This year, email turns 54, and over such a long period of time, the process of how we create emails has undergone many changes. And the main goal of these changes was to simplify the design process. Today, regardless of technical knowledge, any marketer can create a beautiful email that can be filled with various dynamic content, look good on all possible devices, and so on.
However, back in the days, not everything was so easy, and now we will take a short journey that will not only show “how it was before” but also give a glimpse into a new future of email design.
Key takeaways
- The email design process has come a long way from simple, plain text emails that marketers have to code manually to an easy-to-learn process of dragging and dropping necessary blocks and reused content pieces into the editor, with no tech skills required.
- The main problem with the whole email design evolution is that, despite all the innovations it brings, every product and every company strives for its own innovations. Lack of unification creates a disjointed email design experience, where the stack of problems that need to be overcome in different ways keeps growing.
- The advent of AI and its rapid development is becoming a main tool in fixing this disarray problem, by providing marketers with a straightforward email creation process, freeing up their time from the design routine, yet giving them diverse emails where all sources of disjointed design experience and hitches are solved.
HTML email design
Those were simple times, with the simplest emails (that you actually still can see in your inboxes, in one way or another). And while these days you can do them with a snap of your fingers, back then it was hard to do email marketing with these emails without coding skills or having a team of specialists.
Each email was hand-coded. There were no pre-built templates, pictures, fancy animations, interactive buttons, or other features. It was just text. In general, the process of creating emails at that time had several characteristic features.
However, as the whole Web evolved (and evolved rapidly), emails have fallen far behind the web evolution. For example, while the web has embraced styles, emails are still coded in tables, even though it was a common approach at the time for creating full-fledged web pages.
There was a demand for more advanced emails that are easier to make and that provide more robust features.
WYSIWYG email editors
Where there are limitations, there soon appears a desire to overcome them in one way or another. And WYSIWYG email editors are a small step forward in the development of the email design process.
WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get," and it was a response to the request for a simpler process for creating emails. The main idea of such editors was that changes made to emails were instantly reflected in the editor itself. For example, you code an email in the left window, while in the right window, the result of your work immediately appears, and you can clearly see the mistakes you make.
However, creating emails still required technical knowledge, and the road to a better email design experience was still long. Even the main problems remained the same, such as the tabular structure, lack of interactivity, personalization, and so on.
New features like email templates entered the lives of marketers and simplified the design process since the email pre-built template already exists, and all that remains is to edit it to suit the needs. Even though it was a handy solution, it was far from the game-changer that allowed emails to catch up with the rapid development of web technologies.
Interestingly, WYSIWYG editors still have their place, as they really suit mostly B2B business-type emails.
Drag and drop email editors
It’s about time to discuss the current and most common way of creating emails. Drag-and-drop email editors are one of the main periods in the development of the email creation process, which made a shift towards maximum user-friendliness, and which we are witnessing now.
These editors are designed to free marketers from having to understand the code to create beautiful and complex emails. All they need to do is simply drag the necessary elements of the email into the editor, rearrange them, and edit their contents — and it’s done. This is the most intuitive way for creating emails yet, and with the easy way to create emails, advanced emails became more frequent in recipients’ inboxes.
Besides that, drag-and-drop editors opened the doors to more straightforward email tests, exports, and other quality-of-life improvements.
The most interesting thing is that the editors themselves have also undergone their own revolutions, which not only make the process of creating emails faster and more efficient, but also open up new opportunities for creating complex emails faster and more efficiently. These evolutions brought long-awaited advancements in how we portray emails. And we talk about more interactivity, engagement, advanced visual elements, and marketing tools to achieve the needed results. Here’s what we are talking about.
Blocks
Blocks are the cornerstone of drag-and-drop editors and everything these editors were created for. They are intuitive, easy to use, and eliminate the need to code your email (though you can still do that, thanks to the support of code editors in many tools).
Such editors offer sets of all the necessary standard blocks that can be found in an email:
- headers and footers;
- banners and images;
- text and video;
- CTA buttons and menu blocks;
- and much more.
This set alone is enough to support your entire email strategy. But editors have evolved further.
Snippets
Snippets (or as they were previously simply called, modules) open up the possibility of repurposing content by saving it as a snippet and using it in other email campaigns. Imagine that you have your favorite email section with a digest of articles, which consists of many simple blocks. Making it from scratch for each email is quite a hassle.
Snippets solve this problem, since a marketer only needs to make this section once, and then save it as a snippet in the library of modules. After that, this section will always be available for any subsequent email campaign. Yes, the marketer will still need to change the content in it (article titles, descriptions, etc.). But, this is already much less of a headache, isn't it?
Modules
Modules are a much improved version of snippets that, in addition to maintaining the philosophy of reusing content, open up possibilities for more advanced approaches to email creation, with many things modules can do.
For example, modules allow marketers to update dozens of email templates in a few clicks, thanks to synchronized modules, where a change in one template is reflected in all other templates with that module.
You can also make your life easier with smart modules, made specifically for dealing with data. Smart modules pull data from different sources via links and place it into the modules. Thus, you can easily create email content without typing all the data by hand.
And don’t forget about the dynamic content, which allows marketers to create and send highly personalized emails. Create needed content versions, set the rules for display, and save all versions in one module, and voilà, you have a prepared dynamic content piece that will work in any email you place it.
