HubSpot Community Developer Show | Email with Alyssa Wilie | S01E02

All right, cool. Counting to three. One, two, three. That was the most asynchronous scene. It'll work out. It'll work out. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the second episode of the HubSpot Community Developer Show. I said it correctly on the first go this time, actually. I'm very proud of myself. Take a second to think about that. I invite you guys to go onto the thread and ask questions anytime. I will post a link to it in the show notes. I really do invite you to do that. And if you haven't checked out our first podcast with John Cesala on accessibility, I really encourage you to do that because that was a great show. And with that, I would like to introduce the. The guests for our second show. Elisa Willey. I said that correctly. Right. I really need to start.

Wiley.

Wiley. Wiley. I apologize.

Wiley Coyote.

Alisa Wiley from littenweb is a specialist in email. She has been coding for 12, 15, 100 years.

I wish about eight years I've been coding as a job, but I started learning HTML and C. He has this back when I was like a preteen.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, she works. I'm not sure if it says Linton Webb. Right. So, yeah, Also you're in Texas. How are you doing? Is everything resolved in terms of like cold weather and electricity and existence?

Yeah, it's been in a nice 70 degrees the past four days. So, like, it's weird. We were in the negatives over the weekend and then it was like, hello, nice weather.

Yeah, crazy, crazy times. We also got Sarah Nolan over here. She is a tech lead. I'll let her do her introduction because again, second. Second podcast row. There's just so many words involved in her title that I. You have at it, Sarah.

Yeah, so I'm the tech lead on the marketing email, front end and back end teams. I've been in HubSpot for over four years now and I've been the tech lead on the front end team for two and a half years and the tech lead on the back end team for about six months now.

Amazing.

All right.

And we got, of course, again, John McLaren, developer advocate. Senior developer advocate. Don't forget the senior part of that. Who has been at HubSpot for actually a little over a year now. Are you almost there?

Two years. Almost.

Really?

Yeah. Pretty close.

Wow, cool. Yep. This is the panel. I am very excited to talk about email this week. We have a lot of questions. Before we get to that, though, just a few announcements. I do encourage you guys to go back. I'll put this in the show notes as well. The Custom objects and HubDB workshop with Zach and Ramona was really, really good. So I, as I said, put in the show notes. Watch it. Really good stuff. Next podcast is going to be on SEO and we have an ongoing AMA in the forms presently. Again, we'll put in the show notes. Please ask questions there. And John, you had something else you wanted to add, right?

Yeah, I just wanted to let everyone know as a developer, technology best practice and everything is always changing at crazy, incredible speeds. And so when it comes to HubSpot, we have a bunch of different ways that you can stay connected on what's happening in the world of HubSpot development. So we have a monthly newsletter which is able to be found by going to developers.HubSpot.com blog and there's a link on the page there to subscribe any.

Quirks you can just hilarious or not hilarious, annoying.

Mine is also with Outlook, of course in Outlook 2016 and 19 it will just randomly display these one pixel lines throughout your email and my one as well, horizontal lines. Nobody knows the exact reason for it. There's like a theory.

I have a theory.

Yeah, there's a theory that it has something to do with like odd numbers in the height and like there's multiple different ways going around on how to fix it. But no one fix fixes every email. So you just kind of have to like throw fixes at it and hope that it's. And it's been brought to Outlook's attention Sadly back in 2016, but apparently they just refused to fix it.

It's like, no, no, no, we're sticking with it.

They don't even know why it did it.

That one, that one just kills me because obviously with the drag and drop editor people are just so confused. They're like, why doesn't it look the way it looks in the editor? Yeah, because like some people say it's a rounding error. Like just try add like some margin there or just some white space or change the font size or maybe the line height. Just keep trying things and testing because it's different for every single email because the content changes where that line might appear. And like you could change something and get it to disappear from one part of the email and it'll appear further down or higher up. So that one kills me. There's another one that I hate. It was one actually I had a support case where and I've never been able to pinpoint this one, but we had a customer who, who was getting really weird stalls in their email on their specific Outlook instance. And the only way I fixed this after much trial and error was by using those conditionals to hide our media queries, which didn't work in that Outlook version anyway. Like, they shouldn't have been getting applied. But by using a conditional so that, like, they wouldn't be rendered in Outlook, it fixed the problem on the customer. And, like, support brought me like a plant because they were so happy I fixed it. I was like, I don't know, but it did it.

I love it. Maybe. I mean, I'm not sure this is terribly much of a quirk, but why does Gmail cut. Is there another email vendor that does this, like, cuts off after a certain Outlook?

