Hey and welcome to my website Mark Hewington EmailGeek. I am a 15-year experienced email developer.
So, the purpose of this page is to share my opinion on what a email developer is and what they do day to day and show case my work and experiences as portfolio.
Also should you not have the resources for a in house email developer I can help you can get in touch below.
See More EmailsSo let start at the beginning, traditionally an email was built by apprentice and juniors, this was due to it being a bit of boring work and to get a great foundation in HTML and Tables structures.
But since the introduction of mobile first design this started becoming more of a specialist skill set, with tricky parts like learning dreaded white line I outlook and poor font support.
For instance, GoCompare ethos was creative approach with pastel colors, great images and a fun factor in the designs with customer experience was at heart of everything.
Take a look at these email to see how GoCompare would consistent change there email to keep engagement and have different but on brand themes.
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Click on the images to take a full look at the designs.
This example is by Nationwide building society one the leading banks in the UK.
Nationwide needs as a customers was more about templating, having all team working from master template.
These types of emails needed to be pixel prefect as it emails purpose was more about transactional email and fast to delivery approach if key information like bank of England base rate changed, or Voting AGM or Take over from Virgin Media.
Trustpilot was more of a business-to-business focus style branding was important, but the message was the only major focus like the milestone you hit 500 reviews to 10,000 reviews, wanting you to be invested in every achievement.
Phonak was both business to business and business to consumer, they needed a robust email template with modern email technologies, like dark mode & interactive emails, but there number 1 focus was to be modular, meaning that every email creator could build with freedom any translate into any language and still have great looking emails.
From my experience working with UK company’s Gocompare, Nationwide and worldwide brands Phonak, Trustpilot.
Is that every day is different per company, this is due to the business perspective of email marketing and automation.
Let’s laser focus on email developer day to day it is building (HTML, CSS, & Email Deployment), Most tasks normally include a request to build a design based on an image or email someone likes or a full on branded PSD or Figma file.
It is your responsibility to create this or cavate what you can build and why and give example of what could work.
Then over days, weeks create a master email that is fully tested on a range of email devices and tools like litmus and email on acid – me personally I aim of 95% or 100% of perfect emails on all email test.
The same time your job could include adding content block or module to this email an email you did or didn’t create and get it working perfectly in a timely manner – this work normally is business as usual work.
Is there a future for email developers, I believe yes but there going to be some pain and mistake before role come back to 2020 level.
And this really up to customer and how they value their customer experience or how quickly they want a hard amendment actioned to the broken email.
Will we become email prompt engineers rather then experienced developers who learn by doing, I am unsure but my focus will be to keep at least 80% of my skill set human, but I also wont be so ignorant that AI can’t help, because when you really thing about it email template and modules are the finish part of the AI prompt.
I am sure AI email builders are coming but does this make it quicker or worthwhile I can see this as really a great email template only take 1 day to a week to complete.
But personally, working with a human and being able to really get your brand cared about by your customers takes effort by human on every communication, this starts with a great email template created with a purpose.
I truly love AI but the question I believe needs to be asked is:
If you don’t take the effort to care about your emails why should or would your human customer and is sthis not the real purpose of sending that email you want them to interactive with.
Also note I am a salesforce marketing cloud developer and a email marketing geek hence why I am know as a EmailGeek.
Review by: Tommy
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What Tommy said:
When taking on a project that needs to be delivered in a short space of time with high quality results you need someone with a great depth of knowledge and work ethic. Mark brought all of that and more, including teaching the team along the way. He is excellent at coding, from html, AMPscript to all things relating to SFMC.
Review by: Harry
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What Harry said:
Mark has been fantastic to work with, cleaning up our Salesforce data and allowing us to automate a lot of our manual processes. Mark has also built some industry leading html email templates, boosting our CTR by 110% YOY during the most critical period of our year in driving revenue from email. Thanks Mark
Review by: Reto
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What Reto said:
Mark is amazing to work with. He understands our business needs and can transform it into good looking and good working bits and pieces.
He is very skilled in Marketing Cloud and has deep knowledge in Email Marketing. With his experience, he helped us to setup our email campaign successfully – within no time and high quality.
I really enjoyed working with you Mark & hopefully this was not the last time.