PilotMail

If you are like us, spending a lot of time crafting beautiful marketing emails or transactional email templates, then you must have the first-hand experience of difficulty in setting a smooth workflow for building perfect HTML emails. We ended up using multiple tools and services to make sure HTML email is optimized, cross-platform compatible and production-ready (CSS inlined, etc). Generally, a typical workflow included:

• A code editor to write HTML/CSS code.

• Linter to make validate your HTML/CSS code.

• Online file storage provider to host email assets like images, etc.

• CSS Inliner to inline all CSS styles.

• Email Preview Tool to send test emails to various email clients and check compatibility issues.

Phew! quite a list to of things to do before we deliver one perfect email template. That’s why we decided to solve the problem and built PilotMail. PilotMail brings all these tools and services together at one place and streamlines the whole process of coding, testing and delivering HTML Email templates. Here are quick lists of features that PilotMailer offers:

• You can send test HTML emails to up to 10 recipients at once for design testing and debugging on real email clients.

• You can include a plain text version of your email and test that too!

• CSS Inlining and more settings to generate production-ready code.

• Layout Viewer to easily view HTML email in your web browser

• Code Editor to easily edit HTML, CSS and Plain Text of your HTML email.

• Asset Manager to host and manage all images, etc your HTML email uses.

Many mailing services or ESP like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, ExactTarget, and Silverpop also offer email coding & testing integrated into their email delivery process, but there are often many steps involved. Secondly, depending on the ESP it may cost you a lot to maintain an account with the ESP, as you end up paying extra for email delivery features too. Finally, you get tied to one particular ESP, whereas if you use PilotMail, you keep all your templates at one place but use any ESP if you like for mass email delivery purpose only.

Take PilotMail for a spin and never send a broken email again!