So who are you and what do you do?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m Mark Robbins and I work for Rebelmail where I build interactive and experimental emails.<\/p>\n When did you first get involved with email marketing and design?<\/strong><\/p>\n A little over 2 and a half years ago I got a job at The Learning People<\/a>, where I was tasked with building the HTML emails that account for a large part of the traffic to the site. After a couple of months of this I got curious as to why certain things couldn\u2019t be done. Why can\u2019t I use an <li><\/em>? What\u2019s going to break, which clients will it break in and what will it look like? I started doing my own tests and found a lot more was possible if you spend a little time on it.<\/p>\n The Learning People were great at giving me the opportunity to build my knowledge.<\/p>\n What are some of your favorite tools? And what does your typical design process look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n I love Litmus obviously, the testing I do there is hugely valuable. It\u2019s just not practical to test on that many devices without it.<\/p>\n Kevin, our designer, will work closely with a brand to create a design that makes use of our interactive technology whilst staying true to the brand identity, and that really enhances the email user experience.<\/p>\n Then I have a gulp workflow to build the actual code. I can break my code down into modules and then every time I save it compiles the code and refreshes a preview in the browser. This means I can make a change to the header, footer or even the master CSS and it\u2019ll be applied instantly across all the templates using that module.<\/p>\n What\u2019s your favorite email hack?<\/strong><\/p>\n There are so many I love. It\u2019s one of my favorite things about email, I love that it\u2019s dirty and you have to get creative to make things work.<\/p>\n My overall favourite has to be the checkbox (or radio button) hack<\/a>, it\u2019s what most of the interactive stuff I build is based on. It can really expand the possibilities in email.<\/p>\n What do you see as the biggest challenge in email today?<\/strong><\/p>\n The unknown. When a browser releases a new version they will document the changes and have a beta release available for developers to test on. In email, we don\u2019t know about a change in an email client until someone posts on twitter or the Litmus Community.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve done some pretty impressive email experiments, including a games in email and some interesting Community Contest entries. How do you come up with new ideas to test out?<\/p>\n Ideas can come from anywhere, usually a small comment and it just gets me thinking\u2014how can I put that in an email? How could I push that further?<\/p>\n Justin Khoo, suggested<\/a> putting a score counter in a game so I built ThWack-a-Vole<\/a>.<\/p>\n Andrew King, made a comment<\/a> about Super Mario in an email so I built Mario<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mike Ragan did a great talk about pixel art in email<\/a>, which inspired me to build a dancing Carlton Banks<\/a> (this one takes a while to load).<\/p>\n![\"community-spotlight-mark-robbins\"](\"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/community-spotlight-mark-robbins-250x280.png\")
<\/figure>\n![\"Mark](\"https:\/\/www.litmus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/community-spotlight-mark-robbins-2.png\")