More than an email builder: Unexpected ways to use Stripo

Who says the email builder is only for emails? What if an email builder could help you create website banners? 

A while ago, we came across a rather unexpected use case for Stripo. Our client uses the Stripo plugin on its platform to create banners for websites, not just email campaigns. 

This sounded a little strange at first. Stripo is an email builder, after all. But the more we thought about it, the more interesting it became. The same building blocks that help marketers create an email can also be useful for creating other branded visual content. If a tool already solves part of the problem you have, why limit it to the use case written on the label?

Occasionally, clients discover new ways to use familiar tools, and Stripo is no exception. In this article, we’ll explore several unexpected use cases for Stripo along with examples that involve other marketing tools, as shared with us by marketers and business leaders.

Unusual ways to use Stripo: Beyond email design

Let’s begin by exploring unconventional ways to use marketing tools, starting with the Stripo email builder.

Creating visual content beyond emails

The capabilities of the visual drag-n-drop editor make Stripo a versatile tool, thus allowing you to create much more than just email designs. After all, most marketing materials share similar components (banners, logos, contact information sections, and more). You can see this for yourself in the examples below.

• The Stripo editor for website banners 

Our client, Evam, a real-time customer engagement platform, uses the Stripo plugin as an embedded editor for its own clients. Beyond email creation, they also enable clients to use Stripo’s functionality to create website banners.

(Source: Evam)

This actually makes sense because the Stripo editor has everything you need to create a fantastic banner: you can set the required dimensions; upload your own images or use the email modules library; add images, text, links, and buttons; edit everything; and test for mobile devices, accessibility, and appearance in dark mode.

(Source: Banner from the Stripo email modules library)

• Postcard-style email

While we are accustomed to traditional emails, some of our customers use Stripo to create emails designed like small postcards.

“Postcard-style” emails visually resemble classic paper postcards. Their key features include minimal text, a single focal point (a “hero” image), clearly defined block boundaries, and a vibrant call-to-action (CTA) button.

This design is ideal for quick promotions, greetings, holiday wishes, or announcements because it’s easy to grasp in just two seconds on a smartphone screen.

(Source: PostcardMania)

• Letterhead making

For business communication, companies need letterheads that align with their unified branded style used across all their communications. You could commission designers to create them, use a specialized tool like "Letterhead Maker" (which requires uploading all your brand assets), or simply build them in Stripo, especially if you already create emails there and have your brand identity saved on the platform.

For example, I created this Stripo letterhead in just five minutes by using the header and footer elements originally designed for our emails.

• Landing pages with the Stripo editor

Initially, creating landing pages within an email builder seemed like an unconventional use case to us; however, we soon realized its value for marketing teams and added “Stripo Landing Pages” to our feature set.

You can utilize the same drag-and-drop structures and content blocks found in your emails, and reuse existing modules, project color schemes, images, and other elements, thus making it easier to align the landing page with its corresponding email campaign. The page width can be adjusted within a range of 600 to 900 pixels.

Then, the background selected for the template is applied to the space outside the content area. Once the page is ready, share it using the “Landing page view” option.

(Source: Stripo landing page template)

Testing email design decisions

Stripo offers extensive capabilities for testing email designs — including rendering across various email clients, dark mode compatibility, link functionality, and more — directly within the editor. Our clients often use these features not only for email design but also for other web-related assets.

• Stripo for dark mode testing

For example, one company utilized our templates to test it in dark mode. They evaluated various templates across different email clients to see which elements rendered correctly. Then, they proceeded to use only those color combinations that performed well, which helped them save time.

• Selecting and saving effective color combinations for dark mode

In Stripo, you can select background and font colors and save them in the design panel specifically for dark mode — settings that can then be applied to other materials as well.

In other words, Stripo can serve not only as a tool for final email creation but also as an environment for preliminary design experiments. This approach helps validate design decisions before they go into production.

