As I mentioned to the core team at Mautic Community some time ago, Webmecanik is proud to be able to offer its Mautic expertise and its resources to develop a new world-class email builder integrating the latest innovations and email industry trends.
Since my appointment as leader of the Product Team within the Mautic community, I would like to propose this new feature for the series Mautic 3 series as a candidate for Mautic 3.1.0 or 3.2.0.
Schedule
We are very happy to be working on replacing the current email builder, which has now run its course and no longer meets the requirements we set for ourselves and that our clients set for us. This has been requested repeatedly by our clients and, as we always do, we are listening. We are also listening to the Mautic community, and this request is very strong there too— the Mautic community deserves better than what we have today!
First, we will develop it as a plugin, and then ask Mautic community teams to consider it as a new core feature. What is the advantage of starting with a plugin? Even though Webmecanik users will benefit from it earlier, all community users will be able to benefit from it before the feature is released in a new community version.
Here is the roadmap I will propose to the community:
- Development of a proof of concept (POC) replacing and embedding 100% of the existing features.
- Presentation of the POC at the next Mautic Community Sprint in Ghent in April 2020 and request for the core team to accept it as a core feature in one of the minor versions of Mautic 3.
In addition, this will be the perfect time for collective brainstorming to define the additional features and improvements to plan for the future of our email builder. - Publication of a dedicated roadmap for improvements to the email builder.
- Integration into the core.
The technologies chosen and the approach with the Mautic community
We took the time to benchmark the various solutions available to us to tackle this big subject. Our DNA and that of the Mautic community pushed us to consider Open Source as a top development priority. It is also a good way to save time on implementation.
From this came our conclusion: a mix of 2 rapidly growing technologies, GrapesJS & MJML. Our discussion with Nicolas Garnier, founder of the MJML project, confirmed this choice.
After several weeks of work, we are also proud to announce that this major change can happen without degradation. The emails and templates created previously will still work.
About GrapesJS
This is an open-source project offering a very powerful email editing interface—here, we focus on UI and UX.
About MJML
This is an open-source project that makes it possible to generate high-quality HTML in order to meet the many display constraints of email clients.
Replacing the email builder with the best email technologies
So this is the first big step, and it is already well underway! We think we could complete the POC by the end of March in order to demonstrate it at the next Community Sprint in Belgium. This first version will bring the new interface and the new HTML generator while keeping all existing features such as templates, token usage, A/B testing, etc.
Knowing the timelines for finalizing Mautic 3.0.0, I think we could have the new email builder as a candidate feature for 3.1.0 or 3.2.0.
Feature improvements
Once again, we think the Mautic Community deserves even better! This will be the perfect opportunity to shape the future of the email builder’s features. I suggest that all community users join us at the Community Sprint in Belgium to brainstorm with the product team. If you can’t make it, you can share your comments and suggestions in the dedicated thread on GitHub; I will personally make sure to pay attention to them.
I am pleased to see that only a few minutes after my announcement on this program, many people have already responded positively.
As the main user and distributor of Mautic with our Webmecanik Automation version (more than 400 clients), we also have a few ideas:
- Improving the use of dynamic content
- Making A/B decisioning automatic
- Integrate Spam Assassin to score the quality of the email content
- Integrate Litmus to preview emails across different platforms/clients
- Save an email as a template
- Save an email section as a “section template”
- Add an option to configure a Preheader
- Add support for AMP technology in emails
- and more…
About Webmecanik
Webmecanik is a SaaS marketing automation publisher. We are the leading contributor to the Mautic community and offer a cloud-based, customized, and maintained version of Mautic, along with many services. More than 400 clients trust us as an expert in Marketing Automation that cares about data protection and GDPR compliance.
