We explain why an email builder is the best way to put together an email your customers will love.

You can prepare an email newsletter from scratch. That means going through several stages. First, ask a copywriter to write the text. They'll come up with a subject line and preheader worth clicking, craft a headline that makes you want to keep reading, and finish with a call to action that gets the customer to act.

Next, you need a designer to lay out the text — for example, adding a header with the store's menu at the top, preparing a bright hero banner, and adding buttons that are hard to resist clicking.

The result then goes to an email coder, who turns the finished mockup into an email and makes sure it displays correctly on every device. Of course, every stage matters, but coding is the last one, which makes it the most important — it determines what your customer ultimately receives.

The good news is that this stage, like the design process, can be automated. Just use an email builder. Here's how it can help.

5 reasons to use an email builder

Here are the main reasons to ditch coding from scratch in favor of an email template builder.

Cost savings

Building emails from scratch is more expensive. You need to pay a copywriter, a designer, a coder, and a manager. To create a newsletter in a builder, you definitely won't need a coder — a manager can handle it all. At most, you might bring in a specialist for some tricky issue, but that will cost far less than a full build.

A designer, generally, isn't needed either, or only minimally. The manager can assemble the newsletter from ready-made blocks. So, besides the manager's time, the only thing you need to pay for is the copywriter's work. Pretty budget-friendly.

Time savings

Oddly enough, when two people handle a task, it gets done faster than if four people were working on it. It's logical: no time is spent on design, and basically none on coding either. All the blocks are already there — you just need to arrange them in the right order and swap in the text.

Using an email template builder isn't just easier, more comfortable, and cheaper — most importantly, it's faster. In the time it takes to put together one newsletter from scratch, a manager can assemble two or even three emails in a builder, with fewer errors or none at all.

Fewer mistakes

Yes, a builder also helps improve the quality of the final product. The blocks an email is made of are already finished, so there are no errors in them. You don't have to worry about a broken link, shifted typography, or an image that fails to load.

Some platforms go even further and check for spelling and punctuation mistakes — you can even get rid of double spaces. Either way, a builder is definitely more reliable than assembling an email from scratch, if only for purely technical reasons.

Built-in responsiveness

An HTML email builder also helps you avoid other, more technical errors. While assembling an email in it, you can see how its layout adjusts from the web version to the mobile format.

Whether the banner resizes correctly, whether the product table in the email body breaks, whether the text looks right in dark mode — the builder takes all these concerns off your hands and handles them for you.

A result that meets expectations

Finally, the main reason to use an email builder for your newsletter is that it lets you create exactly the emails you need. If you're happy with their structure and design, there's nothing to change. And if you do want to add something, that's easy too — reorder blocks, add new ones, use new templates. No surprises — and sometimes that's a good thing.

How to choose an email builder

We explain what to look out for when choosing a block-based HTML email editor.

Number of available templates

Many of the emails in your inbox probably don't look template-based at all and differ a lot from one another. Keep in mind that an email builder also lets you make newsletters varied and distinct. The main thing is having enough templates to choose from.

And if you can also create your own custom template, there will definitely be no issue with keeping your newsletters unique. So pay attention to these two points first.

Customization options

Sometimes you want to tweak even a perfect template. Maybe you'll want to adjust its design, update the structure, or just add a countdown timer after the banner in one email about an important promotion. That happens too.

So be sure to check whether the email builder you're considering offers template customization — and how extensive it is. With it, your newsletters will meet all your requirements.

Builder interface

Speaking of which, another important requirement for an email builder is its interface. Since it will be used by a manager rather than a coding or design specialist, the interface should be simple and not overwhelm the user with dozens of buttons.

English-language support for international users, visual simplicity, and intuitive design — these are a few more interface qualities that become competitive advantages.

Integration with other services

Check which other services the builder you choose can integrate with. The list should include the biggest email marketing platforms and CRM systems. If they're there, setting up the integration should be effortless.

Testing capabilities

An email template builder should also let you test templates on different devices. Automatic link checks, preview generation across devices — check whether these options are available in the tool you've chosen.

If not, it might be worth looking further to save yourself work down the road.

Convenient export

You'll need to export the finished email from the builder, so check how that works. Ideally, export should be quick and simple in every possible format — from HTML and EML files to ZIP archives and links to the web version — or exported directly to your email platform.

Remember that a manager, not a coder, will most likely handle the export, so even this process needs to be intuitive.

Additional benefits

Finally, look at what else the service you've chosen offers — its features, unique characteristics, special offers. For example, what's the pricing like — can you use the email builder for free during a trial period?

Consider the number of built-in microservices and how willing the provider is to accommodate the customer. Even look at the number of clients, their reputation, and their reviews — that can matter too.

Conclusions

The answer to this article's main question is simple: the best way to build — or rather assemble — emails is with a newsletter builder. And now you also know how to choose the best one and what to look for.

Of course, our service Letteros meets all these requirements and offers customers far more than the bare minimum — from simple, free migration from other services to a choice of comfortable pricing plans.