I think Outlook does it as well, but we don't have reasons related to that. I think they do load the email to get the preview text. This is what I think happens. So they don't want to load the full email in case it's too large because obviously they want to show all the email previews in one go. And it's. I think it's a performance thing, unfortunately.

I'll take it. Did you guys just hear. I just hit my ear and I turned on Spotify. Did you guys hear that.

Going through?

Yeah. Okay, so let's move on to some questions that we got on the forums and elsewhere. A lot of people actually submitted to me just directly. So if you guys want to do that, you know, you being the people out there listening to this or watching this, feel free to do that. But also I do encourage hitting the forum and it just makes it. I think people feel more comfortable when they see other questions out there. So, you know, community, Yay. What is the value of email? That's a question, and I think I'm very curious to know your answers on this. Why email, in my opinion, is almost more important than a website. In a sense, this is how you get your material out there to the public. I will say a little on it. I will start with Elisa. What do you think the value of email is? No right or wrong answer.

Yeah, I think it's mostly because the users are more likely to see an email than anything else. Like, they're not always going to be on social media, and even if they are, it's not as likely that they're going to scroll through yours and then they're not always going to be on your website, so they're not always going to get your new information. So with an email, you're sending it directly to the user, giving them updates and keeping them engaged. And also it's a way cheaper way of advertising.

Yeah, definitely. Sarah, what do you got?

Similar, I guess it's also like highly customizable. Like if you compare it to other forms of marketing, like social media, even ads, like you're able to get your brand right out there as it's very affordable. And one other thing, I suppose coming from working on the product, it's just you're able to track things a lot better in email. Targeting is really easy in email. Like you're able to target specific parts of content to a person that's getting it. Personalizing it is also great because if people are getting these emails addressed directly to them and also sometimes based on their interactions previously, it just feels like the company is personalized to you and it's good for building up that relationship directly with someone.

Yeah, definitely. I think also. I'll get to you, John, in a second. But I think that also ties into another question was what are the different kinds of emails you can build? And there are just so many things like you don't even think about transactional emails to marketing emails. There's so many different ones out there. John. Sorry, you.

It's all good, all good. I forget the exact statistic, but I'll make sure that we get it in our show notes. But there is a stuff that that basically the email is like one of the cheapest forms of advertising. So it is a great, great tool for getting a wide reach for people who are actually already interested in what you want to tell them. It's not like a TV ad or, or a billboard where it may not be as targeted. The. The other, the other really key thing that Sarah brought up is like personalization. You can actually do that in an email. It's a lot harder in other contexts.

And HubSpot's actually I'm not to plug HubSpot, but why not very good at the personalization of an email. And I know Sarah, your team's working very hard on just making sure that you can basically do about anything with an email. In terms of personalization, it's coming along quite a ways. Next question I have is, well, actually this is something I thought of and I don't know why we didn't discuss this more in detail. Last episode is email accessibility. We focus very much on website accessibility. I don't have any. I literally just have it as email accessibility on my notes here. And it's not a question, it's just like a topic. I'd like to know your thoughts on Generally, John, I'll start with you, considering you were on the last episode.

Yeah. The good news is that email accessibility is very similar to web accessibility in general. So a lot of the same rules apply. Make sure you have good alt text. And in email, alt text is so much more important even than in. Than in normal web development. Yeah. So. So a good example is like Outlook, by default, Outlook hides images. You can change that setting, but by default they're hidden. And so what shows to that user when they first open your email? Well, it's the alt text and there's actually some really cool things you can do with that. Like, a lot of people don't know that you can style alt text. You can actually make that text look like headings, make it look great so you can have a fully.

How do you do that?

It works exactly like normal text. It's just like styling a div almost. You just style it as if it's text. And when the email doesn't work, the color, the font family, all that will work.

Sorry, I'm going to ask a lot of questions because I'm not. Do you use inline styling for that? I mean, is it like, where do you put the style?

So that one's, that one's a great question for all of us here. But when it comes to emails in general, there's best practice is usually to inline style things. But when you're actually doing the authoring, it's obviously a pain in the butt for us as developers to work that way. And the reason that it's a best practice is just to ensure backward compatibility. That's the only reason there are some really old email clients out there still. But then there's, there's. You can, in most of the modern email clients have style tags and use them.

So what is the style tag for that? I mean, alt text, is it like alt text?

And then I think you can target the image tag directly.

Okay, I'm sorry.

Yep. So it's just like you're styling the image, but for some weird reason you put a font, a font family on it and a color on it.

Now it's all making sense to me. Thank you for taking me on that journey.

