A Simple Yet Powerful Email Builder: Saving Almost 70% of Engineering Bandwidth

Back when I had just completed over a year with Internshala Trainings, we faced a significant challenge that prompted us to rethink our approach to email creation.

Email template building requests were frequent, involved some personalisation, and consumed most of our engineering bandwidth without adding much value. While these tasks were useful for new joiners to learn the constraints of email templates, they were a drain on our resources for the rest of us.

I did some quick research and found that from May 2022 to July 2022, we received 85 email requirements. These took 45 development days to complete out of 65 working days, meaning we spent nearly 70% of our time just building emails.

This was an alarming amount of time spent on something that had no long-term value for engineers, as each email was used only once and rarely reused. It was clear that we needed a better solution.

I realised that every email we created had a few common elements: text only, image only, text on top of an image, a call-to-action button, and a horizontal line. With this realisation, the idea for a tool began to take shape.

Internshala’s Custom Email Builder UI: Easily add common elements like text only, image only, text on top of an image, call-to-action buttons, and horizontal lines to your email templates.

With this concept in mind, I started creating the tool. It took me 5 official development days to work on the back-end and front-end, and a few unofficial hours to polish it. Once the tool was created, the impact was significant:

1. Reduced the learning curve: Various email clients have different rules for displaying email content, requiring custom code for each. Now, this extra learning curve is no longer needed.
2. Time efficiency: The time to create an email dropped from one day to just a few minutes.
3. User-friendly UI: With a simple UI, following a Figma design, any non-tech person could create an email.

Internshala’s Comprehensive Email Builder: Featuring a user-friendly UI with live preview, dark mode, and custom preheaders. Simplifying email creation for our team!

Seamless Image Uploading: Upload and manage images directly within the email builder tool, ensuring efficient and streamlined email template creation.

Flexible Template Management: Easily edit, duplicate, or delete email templates with a few clicks, making customization and updates hassle-free.

The tool included the following features:

1. Live Preview: As team members fill in the details on the left, they can see a live preview on the right. This reduces confusion and allows immediate modifications if something doesn’t look right.
2. Dark Mode: The team can toggle the preview between light mode and dark mode, helping them identify how the email would look to users with dark themes on their mobile devices.
3. Preheader: The option to add a custom preheader to the emails.
4. CSS Support: The tool supports various CSS properties, including height, alignment, padding, font-size, font-weight, line-height, and inline changes.
5. Inbuilt Image Uploading Tool: Team members can directly upload images from the tool, which takes care of adding the image to the correct position, renaming the file, and uploading it to our Cloud Storage (AWS S3).
6. Download File / Copy to Clipboard: Once the template is created, the entire code can be downloaded as an HTML file or copied to the clipboard for use on platforms like Netcore.
7. Edit / Duplicate / Delete Options: These options simplify the team’s efforts in managing templates.

There are still a few missing features or limitations:

1. Adding content in a horizontal flow (row-wise).
2. Adding list items in one go.

However, these limitations never troubled us due to careful planning and new protocols implemented by the design team.

With the design team’s support, we created design protocols that ensured new email templates followed the tool’s limitations. This helped us immensely.

Special thanks to Shubham Singh for helping create the design protocol and implementing it, and Somya Batra for helping curate the requirements, test the tool, coordinate with the marketing team, understand their expectations, and give them walkthroughs.

Now, almost two years later, we haven’t received any email requirements.

In Conclusion

With a simple yet powerful tool, we created a significant impact. We saved:

1. Almost 70% of engineering bandwidth: This time is now invested in improving our product and working on core engineering tasks.
2. Reduced effort from product managers: Less time spent curating requirements and following up.
3. Time efficiency: Creating an email now takes a few minutes instead of a day, allowing the marketing team to create emails at their convenience.
4. Widespread use: This tool is now used by Internshala (IS), Internshala Trainings (IST), and Internshala Student Partner (ISP) teams.

Go Live Date: 12th September 2022

P.S.: Please don’t judge the UI of the email template tool — it was created by me, and I’m not the best at designing.

Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment. Your feedback helps me improve.

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