Why are Email Builders so Hard to Use?
So you're getting ready to launch your e-commerce store and you have everything ready. You've built your site, you have product ready and supply chain process ironed out, and all you need to do is set up some marketing emails. Sounds easy, right?
Not so fast. You open up Klaviyo or Mailchimp (or another preferred email builder) and start trying to build templates, but everything feels clunky and weird. You can't find any of the fonts you like. You can't add spacers or content blocks as easily as you could on your website. And figuring out how to manage the data fields on the receipts is going to make your head explode!
Maybe it's just this email builder. Maybe you just picked a bad one. But after doing some research, it becomes clear that they're all kind of like this. So what gives? Why are email builders so weird and hard to use?
The short answer is that the issues are related to email itself. The tools we use to open our emails are all a little bit different, and your email must be built for the lowest common denominator so that all viewers can receive it cleanly. As a result, there are a lot of limitations on how an email can be built and styled.
Email Rendering
All email templates are built using HTML, and a tool called "rendering engine" is required to take those lines of code and turn them into the visual display you see in your inbox. Email rendering is an incredibly complex process, and there can be up to 30,000 different ways that a single email can be rendered.
Here are a few factors that impact rendering:
Whether the receiver opens the email on a desktop app (Outlook) or web app (Gmail)
Whether the receiver opens the email on a phone or computer
Whether the receiver allows images to load images automatically
Text size settings on the receiver's device
Fonts that the receiver is allowed to download
Since there are so many factors that impact rendering, an email you create can look very different to many of the people you send it to. In order to reduce the risk of your email showing up poorly or incorrectly formatted, it's best to follow a few best practices.
Best Practices
I recommend keeping your email design clean and simple in order to avoid formatting issues on different email apps and devices.
Here are some guidelines:
Static, table-based layouts <-- this is why email builders allow much less layout flexibility than website builders
Template width of 600px - 800px
Web safe fonts <-- this is why email font options are usually very limited. Arial is a recommended easy-to-read font!
Hopefully these best practices will help you understand the limitations on email formatting and help you build emails that look great and render cleanly across the internet! For a full list of limitations and guidelines, check out this Mailchimp article.
Bennett
