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Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

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Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#101

Post by andrei_says_ »

buro9 wrote: post #67
onion2k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.) But you don't know that. It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your cus…

What I do know from measuring my marketing and transactional emails is that the least possible formatting results in the lowest probability that I end up in the spam folder. The hypothesis I had here (unverified) is that using a tool to produce email makes your email look like spam produced by that tool (by other people). My hypothesis more specifically is that spam detection software weighs similarity in the structu…

Are you aware of any studies verifying this hypothesis? Would be very useful in my team’s roadmap.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#102

Post by mschuster91 »

prepend wrote: post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

> This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee?

Because keeping track with the boatload of variety that email clients have and their updates is hard. You have MS Outlook in three different flavors (Windows, OS X, Android), Thunderbird on three major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux), the various Android clients (Gmail, Samsung's custom thing they IIRC ditched for Googlemail somewhere over the last years, the custom clients by various mail providers like web.de and other), Apple Mail, iOS Mail on iPhones of various sizes and iPads of various sizes, the web clients every major provider has, I have no idea what Lotus Notes and Blackberry are offering these days... and then you have the hardcore nerds and privacy activists who have html mail turned off entirely and use commandline clients.

And literally every single client variation has a different subset of features they support or don't support, with the addition of spam filters and virus scanners randomly breaking things by injecting HTML somewhere in the message.

And then you also want your email to be forward-able without Outlook taking half a minute to think about each character.

Email is hard, cross-platform emailing is a nightmare and keeping up with all the stuff I just mentioned takes a massive amount of time to develop and to regression-test.

(In case it isn't obvious, I occasionally have to dabble in this area, and I hate it with a passion)

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#103

Post by ihuman »

prepend wrote: post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

It free for non-commercial use, so it only costs money if the emails will make you money. https://mailstudio.app/pricing

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#104

Post by heroic »

signal11 wrote: post #49

An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…

Almost always, for such emails, you are not the audience. We've done multiple tests to check which emails perform better for our customers, and always ones with a lot more visual imagery, heavily HTMLized emails work better than just text and links.

Our understanding for this has been that people are not very email savvy, and for them the visual imagery works more like story telling.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#105

Post by amitheonlyone »

signal11 wrote: post #49

An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…

I don't completely agree with your opinion. It's true that emails that are crowded with styled elements are not ideal. But I feel that there is a sweet spot where you have nicely formatted and designed emails that look and communicate pretty well.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#106

Post by contravariant »

anamexis wrote: post #90
contravariant wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally you'd think the burden of proof would be on the side requesting considerable resources and infrastructure to send something that doesn't render properly under the most basic privacy settings and cannot be displayed text-only (like in notifications).

I would assume that side has, in fact, established that proof.

It's a common assumption, but also a dangerous assumption when the people who you assume have established the proof are the same people who stand to profit a from it being proven.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#107

Post by TrueDuality »

anamexis wrote: post #90
contravariant wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally you'd think the burden of proof would be on the side requesting considerable resources and infrastructure to send something that doesn't render properly under the most basic privacy settings and cannot be displayed text-only (like in notifications).

I would assume that side has, in fact, established that proof.

I'm also going to make a pretty big assumption, which is that a lot of people using mailing tools that give them stats such as MailChimp do not think about how privacy settings affect their metrics. If I have images disabled by default I will almost certainly never show up in an "opened" metric.

Images off by default is becoming more common.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#109

Post by aarondia »

buro9 wrote: post #67
onion2k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.) But you don't know that. It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your cus…

What I do know from measuring my marketing and transactional emails is that the least possible formatting results in the lowest probability that I end up in the spam folder. The hypothesis I had here (unverified) is that using a tool to produce email makes your email look like spam produced by that tool (by other people). My hypothesis more specifically is that spam detection software weighs similarity in the structu…

When I receive an html email, I default to thinking there is nothing of value in it, and I don't read it. I use email as a more formal text messaging, or often group text messaging, system. Marketing newsletters, etc are just a clutter. But I do get a lot of them, so maybe they work for others.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#110

Post by yoz-y »

IceWreck wrote: post #42

Still kinda useless, because most users still block (and should block) remote content including images by default. I'm tired of companies(and users) sending emails with trackers to check if someone has read your email or not.

Do most users block images? I doubt it (but I have no data). I'd assume that most users use web clients, and very few if any web clients block images by default.
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