you might want to adopt some task runners like Gulp or Grunt to handle the tedium of compiling css or optimizing images, or sending tests to your favorite QA platform.
A bunch of email geeks have written on the subject and many have built and shared open-source tools like:
Lee Munroe's Grunt Email Design Workflow
MJML
Zurb's Foundation for Emails
Chris Coyer has a great write up about these and other methods over on CSS-tricks
In addition, a lot of tools like Litmus and EOA have aspects of this built in for snippet/partial management, which can speed things up and streamline maintenance.
Another step from there, might be ultimately rolling your own build tool, based on a static site generators like Jekyll (ruby), Eleventy (node.js), and others. Personally, we've been using a mix of Jekyll and Python for almost a year to build certain emails with our content editors working directly in a Google Sheet and we pull their content into templates via Google's API, then Jeykll handles the build and inlines our css too. The thing to remember is that automation can sometimes come with a significant upfront time investment (and can be frustrating along the way!) but the time you'll save on the other side, plus the lack of errors, and ease of maintenance will pay off with interest.
Always happy to geek out more on the topic. Find me on Email Geeks Slack.