Snippets and modules also bring a lot more things to play with, which can make your email creation process much easier and filled with more advanced designs. We’ve made a full-fledged comparison between snippets and modules, with all their pros, cons, and examples of how each thing works.
The main problem of email design experience, then and now
We’ve described to you a path of how email design experience has evolved over the years. Has it become better and more convenient? Of course, but with one caveat. The main problem has not gone away.
Everyone wants to modernize email, but each in their own way. For example, Microsoft is creating Action Cards to perform various actions directly in emails, Gmail is pushing AMP for interactivity and a web-like experience, Apple is sacrificing analytics for privacy, and Outlook is still rendering emails through Word. Instead of moving forward together towards a common goal, everyone is diverging in different directions towards their ideas of what will be convenient for the recipient. Each big player is pulling the blanket of innovation and setting email design standards.
This is in no way demeaning to the innovations that companies bring to the table. However, the result of this approach is felt by readers, as they receive a disparate experience that email designers have to stitch together by hand.
A single email can have 7+ versions to look the same in different email clients. Meanwhile, developers are forced to use old table technologies (which we mentioned above) to code emails for some email clients, and even creating a basic email feature like a button with a radius can be done differently in different products.
Email editors, whether as independent tools or part of email senders, are constantly trying to find a compromise between all the controversial approaches, innovations, and trends in order to have more options, so that the created emails work in every client, and so that the desired result can be achieved without a mandatory programming diploma.
And that’s what our next evolution chapter aims to solve.
Where will email design evolution lead us?
There’s always room for improvement, and email design experience is loyal to that statement. It would seem that we have achieved the desired — the process of email design has become accessible to any marketer, regardless of their technical knowledge. You can create emails of any complexity and not even look at the code editor. But the industry is now going even further, thanks to the advent of AI.
Prompt-to-email design approach
AI is becoming more accessible and easy to use, we are trying to make it an assistant in all areas, and email design has long been no exception. At first, there were modest attempts in the form of generating subject lines using AI. A fairly simple task, isn't it?
After that, as AI gradually developed, it became possible to edit and generate text not only in individual blocks, but also in entire email structures based on the email context.
And this is what we at Stripo and the industry as a whole are striving for. The main idea is to eliminate any process of email design to the format we are all accustomed to. A marketer should be engaged in strategy, analysis, idea generation, and creating emails, even with current simplifications, which still takes up precious time.
There is only a marketer and their need for certain emails, which should be the basis of an email marketing strategy. And there is AI, which should cover this need.
Stripo is believing and working in this direction, and we already have some developments — AI Assistant. This is a tool that uses AI to generate emails that can then be edited, saved, and used for marketing strategies. However, AI does not create emails out of nothing. It needs two ingredients: prompts and modules. While prompts set a general task for AI, modules serve as the necessary context for GenAI, allowing it to precisely direct its creative abilities.
That’s what our AI Assistant is all about. It’s a full-fledged tool for generating emails, and modules are at the core of the whole feature. You type the prompt in the dedicated field to give GenAI a description of what you want it to generate.
However, as with any development, there will always be obstacles on the way to perfection. Currently, AI can easily use already created modules to construct an email, and then one of the main problems is solved — all emails are guaranteed to have all the necessary design elements in accordance with the brand and are written with proven code that works in all clients.
But there’s another problem, as emails are created very similarly. Yes, this problem can be solved by creating and maintaining a large library of modules. However, this again brings us back to the fact that the marketer begins to spend more time on the routine of email design instead of strategic tasks. What we ran away from, we ran into again.
But what if AI could combine and expand existing modules, making different variations, solving both problems? For example, the trending products section can be made into modules with this design.
Or create something like this. The main purpose of the block has not changed, but the design has become fresher.
AI can do this if it operates not with ordinary HTML, but with a high-level model that describes the email, vaguely speaking, at the UI level when we operate with structures, containers, buttons, menus, and so on. It is quite easy for AI to give a command like “Make the text in the main CTAs more catchy” or “Create a digest of articles in a chess style when the first block has a picture and text, while the second one has text and picture.”
This is very similar to the Copilot approach, which is widely used by developers, but at the marketing level and not at the code level. This is the core of the prompt-to-email design concept, which is gradually evolving into this way of creating emails.
This approach that we're actively developing is aimed not only at helping marketers produce emails faster. It also helps marketers create whole email campaigns, while technical catches and nuances are hidden from them behind the curtain, where AI is dealing with them. While a marketer is responsible for strategic thinking, AI is responsible for the technical part, so the marketer doesn’t need to even remember the problems we mentioned above.
You can read more about our first steps in the prompt-to-email approach and how the AI Assistant works in our dedicated article.
Wrapping up
This was a great throwback to what email design was like then, how it’s doing now, and what new heights it can achieve in the near future. Without looking back, it’s hard to create innovations that make the lives of email marketers easier. They came a long way from coding emails from scratch to just dropping necessary content pieces into editors and saving them for later use. And now, we are on the verge of a new revolution in how we create emails.
AI is aimed at increasing email design simplicity, freeing marketers’ time on more important matters, while providing them with diverse, complex, and fast email design, unifying all the previous industry achievements in terms of the email design process.