Show HN: Drag/Drop Email Template Creator for Transactional Emails

Show HN: Drag/Drop Email Template Creator for Transactional Emails(klaviyo.com)

34 points by bialecki 13 years ago | 16 comments

eob 13 years ago |

I'm happy any time I see web design/development moving into the web browser and out of text files. It feels like the natural progression of things.

Some comments:

- The example email (Weekly Summary) made me think "SPAM!" as soon as I saw it, because it looks like the kind of email that Twitter sends me and goes straight to my trash bin. On the other hand, I imagine there are a lot of use cases where summary emails are welcomed.

- Other than that, the image does a good job communicating the features you provide. I'm left wondering where the data comes from though. Do I upload a file? Integrate with my back-end?

- I was confused when the iPhone image showed template tags instead of a rendered result. Are you trying to imply that I will be editing templates using my mobile? That seems weird. If you're trying to show that your design templates are responsive, maybe just show the rendered version of the previous Weekly Summary template on an iPhone.

- Site looks slick -- I like it!

- Seeing this make me think that it would be cool for some If This Then This-style framework / API that hooks into your back-end and generates mails automatically. That would enable people to send me the emails that I enjoy reading, like "SoAndSo just cheered you on FitBit".

gnud 13 years ago | |

> I'm happy any time I see web design/development moving into the web browser and out of text files. It feels like the natural progression of things.

I'm often not. I'm not talking about this tool specifically (it looks very nice, and I havn't tried it), but when tools move away from text files, we tend to lose important facilities like "replace image A in all our email templates with image B".

eob 13 years ago | | |

This is very true.

But if you buy into the "browser will become the runtime for most things" argument, you'll be able to do this within your browser-based HTML editor, too, one day.

felipe 13 years ago |

This is an excellent concept that targets a real pain-point I faced many times, which is: How to properly lay-out or template emails without the pain of actually sending transactional emails through SMTP and looking at them in the client (Gmail, mobile, etc...). This also prevents designers and programmers to collaborate, so your concept would allow designers and marketeers to design and change email layouts independently from the programmer, which is another pain-point for non-developers.

Having said that, it seems that you expect the app to use your SMTP, and IMHO that's a deal-breaker. Once an app or company is already using a SMTP provider, changing to an unknown one (which could impact deliverability and so on) is a deal-breaker. However, if you provide a tool that somehow the marketing dept can change templates which then the developers can somehow fetch into the source codebase, now that would be (I think) a good value.

I am a software developer (not a designer nor marketeer) so I may not be the target user for this tool, but I think it would be valuable for developers too.

bialecki 13 years ago | |

Sorry, I think there's some confusion (you're not the first person). This tool is just to create the HTML. Our subscription email service allows you to send email, but the email creator is just for creating templates. Basically we took a feature and made it public and free -- our way of trying to make email a little better for everyone.

Create your template, save it, copy the HTML, and do with it what you want.

We're also talking with some email as a service companies about how we can integrate this with their service/app.

felipe 13 years ago | | |

That's excellent! I got confused because as I was looking at your web site I saw the "Pricing" link at the bottom and assumed that was the price of the tool. Maybe you could create a separate web site to help clarify this point?

niftylettuce 13 years ago |

https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates

https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints

scottmotte 13 years ago |

Love the copywriting above the fold. It is very personable, communicates a need to me that I didn't know I had, and tells me it can solve that need (all in a quick read).

eli 13 years ago |

It would be really nice if I could start using the tool before giving you my email address.

bialecki 13 years ago | |

We're working on it. We wanted to allow for saving, so that's why we ask for an email.

eli 13 years ago | | |

Totally makes sense, but if you can hold off on bugging them until they actually need to save (or maybe until 10 minutes have passed, whichever comes first) I think you'll be better off.

navs 13 years ago |

I love the drag and drop HTML development idea. I'm curious whether there's any open source libraries out there or open sourced projects that can help me develop something similar. Any suggestions?

MasterScrat 13 years ago |

I really like the look of your site. Did you make it yourself from Bootstrap, or is it a template?

dirkdk 13 years ago |

Just disabled. Too much HN love? :)

somid3 13 years ago |

love the ease by which I can set a template. nice