What Are Email Frameworks?
An email framework is a set of tools and resources designed to simplify and streamline creating and managing email campaigns.
Email frameworks provide developers and marketers with pre-written code, templates, and best practices that facilitate building responsive and aesthetically pleasing emails across various email apps and devices.
What is the Purpose of Email Frameworks?
The main purpose of email frameworks is to address common challenges in email design, such as compatibility across different email clients, responsiveness on various device sizes, and adherence to modern design standards.
Email frameworks provide a standard and structured approach and ready-to-use components, significantly reducing the time and effort required to create effective and professional emails.
Typical email frameworks include several key components:
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Pre-built templates:
These customizable templates address various email needs, from newsletters to promotional emails. They are designed to be visually appealing and mobile-responsive.
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CSS inliners:
Since many email clients do not support external or even internal stylesheets, email frameworks often include tools that automatically inline CSS styles. CSS properties are applied directly to HTML elements to ensure consistent rendering.
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Responsive grids:
Frameworks provide grid systems that adapt the email layout to the screen size of different devices, especially mobile screens, to accommodate viewing on different devices.
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Component libraries:
These are collections of common design elements such as buttons, headers, footers, and image containers that can be easily integrated and reused across different email designs.
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Testing tools:
Many frameworks include or integrate with tools that allow designers to preview how emails will look in different email clients and devices, ensuring that all recipients have a consistent experience.
The Benefits of Using Email Frameworks
The use of email frameworks offers several advantages for marketers
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Efficiency:
By reducing the amount of code that needs to be written manually from scratch, frameworks save time and streamline the development process.
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Consistency:
Frameworks help maintain a consistent look and feel across all emails, crucial for brand identity and reaching your pipeline goals.
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Compatibility:
They ensure that emails perform well across all major email apps and devices, reducing the likelihood of display issues that could affect user engagement.
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Accessibility:
Good frameworks encourage best practices in email design, including accessibility standards, ensuring that emails are usable by people with disabilities.
3 Popular Email Frameworks
Several well-known email frameworks are widely used in the industry, including:
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Foundation for emails:
Created by ZURB, this framework is designed to help build complex responsive email layouts with simple HTML components.
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MJML:
Standing for MailJet Markup Language, MJML is an open-source framework that simplifies the coding of responsive emails by using a semantic syntax which is then compiled into compliant HTML
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Email on Acid
Email on Acid provides tools for building emails and comprehensive testing to ensure they look great on any client or device.