Yeah. There's one more quick call out on accessibility with email. The other big thing that you can do in email is, is say you have. Since you're making everything with tables, usually your rows and columns that do not actually contain actual content. So what I mean by content is an image that says something or conveys some form of meaning other than Just it looks pretty. If you have those, you can apply a role of presentation to it and that will make it so that screen readers and even smartwatches. If someone has a smartwatch and opens up their email, it doesn't tell them like there's an image there.

Like. Right. So this is a pro tip for all those people using Photoshop slicing. So all those spacer tables that they put in there, we'll just add roll presentation to that. Good. Good to know. Pro tips. Moving right along, I have what are the different ways you can create email in HubSpot? So I guess I'll go with you, Sarah, on this one. Just how can one make an email.

In HubSpot Go using the marketing email tool? I guess if you're talking about like actually designing the email, there's a couple of ways. So you can just build the template, the static template, HTML and design manager and use that and then you don't have to to do any editing within the editor. I don't feel like that's used very commonly. It's more likely that you're going to build a template and design manager with inline editable modules that can then be edited in the marketing email editor. Or you can just build a drag and drop email in the drag and drop email editor. So there's a couple ways. You can also build a very simple email using the Workflows tool. If you want to create an email action, you can just create a simple plain email from there. And I'm sure I'm missing a couple of places, but those are the ones that come to mind.

Elisa, how do you decide on what type of email? How are you going to build it? What's your process?

Well, since the drag and drop email editor came out, I've mostly just been using that. Y' all did a really great job on the underlying code. Like, I rarely run into issues crossplay, but if it's something really custom, like we did an email for one client who wanted to bring in posts from their WordPress based on what a user was subscribed to, like particular tags they were subscribed to. And so I worked with one of our integration developers to do that. And so it was a fully coded template connected to this integration that would pull in those posts based on the user and then send it off. So mostly it just depends on exactly how custom you want it to be.

Definitely. Next question is, and this is again for you, Sarah, why can we not use the image tag in the drag and drop rich text called out?

This was a design decision that we made when we were building the drag and drop email editor. But the main reason is that it's really hard for the image within a rich text, which in a rich text config to be responsive. Um, so we don't really like marketers having access to the source code. So we actually, we've. I think it's tables and images we don't allow being used in there because it can end up the way that the drag and drop sections are built. It can actually end up causing the section to grow out and then you end up with like this box that doesn't line up. So instead we have the image module, which is fully responsive. In the drag and drop email editor, we figure that if someone wants to put an image like their own custom coded image, they can go do that using Design Manager or the HTML module. And that way they're going to guarantee that it's going to be responsive. But we can't guarantee it if it's just plopped in the middle of rich text. In the classic editor, we don't have the same constraints because it's not built using the same template engine as a drag and drop email editor. And it will expand out. The way that the container for classic email templates is built is that it will expand out. The drag and drop box will go to 600 pixels for each section unless the image causes it to expand, which is not nice.

Thank you for.

Actually, I have a question about the image module itself. All the other modules in the drag and drop editor has that HS padded class on it. When it goes to mobile, that padding changes, but on the image module it doesn't. Is there a reason for that?

Yeah. So we used to have the class which should be on the image class. I can't remember. We made this decision because we have to put the padding in a different place for the image module. For the other modules, we just wrap those modules in a table to put the padding around it. But that doesn't work well for images that we want to go full width. We wanted to put the padding directly in the module code. It's a funny quirk about the way we actually add the tables. And so we can't trust to just add a class for it to kind of apply it in the correct place. And this is something we are going to be working on because we plan on addressing mobile styling in the drag and drop editor so that you can have custom styles at different screen sizes. And the image module is a big one there. I think the Only module we have that allows for some custom styling at mobile is image. You can have go full width on image on mobile. That's the only one that does that. But we hope to, you know, we hope to add more options there in future.

And Elisa, how do you. My earbud wants to pop out. How do you work with your design team? How do you say. Because I remember. And John, I want you to answer this as well, because we've all worked at an agency and the client has dreams, you know, and not. Not necessarily like they're lofty goals that cannot be accomplished. Let's just say that. How do you. What is your process of saying, I guess, you know, the overall theme, I think for this is going to be compromise. I think email equals compromise in a lot of ways. How do you go about this? What's your process?

Actually, currently I'm working on a document for our designers on all the different quirks in email to kind of guide them in their design. But before I get that to them, usually when they send the design, I'll review it and then I'll send to them any problems I see with the design. Like, this isn't going to look the same on everything, or it's just flat out not going to work and I'll tell them why and then I'll give them different options that we could do instead.

