Thread

We are getting active on using custom HTML for email marketing and were curious what applications were a good compromise between ease of use and capability.

We are using a hybrid model where a professional HTML coder creates our overall HTML Template for a given marketing campaign, and then we want to be able to edit the main text and tweak it for the different groups we would be marketing to, as well as specials, etc.

Of course I’m checking to see what our pros are using, but we welcome additional input from other more experienced people.

Thank you in advance.

Blossom

Blossom,

I can only speak for our team at Email on Acid, we use Dreamweaver and write our HTML code from scratch.  This is the only way that we have been able to achieve good results when designing and developing emails that render correctly across each of the most popular email clients. 

In order to be certain that your emails render correctly, you can always use our test to make sure your application is writing clean code.

Cheers!

I use Coffee Cup HTML Editor for creating e-flyer designs. It is less of a hard core “professional” product than Dreamweaver but it is more user friendly (and you can get a legal copy of it a lot cheaper than Dreamweaver).

Coffee Cup allows you to switch between a WYSIWYG tab, where you see the email as it will appear and can edit it visually (similar to editing a Word document), and an HTML tab, where you can edit the HTML itself.

Generally it is best to steer clear of the WYSIWYG pane as editing it like this can create bad HTML and make the email show up wrong in some email clients. But if you have had the template professionally designed and just want to edit some text it might be OK.

Alternatively, if you get the designer to put place holders in the HTML markup e.g. “[insert body text here]” then you could edit the HTML directly without having to understand HTML.

For a cheaper(free) but less powerful alternative to Dreamweaver, Microsoft do a programme called Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer, it has its flaws but considering that it is free it can be a useful tool.

Thanks for all of the great suggestions..!

I usually do the markup for all my emails in Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/)