Emma (Campaign Monitor)

Bringing drag-and-drop (🐉💧) to email

One of the first projects I worked on while at Emma was their mailing campaign editor which represented the core of the application. This project allowed us to establish a new visual language that could be used in future experiences.

Challenge

When I began this project, customers who wanted a custom email template had to correspond with a project manager and wait for a designer and coder to turn around an artifact. It was a slow, archaic process that nobody enjoyed. Our mission was clear: craft an intuitive DIY email builder that anyone could use.

Simple table layout of campaigns

The first iteration of the drag-and-drop editor

Sliding template drawer with prebuilt and custom templates

Details of the editor that I obssessed over in CSS

Outcome

The drag-and-drop email editor was among the first of its kind. Only Mailchimp had a similar construct, but in side-by-side tests, our editor worked better in more use cases. This was in part because I worked very closely with the developers and helped push code (mainly HTML + CSS, but also plenty of JavaScript interactions) to make sure everything performed perfectly.