Do you have, like, for example, background images? I know sometimes that's always going to be an issue. Right. Do you have your designers kind of think about what color can be there instead of, you know, an actual image? Is that something that they're actively thinking about? So I remember when I was in my agency, that was one of the things I just made sure that they were always thinking about, you know, it might not work in X client. Can you make sure you think about that and how you want the alternative version of that to be?

Yeah, that's something I always have to bring up in my review is if there's background images, I'm like, okay, this probably isn't going to show up in Outlook. What color are you okay with putting there instead of the image? There were instances where I was using VML vector markup language to make it show up in Outlook. But even with that, sometimes issues arise. So at one, at some point, it's like, I'm not even going to bother with this. Just give me a color to use.

Yeah. No. Was it email on acid that has that VML cheat where you can upload an image? Yeah. I thought I was out. I thought like yes, I got it. We're all good now. Email. But I mean, just so you guys know, another solution is the Photoshop slice tool. If you just slice out that, you'll have a background every time. Just putting it out there. John, can you tell me about, can you tell me about your experience just working with the design teams? Various. I mean, I'm sure in your, I mean, I imagine. Did design always come from your company or did it come from like various clients?

It depended. So at my previous employer it was usually we worked with an agency that that agency would do the design and pass it to us to do the development. And then prior jobs that I had, it was all done in house. The design was in house. And something that I found that was really useful. And I will make sure again that we get this into our show notes. There's, there is a good resource out there and it might be outdated now, but it basically runs down like kind of the differences between web and email, but in terms that a designer can understand. And like goes over the things that you don't think about, like using fonts, like custom brand fonts, like, like there are ways you can do it, but you have to make sure it falls back like eight different ways so that, so that like old, old email clients can handle it. And sometimes, sometimes you have situations where even that's not possible and you might have to do something like use an image with really good alt text. Yeah. So it's, it's all about communication and, and it's a good idea to get involved in the design. Like when they are actively designing it, like having active back and forth conversations during that time instead of having it be like a, they pass it off to you and they forget about it kind of thing.

Right, right. How many of you guys, show of hands have had a design come to you that is a website and not an email? I mean, I don't know why people slow down.

I don't know why people want to put navigation menus in their emails, but.

People want to do this in HubSpot as well. Like we have to make the menu module available for the email tool because some people wanted to do it and I was just like, but why can't they just have like four columns and just make a fake menu? Why does it have to be the menu module that won't work like a menu?

I haven't had that issue here at Linton Web, but at my first job we were working with like several different partners and they would just send us like a landing page and be like, make this an email.

Yeah, yes, yes, yeah. Moving on to the next question, this is a long one so I'm going to read that out. How does one create an email asset module library that can be used by others in the drag and drop email builder that is flexible, where elements can be moved around, deleted, added, etc. With options to extend their functionality and how much functionality is possible. If I can create modules, I can create good looking emails from which work with the majority of clients. Hopefully I won't be asked to make two code specific emails. Who wants to go with that? John?

This is a multifaceted question here, but I'll break it down to first the module library idea. So with the way that the drag and drop emails work, creating a library of reusable email modules that you can use in those and drag and drop and place them how you want is a great idea. The some things you might want to like just try to do is, is make sure that when you are creating those modules that you have consistent things like spacing and consistent ways that you try to do responsive. That way when, when you do put them into an email and mishmash them, it'll look like you designed it as a whole instead of individual parts. Sarah, it looks like you might have something that you want to say.

So if we're talking about modules for the driver drop email editors specifically things like making sure that they don't grow in width past what the container is. People who create massive images, we don't like to go and mess around with the styles on module tags, we don't do that. But if you have an image module that's like 1000 pixels wide, it's going to cause issues for the drag and drop email editor. I've seen that a couple of times. I've seen someone try to use an entire, as you said, an entire image for their email. They've just taken a screenshot of a webpage and they're like, why does this not render well in Outlook? Why is it not responsive? And yeah, I think the thing about the drag and drop email editor as well is that it's mobile first. So that means that, you know, we have media queries to make it work well on desktop and it should just, you know, respond well on mobile so things will stack. And that's we have like a bunch of conditionals around Outlook and so if you're designing modules for that, you'd want to do the same thing. You'd want to have, you know, conditionals for Outlook and you'd want to have styles that would like maybe media queries. So we have this tag that you can add to style tags that will make it go in line, so make styles go inline. And we also have a tag that will make your style tag be dragged up into the header of the drag and drop header. We haven't actually documented that, but it's probably going to be something we're going to release when we start talking about drag and drop areas in email templates.

Sounds like I have work to do. That's my problem to solve.

