What to Look for in Email Design Tools

Email marketing can be a very powerful tool to reach your customers and share your news. But creating email campaigns that look great in all email programs can be a real challenge. I recently had a meeting with a user who spends hours of work at night to tweak a layout, and then a few hours later the layout breaks on mobile. I hear this from way too many users. That’s why we created this list of design tools for email campaigns.

When evaluating email design tools for creating and sending email marketing campaigns, the primary features to get right are those that allow for efficient production of great-looking email campaigns and full creative control to get the desired results.

1. Drag and Drop Builders vs. Code Flexibility

This is at the core of any email design tool – the editor interface. In order to facilitate the marketer in the strategy phase, the best tool is a clean drag and drop builder for non-technical team members to add blocks of content and to add space between them, and to add images, for example. In contrast, pure drag and drop tools can be too limiting for advanced teams, who require the ability to implement custom styling and brand-specific requirements, which can only be achieved by means of HTML and CSS.

This makes sense: drag and drop email design is far faster than hours of manual coding, but the average tool only offers a fairly basic editor. That’s the gap that pushes so many teams to bring developers in alongside designers, just to add the functionality a basic editor can’t handle.

Really Good Emails keeps a curated library of real marketing emails from working brands, organized by type and industry. Spending a few minutes there before you start building gives you a concrete sense of what’s achievable once design flexibility and technical control work together, and it’s worth doing before you open your own editor.

2. Responsive Design and Multi-Device Previews

Most emails are read on a mobile device, so if your email content does not display correctly on a mobile, then it is likely to be deleted by the recipient, or they will unsubscribe from future emails. Even the most well-planned and designed campaign can look a complete mess if the content does not wrap correctly.

That is a risk no marketer should take.

So, robust responsiveness is non-negotiable. That means the campaign automatically resizes for mobile and other devices. That’s why testing the campaign on a desktop as well as on mobiles and other devices before sending it off to subscribers is so important: it gives you room to make last-minute changes before the final version goes out. It’s also worth checking whether your email design tool lets you preview a campaign in various inboxes, so you can catch rendering problems while there’s still time to fix them before you send.

A capable email design tool gives you control over how each screen size renders. You can even hide elements on the desktop version of your email to better present your message to readers on mobile, and set the body copy size independently for each screen size.

3. Dynamic Content and Personalization Capabilities

The real personalization happens when messages change based on a subscriber’s interests or past behavior. Instead of just inserting a first name into the email body, top design tools let you create dynamic content blocks that change based on the subscriber’s data.

Visibility rules per content block: with this feature, you can decide for each content block whether it should be visible to certain audiences or not. For example, you could set up a template with different offers for long-time customers on your list and new subscribers.

That’s the real value: a single campaign structure can deliver relevant content to different subscribers without building separate emails for each segment.

4. Brand Management and Reusable Assets

A good email marketing tool for creating and sending emails includes robust features for managing a brand.

A Library of Brand Assets: a design tool that lets you add and store the following items in a centralized library is critical for effective brand management:

Custom color palette presets saved directly in the color picker.
Custom font support or integration with standard web font libraries.
A centralized asset manager for high-resolution images, logos, and icons.
Reusable content blocks, such as headers, footers, and signature banners.

By saving custom blocks in your email marketing software, you save a lot of time when building new campaigns. You drop in pre-approved content blocks instead of rebuilding brand-consistent elements from scratch every time.

5. Team Collaboration and Workflow Features

In reality, most campaigns are written by more than one person (e.g., writer, designer, marketing manager, stakeholders). They will all be involved in creating the campaign, and then reviewing and approving it before it’s sent to subscribers.

Collaboration Features within Campaigns: real-time editing, inline comments, and a version history for all changes. This way, teams can work together on a campaign and leave comments and notes directly on the different visual elements.

Role-based permissions for teams should be supported by the software. This means that the designer should not be able to modify copy written by the writer. Similarly, the designer should not be able to modify branding approved by the marketing manager. And the designer should not be able to modify approved brand assets accidentally.

6. Template Ecosystem and Export Options

Even if you are of the “build from scratch” school of thought, having a good set of starter templates to draw from for inspiration, or to save time when you’re under the gun to send off a campaign, is crucial to finding the right software.

Exporting in the right format is also important. Can you connect your new email campaign directly to your email service provider? Can you export your finished HTML templates as production-ready HTML code in a single click?

Make sure the code your tool outputs is clean and doesn’t contain unnecessary bloat. In some cases, spam filters can pick up on a lot of bloat in a piece of HTML. In other cases, a piece of email could exceed the inbox provider’s clip limit (the amount of content that displays before a reader has to click to see more) due to bloat in the HTML code, which would keep your readers from ever seeing the call to action in your email.

When choosing an email design tool to support your marketing activities, it often comes down to a choice between something simple and something powerful. In the end, the tool that lets you execute campaigns efficiently is usually the better choice. Look for one that’s responsive, supports dynamic content, and works well across teams.