I’ve been designing, and building email templates for about 10 years now and I’m used to building them from scratch using HTML+CSS, the “old-school” way. By now I accumulated the experience to know what works and what doesn’t. However for those who don’t have the HTML skills to build emails from scratch building emails has a pain in the ass because some email clients, specifically, Outlook don’t support some of the most recent developments in HTML and CSS, and this, in turn, made building and troubleshooting very time-consuming and this is a big challenge. Outlook, being a popular email client, especially in the corporate world, forced us email builders to code like it was 1999 for the longest time.

The good news is that in the past 2-3 years I started seeing no-code email-building tools more and more which are commonly known as “Drag and Drop Builders”. This is fantastic news for those who aren’t inclined to learn HTML and CSS, and also if managing busy email-campaign schedules, and even the more savvy coders.

I tested out drag-and-drop email builder tools in Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Stripo, Stensul, Litmus, and Pardot’s own and came to the conclusion that they are all great, except for Pardot’s solution, sadly.

But email marketing is more than just building emails with a drag-and-drop functionality. For instance, Stensul, Stripo, and Litmus don’t offer an email-sending service, while the others mentioned above are more of a one-stop shop for email marketing. However, if you are using a tool like Pardot that’s behind the curveball on drag-and-drop email-building functionality you probably will start looking for other tools to support you and your team. So in this post, I am going to focus on these three tools, Stensul, Stripo, and Litmus, and see how they can fill the gap with platforms like Pardot.

Stensul

It has a modern drag-and-drop email builder that’s browser-based. The builder is very user-friendly and responsive, and it also lets you build for phones and desktop devices. Their email templates are tested against all email clients and devices so rest assured that your emails will perform on any platform.

The platform is set up to host images and also allows you to host your own. It also offers basic image manipulation functionality, such as cropping and scaling, and it also stops the user from oversampling to control image quality which is very nice. The scaling and cropping are especially good so the editors don’t need to jump between apps which is time saving.

Stensul works with your marketing department to customize email-building components to match your brand and this service is included in their monthly pricing. Stensul even allows brand managers to lock certain elements for higher control.

In addition to the building and branding capabilities, the platform offers a neat proofing and approval workflow that can make any busy marketing team’s approval process easier and simpler. The tool allows the teams to take notes directly on the email during the proofing stage and gives granularity to comment at the narrowest scope or at a high level.

The platform comes with integrations that cover the big players in the industry like Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Pardot, Adobe’s Marketo, Oracle’s Eloqua which is a big plus. Meaning you can access your merge tags, custom redirects, dynamic content without ever leaving Stensul, and when you are done building your email, you can push it to your email-sending platform to add the customer segments and finally send it out.

What I didn’t see in Stensul were a subject line and email body copy analysis tools that can help with reducing “spamminess” of email messages. Maybe this is in their roadmap for the future.

I think this tool can very nicely complement a tool like Pardot that lacks a solid, modern email building and proofing workflow.

Litmus

Litmus has been an industry leader for some time in email testing and deliverability. Recently they started offering their Litmus Enterprise solution which comes with, again, a very solid drag-and-drop email builder.

The platform offers us marketers tools to test emails to see how they would look on multiple platforms and devices. In addition to the email client testing, the platform also improves accessibility which is a big requirement for government and educational institutions that can solve big headaches.

Litmus also checks for typos, link quality, image blocking, email loading speed, and additionally provides a spam testing tool which is again, great for us marketers.

It also integrates with major email-sending platforms like the ones mentioned above from Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle where the final approved email would be sent from.

In addition to the above, Litmus provides email metrics right on the platform, which may or may not be necessary knowing most major email senders already provide this data.

Stripo

Stripo is not as feature-rich as the two platforms above, Stensul and Litmus, and if you are simply looking for a drag-and-drop email builder at a low cost it definitely does the job. While it costs significantly lower than the others it also lacks the proofing and approval workflow, integrations, analytics, and spam-checking features. If you aren’t worried about these added functionalities Stripo will get you from a to b in terms of speeding up your email-building process.

In conclusion, Litmus, being the highest priced among the three, provides enterprise solutions to help larger teams with building, proofing, and testing steps. Stensul is close second with a lower price point lacking the spam and link checking and accessibility features that Litmus Enterprise provides. And finally, Stripo is a low-cost solution for those who are simply looking for a budget-conscious solution to build emails.

If you are in the email marketing world and using another tool or if you’d like to share your thoughts I’d love to hear from you.