DataCamp teaches data science and analytics online, and its emails go to learners and business teams at every stage: joining a group, starting a track, finishing a course and coming back each week. We built a responsive, reusable master template in Customer.io with standalone modules, so the team can put together a wide variety of emails in DataCamp's own look without starting from scratch.
We started by exploring Customer.io to confirm what its template editor supports, then agreed the list of inboxes to design and test for, based on DataCamp's own analytics. Gmail on mobile came first, followed by webmail on desktop and mobile, the Apple Mail apps on iPhone and desktop, Outlook and dark mode.
We worked from DataCamp's designs and brand guidelines, and exported and sliced every visual asset as transparent PNGs optimised for email. The emails sit on DataCamp's dark navy brand surface, so every asset was prepared to hold up in dark-mode inboxes as well as light ones.
The master template is built from interchangeable modules, each also delivered as its own HTML file. On mobile the blocks stack instead of switching layouts, which keeps every module predictable across clients.
To show the system in use, we built five sample emails straight from the template: Onboarding for group admins, Complete Course in Track, Track Welcome, Convert and the weekly Newsletter.
Every module and sample email was tested in Email on Acid and on live devices against the agreed inbox list, with review rounds on the onboarding email before the rest of the set was built. The handover included the master template, each module as a separate HTML file, the image assets and the rendering test results.
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Annett came highly recommended from the community and it was very apparent why. Her communication was fantastic, her code is top quality, and she was able to adapt to the constraints of our internal workflows with ease. We were able to ship a large project on time and will be building off of her work for the foreseeable future.
