Voodoo Manufacturing: Creating High Power Custom HTML Emails
Jan 2018 - Feb 2018
Goals
- Quickly creating marketing emails that look good across email clients
- Creating a flexible and extensible codebase
- Working with the limitations of email clients such as Outlook
Project Overview
Voodoo manufacturing is a 3D printing company who needed multiple marketing email designs coded out. My job was to take the PSDs and turn them into beautiful responsive emails.
Voodoo Email Examples
Simple Google map, though it's not dynamic since JavaScript isn't allowed in emails for security reasons.
Order summary table that is populated server-side then sent as an HTML email.
Process
I don’t do emails very often and only take them if they are from scratch. Why exactly? Emails are notoriously difficult due to the technology limitations and rendering engines used by applications like Outlook. For these, I used a framework called Inky by Zurb.
The goal of Inky is to utilize modern build tools such as SCSS and an auto-inliner. With these tools, the process was very similar to building out basic HTML templates with some styling. Emails can’t do much, and JavaScript(interactivity) is limited, so this part of the process was straightforward.
The real challenge came with template testing, which was most of the work. Gmail, Yahoo, and other popular email clients were fair in terms of rendering. The real problem came when testing for Outlook, which sucked most of the time. Inky takes care of a lot, but a large chunk of time was spent making the custom design work with wonky rendering quirks.
TL;DR
Build out the initial template, then do cross-service testing for Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. Repeat for each template.
Voodoo Manufacturing
I had a great experience working with Brandon. He asked all the right questions and kept me updated throughout the duration of the project. He completed the project right on schedule and everything turned out perfect!
Technologies Used
Inky
Inky uses a build process(gulp or webpack) for auto-inlining and SCSS compilation. This allows email rendering engines to be happy without having to manually inline every line of HTML. Thank god!
Other Tech
Besides Inky, other skills included CSS/SASS, HTML, and responsive media queries.
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