Mail Designer 365: A Visual Design Platform Helping Marketers Create Mobile-Optimized Email Newsletters Using Customizable HTML Templates

TL; DR: Mail Designer 365’s visual design platform helps marketers create responsive, modern newsletters using a simple WYSIWYG interface. The platform’s many features — including no-code templates, millions of layout combos, and cross-platform compatibility — all help users take their communications to the next level quickly and easily. Mail Designer is currently focused on streamlining customer workflows, underscoring its overall commitment to helping Mac users make a big impact with little effort.

Mail Designer 365 is proof that some of the best products on the market are developed by those looking to satisfy their unmet needs.

The newsletter design platform grew out of parent company equinux AG, a macOS and iOS development firm founded in 1999. In its early days, the company turned to its marketing and development teams to conceptualize and build digital newsletters by hand — a process that quickly became tiresome.

To streamline the system, the company whipped up a no-code design tool to help Mac users create newsletters in a flash. By alleviating its own pain points, equinux AG created a product that also reflected the needs of the market at large.

“We were our own first customer, and that’s helped us stay at the forefront of the industry,” said Adrian Thomas, Product Manager at equinux AG. “We focus on our marketing team’s requirements and use in-house feedback to hone in on improving the tool from the designer’s perspective, rather than the developer’s.”

Mail Designer 365, now part of TOWER ONE, a subsidiary of equinux AG, provides access to its visual newsletter design software via a three-tiered subscription plan. This business model allows the company to provide ongoing support, feature improvements, and integrations with popular email management tools.

Today, the platform allows agencies, startups, and enterprises alike to create modern, responsive email newsletters using a powerful yet familiar interface. A comprehensive collection of professional templates and reusable design elements make it easier than ever to achieve high-quality results, while cross-platform compatibility ensures the HTML will work with all email clients.

Now, as TOWER ONE turns its focus to Mail Designer 365 Approval, a built-in tool for streamlining workflows, it’s providing even more ways to simplify the email marketing process.

It’s a well-known fact that we’re facing a global shortage of technical talent, but the extent of the problem may come as a surprise. The United States — a worldwide leader in the tech industry — could lose $162 billion in annual revenue if businesses fail to find more qualified tech workers, according to the Korn Ferry Institute.

Needless to say, developers are in high demand. That’s where Mail Designer comes in, reducing dependencies on developers by empowering designers to take the reins. “It helps bypass the need to turn to a developer for everything,” Adrian said. “Designers can make their vision come to life by creating it directly in Mail Designer without any coding.”

The platform’s What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) user interface is as intuitive as it is functional, making it easy to create professional-grade newsletter designs in a flash. To keep designs fresh, the company introduces new design features and improvements regularly.

“Our customers are understandably concerned about staying current in terms of the latest trends and styles, whether that’s gradients in the background or big pictures in headers,” Adrian said. “We try to be nimble — we ship roughly every two weeks, which helps us stay up-to-date with the markets and offer great value for our customers.”

At the same time, Adrian said Mail Designer leans heavily on input from its own marketing team. “Over the years, our team has demanded features based on trends — such as mobile responsive support, the comeback of GIFs — and we provided updates accordingly,” he said.

Whether the goal is to grow a subscriber database, generate leads, or boost conversions, design is undoubtedly a critical element in email marketing campaigns. Good design clearly communicates your brand and reinforces your messaging, helping you stand out among the competition. Bad design can make you look out of touch, damage credibility, and ultimately affect the bottom line.

With this in mind, Mail Designer features more than 80 professional templates, countless layout combinations, reusable graphic elements, image editing, and support for both desktop and mobile layouts. The robust platform allows users to create engaging, modern newsletter designs that are both beautiful and functional.

“The main benefit is the ability to quickly visualize what you’re building,” Adrian said. “For example, we have built-in mobile preview features where you can quickly build your desktop layout and then just hit a button and see the mobile version of the layout on an iPhone and iPad, etc.”

Adrian said users can easily customize the mobile version to make the layout more friendly for on-the-go readers. For example, one might choose to replace a lengthy call to action with a simple link to the company’s phone number.

“There are a few hidden gems, such as the ability to adjust the snippets of text recipients receive as a preview in most email apps,” he said. “With Mail Designer, you can put something custom in there, adding an extra surprise for your recipient. That’s just another little way you can increase the open rate and improve deliverability.”

Mail Designer’s HTML engine is optimized on an ongoing basis for compatibility with all email clients, including Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. In addition, the platform will export any design to the customer’s preferred platform or email service provider (ESP). Mail Designer offers built-in integrations with leading ESPs, such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, as well as the option to export your design as HTML before importing it to a preferred ESP.

Adrian told us that Mail Designer serves a diverse client base that includes organizations of all sizes — from small and medium-sized businesses to enterprises. The common thread: They’re all looking for ways to reduce the overhead of the email creation process.

“The features we have built appeal to a wide range of businesses, but we have particular appeal with app developers — which I think stems from the fact that we are web developers ourselves,” he said. “Typically, if you’re a small app development shop, you may not have a lot of marketers on your team. They benefit from being able to get results quickly without having to learn how to hand-code HTML that works with Outlook, for example.”

Adrian has also observed a trend where design teams within large enterprises leverage Mail Designer to take on personal responsibility for email marketing campaigns.

“Perhaps you’re not sending out an email to billions of customers that you have as a large enterprise, but you want to send it to specific subsets of partners,” he said. “Mail Designer fits nicely into that process, letting users quickly create something that looks great without having to go through a three-week creation period.”

The agile process also encourages experimentation by allowing users to decrease the amount of time they spend creating different variations of one campaign. “You can quickly try something with a small subset of your audience just to see what works,” Adrian said.

TOWER ONE recently released Mail Designer 365 Approval, a solution that invites everyone on a team to take part in one person’s workflow.

“Basically, you take your design, upload it to the My Mail Designer tool, and share that link with colleagues, who can comment on it or just hit the approve button for a quick thumbs-up,” Adrian said. “We’ve been using this internally, and I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have one central workflow.”

The collaboration tool facilitates communication among teams on any platform — including Windows, Android, iOS, ChromeOS, and macOS. Like the Mail Designer platform itself, the workflow tool was inspired by internal need.

“We were spending a lot of time in the workflow aspect of our own email processes, and this tool has solved those issues,” Adrian said.