I'm managing around 30 transactional email templates, and updating them is quite a hassle. Just changing the footer requires me to go through all 30 files. The same goes for updating a call-to-action. Most email builders out there focus on campaign workflows, allowing you to design, export to your email service provider, and send. However, I'm looking for something more akin to a headless CMS:
- I want templates stored centrally and fetched via API.
- A visual editor so that the marketing team can make updates without relying on developers would be ideal.
- It would be great to have variables for dynamic content.
- If a shared section is updated once, all templates should automatically reflect that change.
Our emails are triggered from our app rather than sent through a typical ESP campaign flow, so the usual builder to ESP process doesn't really suit us. Has anyone tackled this issue, or are people just managing raw HTML in their codebase?
2 Answers
You might want to consider using two different systems for this. It's common to keep the layout and components in code using something like React Email or MJML, and then let your marketing team edit the copy through a CMS. The idea of a single visual editor with an API that manages everything sounds appealing until you face issues like debugging in Outlook.
I'm actually working on a solution for a similar requirement for my SaaS. I'd love to get some feedback on it if you're interested!
Sure, I’d be happy to help! Are you looking at a visual editor or a code-first approach?
That's a valid point. It works well when developers manage the templates, but the real struggle arises when marketing needs to change more than just copy. Then it's back to square one with dev tickets.