Why Marketers and Designers Should Treat Email Development with More Respect

Someone once told me, “It’s just HTML. Can’t be that hard, right?”

That email went out with broken buttons in Outlook, overlapping images on iOS, and text that was unreadable in dark mode. It took four follow-up emails, a few apologies, and a drained dev team to fix the mess.

Here’s the truth: email development is one of the most demanding front-end disciplines — and too often, it’s treated like a last-minute box to check. Marketers and designers deserve to understand what’s really involved. And email devs? They deserve a seat at the table.

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Email Isn’t a Webpage

Let’s clear this up first: email is not a web page. It might *look* like one. It might be written in HTML. But it plays by a completely different set of rules — and that changes everything.

Email developers have to deal with:

• Table-based layouts, not CSS Grid or Flexbox
• Hundreds of rendering quirks across clients and devices
• Inline styles, hard fallbacks, and limited support for modern CSS
• Dark mode flipping background and font colors — automatically
• Accessibility challenges without reliable ARIA support

And while web developers might debug in a browser console, email devs debug in… Gmail. Outlook. Apple Mail. Yahoo. Samsung. Sometimes with images off. Sometimes with a broken preview pane.

What Happens When Email Gets Ignored

Here’s what I’ve seen — more than once:

• Designers hand off a beautiful Figma mockup… with 12px gray text, no mobile version, and no fallback fonts.
• Marketers change CTA copy 15 minutes before send — without rechecking layout impact.
• Devs get the brief last, with no time for testing. The email goes out. It breaks. Everyone scrambles.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about process. When email is treated like an afterthought, the brand suffers. The customer suffers. And your team burns out trying to patch what should have been planned.

What Email Development Actually Involves

It’s not “just HTML.” Here’s what a real email build cycle looks like:

1. Planning: Understanding purpose, audience, devices, and goals
2. Design Translation: Reworking visual mocks into responsive, testable code
3. Accessibility: Adding alt text, semantic markup, and contrast-safe colors
4. Responsive Behavior: Media queries, stacking logic, touch targets
5. Dark Mode Handling: Adjusting background, logo variants, and unintended inversions
6. Testing: Rendering across dozens of clients and platforms
7. ESP Prep: Making sure links track, tokens parse, and copy doesn’t get clipped

It takes planning. Time. And a deep understanding of what breaks — and how to prevent it.

How Designers Can Help

Designers play a crucial role in making email dev smoother. Here’s what helps us a lot:

• Start mobile-first — don’t design only for desktop
• Use web-safe fonts or define fallback stacks
• Design with real content — not placeholder copy
• Provide assets in usable formats — compressed, optimized, named clearly
• Consult the developer before finalizing mockups

It’s not about lowering your standards. It’s about building with awareness — so the design survives the realities of the inbox.

How Marketers Can Help

• Loop in devs early — not at the finish line
• Clarify the email goal — what is success? Clicks? Signups? Reply?
• Test in real inboxes — not just screenshots
• Respect the test window — allow 24–48 hrs for full QA when possible
• Prioritize accuracy — typo fixes post-send hurt your list trust

Marketers are the closest to the audience. When they understand what email dev requires, the messaging gets tighter and the tech becomes more invisible — in the best way.

Why It Matters

Email is still one of the most effective channels in digital marketing. It’s personal. It’s direct. It’s high-return. But it only works when it delivers — on content, on layout, on trust.

Treating email like a real product — not a throwaway — changes the quality of what you ship. It saves time. It protects brand reputation. And it shows respect for the user, who is likely reading your email on a small screen, on the go, deciding in a second whether to delete or engage.

Final Thought: Respect Is a Workflow

When marketers, designers, and developers collaborate early — with equal seats at the table — the email gets better. The process gets faster. And the mistakes shrink.

Email development is not a dead art. It’s a craft. And it deserves to be treated that way.

Still thinking it through? Contact me here and I’ll help you get it right.