{"id":23593,"date":"2021-02-03T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/?p=23593"},"modified":"2025-12-05T12:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T17:14:11","slug":"10-minute-emails-how-to-save-time-on-email-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/blog\/10-minute-emails-how-to-save-time-on-email-development","title":{"rendered":"10-minute emails: How I save time on development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\t
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I remember looking at the first email I was told to edit the code for and going, \u201cWhat? Why do they have all these tables!?\u201d And then \u201cfixing\u201d it so it worked on my Apple Mail. Somehow, that email got me a job on a marketing team building emails and landing pages. This may sound familiar; it seems like most people stumble into email marketing.<\/p>\n

One of the things you don\u2019t realize you\u2019re also stumbling into is creating a lot of emails in a short amount of time. As a developer, this can be a daunting task. Using the right tools can be the difference between an email taking all day to create or taking 10 minutes.<\/p>\n

In this blog post, I\u2019ll share my personal journey going from a lengthy email building process to a much shorter one. I hope it inspires you!<\/p>\n

Dipping my toes into time-saving tools from a developer\u2019s toolbox<\/h2>\n

Most recently, I coded pharmaceutical (pharma) emails. There are a couple of industries in email marketing that have a huge amount of oversight and tons of requirements, which means you have to get very creative coding their emails. Pharma is one of those. I don\u2019t know how many hours I spent trying to get a footnote to line up exactly, or to get the font size just right in Outlook.<\/p>\n

So I was always on the lookout for products or ways to cut down my development time to allow me to spend more time on the little email quirks instead.<\/p>\n

Email frameworks<\/h3>\n

One of the first things I found was email frameworks<\/a>. They allow you to write significantly less code by using their specialized markup language that then gets compiled and translated back to normal HTML and CSS for your email. Yes, this means you have to learn a new coding language. But once you do, you can get entire blocks of code by writing just a few lines. So. Easy. If you don\u2019t have the time to learn a new language, though, these may not be for you.<\/p>\n

CSS inliners<\/h3>\n

There are several CSS inlining<\/a> tools out there that you can use so your styles can be written once in the head of your HTML and then inlined throughout the body later. This matters because some email clients will strip out CSS styles in the head element, ruining how your email is supposed to look. But going line by line to insert style elements for each paragraph, link, and so on was such a pain. Automatic inlining for the win!<\/p>\n

One of my favorite tools was a Gulp workflow for building emails that compiled HTML and Sass files into email-ready HTML. However, when I moved to pharma, these tools became less convenient. With all the nuances in the designs (e.g. one <p> tag may be one color while another <p> tag had to be a different color), I couldn\u2019t depend on CSS in the <style> tag or automatic inlining anymore. I had to manually code styles inline.<\/p>\n

So what to do in the face of all of this? At the end of the day, I stored the code snippets (reusable email modules<\/a>) in a code editor while templates were put in a folder on Dropbox. This system cut development time in half. Which is great for a one-person email team, but when we started expanding the team, the process fell apart.<\/p>\n

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Learn how to build emails faster with templates<\/strong><\/p>\n

More, more, more emails. Not enough time or resources. Who can relate? Launch a more productive, efficient email workflow with scalable, reusable, and reliable email templates.<\/p>\n

Get your guide \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

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The ultimate in email development efficiency: Litmus Builder<\/h2>\n

I was so happy when Litmus Builder<\/a> came into my life. Builder is set up to handle creating, using, and storing all your snippets and templates to make scaling for teams easy. And their snippets are all housed in one spot in the Design Library<\/a> that\u2019s easily accessible directly from Builder for your whole team to use.<\/p>\n

When combined with the email design system<\/a> that we\u2019ve created at Litmus, we\u2019re able to create most emails in about 10 minutes. And for new or custom emails, the basic framework can be done in that same 10 minutes, leaving more time for coding and testing custom emails and staying up-to-date with ever-changing email clients.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t believe me? I made a video showing the creation of our recent product update email. The whole email took just over 10 minutes to create using snippets, partials, and Visual Editor<\/a> in Litmus Builder.<\/p>\n

See how quick it took me for yourself (and find out what song I jammed out to in the process):
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