Eloqua is a great Marketing Automation platform and there is no doubt about that. However their built in Email Designer isn’t the best tool to use when designing your emails. It does all the basic email editor things that just about all editors do but doesn’t do a great job. There are much better options and in my opinion the best option for an email designer is Stripo.
What is Stripo
Stripo can be found at Stripo.email and as Stripo explains, when working on a new campaign, marketers want their clients to actively interact with emails and anticipate the following ones. To achieve this, they need to build flawless emails with an up-to-date design that render correctly across all devices and email clients, also utilize functionality that takes their email campaigns way ahead of the game. But it requires time which we normally do not have. Stripo allows marketers to easily create new email designs or reuse previously created template.
THe Eloqua Email Designer
As shown on the below screenshot, the Eloqua Email Designer is a no-frills basic email designer that allows you to add things as text, images, buttons, etc but does not at all do a great job on any of it,
Stripo Email designer
With Stripo email designer you can design your own email from scratch or start with one of their 1,000 email templates to help get started.
If you want to design an email from a blank canvas or edit one of your chosen templates then you use their core email design editor. This editor is very robust but in this article I will just go over the core and most often used features.
First, when you go into the editor the “Content” area is broken into a few parts that include “Structures”, “Blocks”, and “Modules”.
As the screenshot shows below, the Structures section is where you just simply select the column layout for your email. For example, one large column, multiple columns the same size, or you can choose different size columns. Note that one email can have several sections with each section having a different structure.
The next section is the Blocks section. In this section you can drag and drop block elements into your structures you created above. For example you can drag in the text and images you want in your email (like all email designers can do) but you can also drag in more advanced features like carousels, countdown timers to show when a certain offer expires, custom HTML, an accordion asset or even a form.
The last section in the designer is the Modules section which is very powerful and sets Stripo apart from the competition. In this section you can choose from a very large list of professionally built sections for your email to make the process of creating an email even easier. For example, if you have an email that you want to highlight a few different products in a section you can just select from the “Set of Product Cards” pre-built modules and drag and drop the style you like the best into your email and then edit the products for your onw use. These pre-built modules look great and are all mobile responsive so looks great on both desktops and mobile devices.
Once you are done designing your email you can test it by simply clicking the checkmark box at the top of the screen which open a window that asks you who you would like to send your test to. Just type in your email address and click Send.
After you made all the changes needed and the tests look good you are ready to export your email to your ESP such as Eloqua. To do this you simply select the “Export” button that you will see on the top of the design editor and this open a window that gives you options on how to export it. You could just export it as HTML which would simply give you the HTML code that you can just copy into your ESP or you can have export directly to any ESP such as Eloqua by just selecting that as your export option.
The above brief description is just the tip of what Stripo can do. In future posts I will go into more detail on other robust functions like formatting the appearance of any of your elements, show how to only display elements if they are on a desktop or a mobile device, or how to connect Stripo to a datas source to automatically update, for example, products that are listed in your email.
As you can see though, Stripo is by far a more robust email designer when compared to the Eloqua designer and can save your marketing team hours on changes and also allow you to create better responsive emails.
