Actually, there are 3 ways to create an emailing.

A brief overview of the 3 major ways of designing an email and the advantages/disadvantages of each configuration.

1. Your routing tool and its "builder" functionality

Now all (or almost all of them) emailing tools offer an "email builder" function for designing emails using drag and drop.
When you dig a little (and this is our goal when we attend tool demonstrations to update our benchmark guide to campaign management tools), there are several types of email builder :

Builder with template library

Some tools offer a library of "ready-to-use" templates with several types of emails: promotion, newsletter, event, birthday, welcome, satisfaction... We "just" have to choose the template we like the most and adapt the visual texts.

Advantages / Disadvantages:
+ No design and integration costs. The builder is included in the license.
+ A library of templates to inspire.
- You are obliged to respect the predefined structure of the email
– Emails that are not 100% adapted to your needs in terms of sending strategy nor to your graphic charter.

Builders integrating your own template

Other tools do not offer a library (or a smaller one) but a custom integration of your own template.

• In this category, we must distinguish the tools that design and integrate a template to your colorsYou can use it by dragging and dropping it into the builder.
• Then there are the tools that accept thatan outside agency designs the email layout but wishes to integrate themselvesYou can cut them into blocks so that you can drag and drop them into their builder.
• Finally, some tools accept that an agency design AND integrates a template email and then they take over to cut it into blocks so you can use them by drag and drop in their builder.

Advantages/ Disadvantages:
+ There are design and integration costs when the template is set up. But after that it is without additional cost.
– There is often a lack of flexibility and limitation in the manipulation of these tools (no possibility to display background images, difficulty in moving blocks, mobile display problem...). This leads to frustration because the emails that come out are not the ones that were imagined at the beginning. In the end, we waste a lot of time trying to create the email we imagined when the goal is to save time!
+ Emailings consistent with your graphic charter (since it is your own template)
– The creative spirit is your responsibility

2. A communication agency external

Or your router's Studio department, or your company's Créa department.

In these cases, it is therefore a third party who created the design and integrates email. Simply import the images and copy and paste the HTML code into your routing tool.

Advantages / Disadvantages:
+ Your time is spent on the brief and the back and forth. You can focus on the editorial content of your emailing.
+ You benefit from the creative spirit of a designer!
– Beware: some agencies are generalists and don't specialize in the email channel. And, as you know, email is not the web! So if your agency isn't at ease with this channel, it will provide you with code that won't be of excellent quality, which won't escape the ISPs/Webmails. (and thus problem of possible rendering, problem of deliverability possible... and all the rest...) (By the way, in our emailing diagnosticsWe have already found an agency that repeated the same code over and over again with traces of Mailchimp... It smells like an agency not too experienced in email...)
– The design time is about 4 days even if the agency proposes to realize the email in 24h/48h (hello emergency tariff :-)). But 4 days can be a long time in emailing! If you want to change a price, a news item or a visual at the last minute, you risk losing responsiveness.
+ If you send out a lot of campaigns in a month, it can get pretty expensive. Let's say the cost of an email (design+integration) often comes down to the cost of a monthly license for a tool such as email builder, where at that price you can create a ton!

3. A tool dedicated to template creation: the email builder

In recent years tools focused solely on drag-and-drop email creation have been created. Proof that there's a hole in the wheel at this level among routers.

A longer time is taken at the beginning to define your needs in terms of mailing strategy and design:

• Do you have different brands or different types of shipments to manage?
• Do you have to respect different graphic charters?
• Do you have specific needs? multi-language? multi-user? customization variables in certain blocks? your tracking tags automatically set up in your links?
• What options do you want? Do you want only the colors and fonts that match your design to appear?
• What practical aspects would you like to have? your own picto bank? your own visual bank?
• Which live content blocks? gif, video, countdown, mosaic, integration of visual in a visual...?

In short, we ask you a lot of questions in order to meet your needs as closely as possible. The goal is to produce elegant emailings that correspond to your graphic charter in a minimum of time.

Advantages / Disadvantages:
– You pay a higher set-up cost.
+ You then pay a monthly license fee. When you send several emails per month it pays off quickly!
+ These tools are very flexible and therefore easy to use.
+ They correspond to your mailing strategy and your graphic charters.
– The creative spirit is your responsibility (but some tools offer coaching on this).
+ These tools really allow the industrialization of emailing creation.

Among the email builders, there are Dartagnan, The Boss (made by Badsender so obviously it's our favorite 😉, MailChimp (many companies create their emails in Mailchimp and route them elsewhere), Sarbacane (last I heard, they were going to market the email builder independently of their routing tool), Welkom…