Email UX is often judged only after a message reaches the inbox. Teams look at how it displays on mobile, whether the call to action is easy to find, and whether the content is clear at a glance. But by that stage, many of the decisions that shape the recipient’s experience have already been made.
It might help to recognize that many judgments people make about whether an email looks, feels, and behaves well enough to open and read happen before the email is even completed and sent.
Marketers who struggle to manage space, reproduce approved parts of email campaigns, check how emails look on mobile devices, and create accessible content are fighting with more than an inefficient email editor. Many of the judgments that email recipients make about the usability, consistency, and readability of marketing emails are made before the email has even been opened – during the composition process.
The First UX Problems Appear Inside the Editor
While it might seem simple to create an email with a title, a picture, some copy, and a button, the person creating the message must consider many additional factors. Marketers must also ensure the email looks and functions correctly across a variety of email clients and devices. This can mean, for example, ensuring images are sized appropriately to prevent distortion or poor appearance on a mobile phone.
The editor itself also defines the UX of email creation. In software products, customers usually create emails within the platform itself. Therefore, the creation experience needs to fit into the product’s existing workflow and interface. To avoid building another email editor from scratch, a white label email builder can be integrated into the product.
At first glance, it might seem like a good idea to reduce clicks as much as possible. However, every switch between tools and systems can pose problems. First, errors are likely. Copying information, for example, is error-prone.
Furthermore, inconsistencies can arise. When users have to switch between different systems to complete a task, design decisions may not be consistent enough. Last but not least, duplicated work is a risk.
These small issues can also cause major trouble. If a marketer can’t reuse approved headers, footers, or content sections, they will have to rebuild them. If a marketer can’t check how the email will look on mobile while editing, they won’t catch potential design problems until late in the review process. And if a marketer has to manually readjust typography and spacing in every campaign, brand consistency relies on the marketer’s memory of the brand’s design guidelines.
Testing creation processes is fairly straightforward. Sit with a marketer and make a new campaign, and see how many times they repeat the same steps:
● How often do marketers choose between different button styles?
● How often do they have to re-create company-approved footers?
● How often do they have to manually resize images in order to insert them?
● How often do they have to copy legal text from previous campaign emails?
Standardize the few building blocks of your email campaigns and then scale. This could be approved headers and footers, for example, or even default type styles for links and buttons, or a number of different reusable layouts for typical messages such as onboarding, updates on products or services that the customer has purchased, and event-based communication (e.g., for abandoned carts or newsletter sign-ups).
These are creation problems. But recipients will feel the effects.
Better Creation UX Balances Freedom With Guardrails
Simply giving users more control in email editors can produce even more inconsistent emails instead of solving problems.
By defining how to create and design emails in your application, you can make sure that your users are able to produce the highest quality emails possible by limiting the scope of possible design choices. In other words, common tasks should be easy to complete, but you should limit the ways users can create less-than-optimal email designs.
Typically, the aspects of an email that change most for each campaign (copy, images, content sequence) should be easy to customize. Lock down brand identity, legal text, and the design of buttons, footers, and spacing between elements.
That distinction can be turned into a simple working rule:
● Lock or standardize elements that affect brand identity, compliance, or basic usability.
● Make campaign-specific content easy to edit without touching the underlying structure.
● Use reusable content blocks for frequently used content such as product cards, customer testimonials, event announcements, and account information updates.
● Make preview and validation available and fully integrated into your editing experience, not as an afterthought.
Include accessibility in content creation. As mentioned previously, adding alt text to images is much easier when the field is visible during content creation, rather than as an afterthought for an audit. Instruct the content creator to add alt text to all informative images as part of the normal process of adding images to a template. Also, tell the content creator whether text and button labels should be readable in color-coded-only interfaces.
To add accessibility requirements to your templates, make sure image fields require alternative text in the editor, that important information isn’t presented only in images, that text and button labels are readable without relying on color, and that color contrast is sufficient for readability.
Seeing how your email looks on desktop, mobile, and even in dark mode is crucial. It can reveal issues that you wouldn’t have spotted had you stuck to the edit view. A long heading may look OK in edit view but look terrible on mobile. An image could look so much better surrounded by copy rather than taking up half the email.
It is much better to check how your email looks at every stage of production rather than wait until you finish composing it. This will allow you to check the layout of your email after you have set up the basic structure of content and then again after you have added all of the copy. It is also a good idea to check personalization separately for missing values that could create an awkward greeting or even a blank sentence.
This is why creation UX is closely tied to recipient UX. The more you can identify and fix these problems during creation, the less rushed your final review will be.
However, as B2B email marketing extends to onboarding, nurture programs, transactional messages, such as product announcement emails, and account-based marketing, programs will likely consist of multiple messages. Each message can have a unique objective, but all require email design and content. The creation process should therefore facilitate repeated use of the same design elements, controls, previews, and reusable content.
Make the Final Check the Send Button
The final review should confirm design choices and make sure everything looks correct, but by that time the team should already know how the email will look on a small screen, whether reusable elements have been used correctly, whether personalization has been inserted correctly, and whether meaningful images have appropriate alternative text.
A practical pre-send review can include a number of questions to answer during the creative process:
● Does the main message still come through within a few seconds?
● Does the hierarchy still work on a very small screen?
● Are buttons clearly labeled, and do they clearly state what will happen after clicking?
● Have all personalization fields been checked for sensible fallbacks?
● Has someone else also looked at the email without images or in a dark design?
Late-stage corrections can be expensive and easy to overlook. So a broken layout discovered at final approval could require extra design time, more reviews, and even more test sends.
If we build the checks into the workflow of creating content, repeating quality is much easier than having Marketers spend time fixing things in production that could have been caught earlier and that others have to review. In reviews, teams want to focus on the email’s substance and make sure it clearly conveys the message and supports the action you want recipients to take.
Find the Friction Before the Final Review
Look for the same three patterns of pain and friction in your workflow and ask these questions:
1) What do you keep fixing over and over in your final review?
2) What do you keep rebuilding?
3) What are you remembering to do that you wish you didn’t have to remember?
These are typical pain points that, when addressed, will have the greatest impact on your workflow. Instead of focusing on where to add more approval steps, focus on the points where you currently have to fix design errors repeatedly. Where do you consistently make minor design changes? Where do you find that you need to re-create something that you already have?
Rather than focusing on all the new approval stages created by a worse process, it is more valuable to focus on the specific process issues you can fix.
While a faster email editor is better, speed is not the ultimate goal. Instead, better email UX means supporting good decisions with a workflow that helps teams make good choices from start to finish.
When you send an email to a recipient, they will only see and interact with the final email and not with the editor, reusable content blocks, preview options, or design restrictions that were in place when you created the email. All of that was behind the scenes to help you create a good email.
