we create value for our clients
The Open University is a global leader in higher education and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students.
Since it was founded in 1969, more than 2.3 million students have achieved their learning goals by studying with The Open University.
why wirebox?_
Wirebox has been developing websites and applications for over 15 years. We advise clients on how best to use the latest technologies; building from the ground up or improving existing systems.
The Open University business-to-business team required an email-building tool which they could use to send out different types of comms, depending on the marketing requirements across the whole team.
They sought out our expertise as the development of emails is a particularly difficult task. This is due to the different number of email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and Mac Mail. Each client uses its own rendering engine, which translates into different display behaviour within these email clients.
Web browsers had similar issues over 5 years ago, but due to the emergence of browsers like Chrome and Firefox, web browser standards improved to make development more uniform.
Email clients did not go through this evolution, however. This is mainly due to Microsoft Outlook’s dominance in business environments.
To overcome these issues, The Open University required an email builder that would work across the majority of email clients in desktop and mobile modes, as well as dark and light modes.
Our partner Stratos developed responsive email designs which we were able to develop with the email builder.
our approach_
Email has some limitations to navigate. For example, CSS support within clients varies greatly. So we needed to create something clean, crisp and widely accepted.
We focused on features that are supported by the most popular email clients.
Email design and build requirements
- The design needed to be simple and compatible.
- It must be responsive.
- It must work in both dark and light mode, even if this means fresh designs for each.
- The development of code needs to be standardised.
- The design should take inspiration from the latest CSS features but operate on all clients.
Email Builder
The Open University, in addition to the external creation of emails, also required a way to build emails themselves.
Many email marketing platforms like Active Campaign or Mailchimp contain builders and ways to create templates. The Open University wanted an agnostic tool which could build templates for any platform.
And, while all platforms accept plain HTML and CSS, The Open University team did not want to edit code directly.
In light of this, Wirebox developed a universal email builder tool for their team as well.
Email Builder Features
- Development of blocks for different content
- Each block is responsive on desktop and mobile
- Blocks are colour-editable
- Simple drag-and-drop creation
- Generates HTML which can be pasted into any email client for sending
outcome_
The Open University business team was able to develop marketing emails rapidly across the organisation with no coding skills needed. This cleared workload blockages as one person was not responsible for creating all the emails to send out.
The email tools went through extensive testing, so quality could be ensured and this email builder received fantastic feedback from The Open University Business team.
As a result, they are looking to expand the system with more email blocks across the whole organisation.
This system was built using React, the Netify hosting platform and AWS Lambda.
