Here’s a question you might think has nothing to do with email modules: If you owned a motorcycle, would you maintain it yourself or have someone else handle it?
That was one of several queries explored in Robert Pirsig’s fictionalized autobiography, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Published in 1974, it’s a tale about a couple of guys who ride their bikes from Minneapolis to San Francisco, with the aim of making it to the Bay Area by the author’s 42nd birthday. As they log mile after mile, they contemplate all sorts of things faced—or avoided—in life.
A key message from the massively best-selling book: If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Pirsig believed that if his 1966 Honda Superhawk motorcycle was to operate reliably over the 2,000 mile trek, he had to tend to the machine himself—and do that really well.
Maintaining modules
Although maintaining a library of email modules doesn’t conjure up the excitement of coursing down an open road astride a smooth-running motorcycle, it is very much a job worth doing—and certainly doing it well.
To make my point, let’s start with establishing—and maintaining—a naming convention for all the modules you might have. It’s really the first step. A standardized naming convention ensures your team can properly maintain a host of things. Without this step, your admins won’t know which modules are in production, which are in flight, or which to remove. Putting a naming convention in place from the start makes maintaining those modules much easier. As your library grows, you can add modules and label them with the appropriate elements of the naming convention.
The same holds true for other items in the library, like color palettes for CTAs or for background colors. Similarly, placing font families in stacks allows you to easily leverage them over and over again, put them back in, and pull them out from the location people expect to find them.
The same thing is true for presets. Taking this approach ensures they’re correct and in the correct place. It means you can make changes quickly and accurately. If that isn’t the case to begin with, it’s a much tougher task.
When creating the basic email text, the CTA module, and the copy, treat them all as drag-and-drop elements. Doing so eliminates the need to rebuild a module, and not having to remake modules saves lots of time.
When it comes to maintaining aspects like branding or inclusion of regulatory language in emails, the Stensul Email Creation Platform allows you to upload and update that information, ensuring it is always current and always compliant. Using the Stensul Platform also eliminates the need to set up palettes, fonts, CTA spaces, and other minuscule specifications. Plus, it reduces implementation time as well as the time needed to perform updates.
Moving QA upstream
Checking on in-place processes associated with creating emails with modules doesn’t make much sense if it’s handled after the fact, which is the way most QA processes work. With Stensul, QA is moved to the front end, so it occurs during implementation. This approach streamlines the checking of existing processes and removes the need to check them each time they’re run. By moving the QA process upstream, Stensul makes things cleaner, with less chance for issues than where it’s usually done—at the point just before you deploy an email to an ESP.
With Stensul, you can build a module that will render correctly across all approved devices. Even if you use CSS, Stensul will render it correctly. There’s no need to manually correct the CSS code or check to see that it’s in the right portion of the module. In certain cases, CSS is necessary to fine-tune your modules. With Stensul, using and managing your own CSS is easy.
CSS does allow you to do special things in the code. But if improperly coded, it can cause rendering issues. However, the Stensul Custom Elements feature lets you use your own code with the security of guardrails that ensure bad things won’t happen when others create emails using that particular module.
Marketing operations people may feel they need to keep doing email module maintenance the way it’s always been done. It’s worth noting that although Pirsig did advocate self-reliance, part of his Zen was recognizing the value of leveraging better ways to handle any number of things. In that way, Stensul is a better way. It maintains modules faster than even the savviest admin and then pushes those modules out to users to create emails, regardless of their technical skills or coding know-how. And those emails will be delivered, load, and display without issue.
Think about it. If you’re a marketer who has put together an email brief, why hand off the job of creating the email to someone else when you can do it well with Stensul? Learn more about the Stensul Email Creation Platform here.