Handling technical email tasks

The Stripo platform was created for more than just developing visual content and testing it across various email clients. Our clients also face various technical challenges.

• Generating OFT files

Stripo offers extensive export options, supporting over 90 ESPs (email service providers) as well as various file formats. In some cases, customers don’t even create an email from scratch in Stripo; instead, they import existing HTML and immediately generate an OFT file, a format required for sending messages via the Microsoft Outlook email client. In this scenario, the editor isn’t used to build an email from the ground up but rather to convert an existing design into the necessary format.

• Exporting HTML email signatures

Our free email signature generator is also used in a similarly targeted manner. A marketer can import a custom-coded signature block, make adjustments, and then export the HTML files that contain that signature.

What can other marketing tools teach us about thinking beyond their purpose?

The examples above show that Stripo can be useful for more than traditional email production. But this way of thinking is not limited to email marketing. Marketers often find unexpected uses for familiar tools when they need to solve a specific problem without adding another platform to their tech stack.

Here are a few examples shared by marketers and business leaders.

Google Calendar as a content management system

The Born to Move team turned Google Calendar into a content registry. Instead of using it only to schedule activities, they created calendar events for published content and added links, performance data, reuse tags, color coding, and reminders. This made it easier for teams in different cities to find successful content, understand how it performed, and adapt it for new markets. According to Malashkin, their content reuse rate tripled in six months.

What’s interesting is how the team adapted a familiar tool to fit its workflow. Instead of adding another content management platform, they used a tool everyone already had access to and organized it around their specific needs.

Replit as a dashboard for custom advertising operations 

The team at Watt Advertising used Replit, an app-building platform, to create a custom marketing infrastructure dashboard for managing over 20 paid advertising accounts for a client.

The dashboard brings together account management, analytics, ticketing and communications, systems, and workflows in one place. Previously, the team had combined Google Sheets, Typeform, Zapier, and other tools to manage a much larger set of advertising accounts. The setup required significant manual work and quality control, so they eventually built their own solution in Replit. The new dashboard gave both the client and the agency better visibility while reducing the time spent managing the underlying systems.

In this case, a tool designed for building applications became a means for a marketing team to create its own working environment. They used Replit to build something around the workflow they already had.

Other interesting examples

The examples above show that marketers don’t always need a new tool to solve a new problem. Sometimes they can adapt a tool they already use to fit a different workflow. 

Here are a few more examples shared by marketing and business leaders:

1. HubSpot as a referral network management tool. LaGrande Marketing uses HubSpot not only for email automation but also to track professional referral networks for law firm clients, including interaction histories, referrals, and follow-ups (Teresa Tran, Chief Operating Officer at LaGrande Marketing).
2. Claude Code as a marketing engine. TalentAid AG uses Claude Code, a tool built for software developers, to support its marketing operations, including blog content, social media, SEO, and localization (Phillip Hamnett, CEO at TalentAid AG).
3. Instagram DMs as a relationship pipeline. Joshua Coleman shared a case where a real estate agent used Instagram conversations to build and manage a relationship with a mortgage broker, eventually turning the conversation into a business opportunity (Joshua Coleman, Founder at Coleman Intellect Inc).

These examples may appear unrelated, but they all follow the same principle: when a tool already has the capabilities you need, its original purpose doesn’t have to define how you use it.

In what unusual ways have you used Stripo?

Have you used Stripo for something beyond creating email campaigns? Share your use case in the comments below. Tell us what problem you were solving, how you used Stripo, and what you achieved.

Your experience could give other marketers an idea they haven't considered yet. We may also feature selected use cases in future Stripo content, thus giving you an opportunity to inspire a wider audience through your approach.

Wrapping up

The most interesting ways to use a tool often come from the people who use it every day, not from its documentation. So, draw inspiration from the methods that marketing teams have already shared with us, and if you've found an unexpected way to put Stripo to work, don't keep it to yourself.