Recently, we had a call with Nicholas Thiede and Emma Butler to discuss some of the issues we ran into. They recommend we'd do some feature requests to elaborate more on the things we discussed. So here I go :-)
Nicholas and Emma did tell us that an improved version of the editor is in the works. Hopefully, the new version already addresses some of the things I will describe below!
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We use 4 different email templates which we will reuse for all our emails. In our previous mailing tool, these templates would be created by a developer. Styling would be defined in the CSS of the template and the developer would be able to define a layout (similar to predefined layouts in the drag & drop editor) and define several blocks that would fit in that specific layout.
To give you an idea of what I mean:
- The general styling of the email is defined in CSS
- The layout of the email is defined in HTML and by creating so called zones
- The blocks that can be used and dragged into the template are predefined and can have their own CSS and HTML. Think of several variants of a header block each containing a different header image. Or a content block that fits into a specific place in the template.
- The ability to add text or images into blocks is predefined by defining that input from the user is needed for that block
- Which blocks fit into which zones is also predefined
- When you create a new email, you pick a template and all these predefined things are inherited.
- Any changes to the parent template are visible in emails using that template.
An example. Our newsletter template had zones for news items. The news item component had specific styling: a thumbnail image on the left and then a title and a description on the right. When you drag in a news item component, the editor knows (because it was defined) that you have to upload a thumbnail image with specific dimensions, and enter a title and a description. The person building the newsletter does not have to be concerned with getting the image in the correct place or making sure the title has the correct styling. The template does this and the user only has to enter the required data.
Defining zones looks like this:
Resulting in this:
Defining components with properties looks like this:
Basically, it’s the drag & drop editor on steroids. This would be a great addition to ClickDimensions, because:
- When you want to change something in emails that are being reused often (in a campaign automation for example), you don't have to change all the email instances separately. Instead, you would just change the parent template and the changes would be inherited by the emails using that parent template.
- It's a clean way to always provide a certain layout and structure for emails.
- It provides the flexibility to create the email layouts you really want, without losing the ease of use of the drag & drop editor
- The user is guided by the template and does not have to be concerned with styling
This is quite a comprehensive feature request. Feel free to contact me if something is unclear :-)
