How do you build HTML emails?
I personally hate writing email HTML and CSS, but my email provider provides some example templates so I just tweaked one to make the emails for my app SongRender. I’m not super excited about digging in further if I have to make any big changes.
Do you just grit your teeth and write the HTML? Do you enjoy it? Are there any tools you use to make it easier?
With great difficulty! I've quite enjoyed using Foundation for emails: https://get.foundation/emails.html
I have a website called travelrsdiary.com and I am in the process of making an app for it. I had the same, issues as you, particularly because my emails contain dynamic content(pictures and text) that were uploaded by the user
I did write html( used one of the plentiful html editors), but I guess I did not find it all that painful ( I am a backend dev and really bad with html)
Build in Mailchimp, export the HTML, then use in whatever tool you want 👍
Oh man, https://mjml.io changed my whole outlook on writing email templates. Instead of writing in HTML, write in MJML and it automatically gives you building blocks for writing responsive emails. once your template is ready, you convert the MJML to HTML so it's totally compatible with everything. They have a cool preview tool where you can see the MJML on one side and the generated HTML on the other
Why not just use something like https://sendwithses.com or https://mailchimp.com ? Both have free plans.
I know there's a lot of nice services out there, that offers this.
SendGrid, for one.
For Sigmetic I simply went with AWS SES and Lambdas for handling emails. They have a nice little template builder where you can write your email markup.
Here's an example of how my welcome message looks:
It gets the job done, I'd say.
But if you need something more advanced, thus tracking pixels and the like, then probably you'd want to use a provider.
SongRender looks pretty nice, by the way 😁