There's a lot of things we want to do with the Dragon Dropping editor in future. The first thing we just wanted to do was getting it, make sure we got it working and got into people's hands. And obviously like this kind of question is the type of stuff we like to see. What are people trying to do with it? Like what are, what modules are people missing that they want to see more of? So yeah, I hope that answered the question.

No, thanks for the little Easter egg there too. That's great. I have another follow up question on and I'll wait till Elise can answer the same question. Go ahead. Modules and whatnot. What do you think, Elise?

How do you tackle this for coded templates? I was actually doing a thing where I was using a custom module with a repeater with a whole bunch of code of just a bunch of different types of sections that they could use so they were able to move things around and delete things and add things. Of course, with the new drag and drop editor that's so much easier. We have a few custom modules built out that we've been reusing throughout the drag and drop emails and I'm planning on adding more to those since in the drag and drop you get that warning that you shouldn't be using style tags. I've been utilizing the classes that are used in the drag and drop editor in my custom modules so that just automatically pulls in those already built styles.

How often do you recycle or reuse your custom modules between clients? I mean, do you have a library that you just have? John, same question to you from past experience. I'm just curious to know how that works.

We reuse modules all the time. Before the drag and drop we had the whole repeater Flexcom with just a whole bunch of text engines. All we had to do was change up the styles and then with the custom modules and the drag and drop there's a lot more customizability we can do because we just have these really simple modules that we can put in. And we're planning on adding more to this library. So pretty much like pretty much every email, we use at least some of these. And then if there is something more custom, we'll create it and add it to the library later on.

Right, right. John imagines basically the same thing for you, right?

Yeah, very similar. The way that I've always kind of approached it, and I do this with email with websites as well, is I create more like a skeleton module. So it's like the base bare bones of whatever that section would look like. And it usually would apply to any website or any email in this case. And then I add styles on top of that for the specific use case that I have. That just makes it so that it's a lot faster to get things done quickly.

Yeah, cool. And going back on. So Sarah, you mentioned the drag and drop is mobile first. And I was just made me think about how this is another more of a philosophical question, how design is done. I mean, do you guys try to influence how your designers think about which way to build, build up or build down in terms of like, you know, from mobile to desktop or desktop to mobile? And do you think of it differently for websites versus email or just universally? Do you try to like in my. I'll answer for myself. I go mobile first. I say get the simplest what you need in there and then you can build out from that. But you want to reduce it down to what needs to be conveyed. I would love to hear you guys opinions on that at least.

I'll start today. I do think it's a bit different from website to email because website on mobile, a bunch of things can change and the functionality can change. Whereas with email it's pretty simple. Everything's just going to stack. So I have our designers do the desktop version and then we just stack it down.

Yeah, that's. That's a similar approach that I've always taken is I tell the designers I will figure out the mobile experience and you're just gonna have to trust me on it. And. Yeah, because a lot of times even if they came up with like a mock up for both desktop and mobile, there may be issues to try and get it to look exactly the same.

Yeah.

Just because email is interesting.

Indeed. Sarah, do you have any thoughts on that? Sorry, did you work at an agency or anything before? I apologize.

So all of my ideas around email are from like editor first.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's that experience. And I guess when you're building the email in the editor, it is Desktop first. We are like when we do end up adding this idea of being able to have mobile related styles, we are going to have like a mobile view while you're editing those styles. But for now you can only see it if you preview the email. But yeah, the way we handle mobile styling in the drag and drop editor is very simple. We just stack columns.

Perfect.

Cool.

We're hoping to do that.

Thank you very much. Cool. Let's see some people who use the shortcut of designing email in mailchimp other email services and then export it as HTML and load it to HubSpot and adjust it for Hubble. Is this a workflow you've used? I think Elisa, you answered this on the forum and your answer was no, but do you have any extend that answer?

Yeah, personally I've not really done that. I know for people who aren't as thoroughly into email as I am, it's much faster. They can build out the layout that they want and then just pull it in and make any edits that they want. I mean you could also do this with the design manager drag and drop. We can build the layout there and then clone it to HTML to edit it. However you need. I see that there's definitely a use in it. I feel like with the new drag and drop email editor that it wouldn't be needed as much. But I do see why people would.

Use it.

For sure. John in so I haven't done that exact thing of doing like taking say like a Mailchimp email and porting it over to HubSpot. But one thing I have done in the past is use. There's a. There are frameworks for email development. There's multiple of them. One of them is foundation for emails, one of them is MJML and I have used MJML to create and foundation actually both to create HubSpot emails. There's a little bit of stuff you have to figure out when doing that just because it's the way that MJML is designed to work. You have to think about both what the rendered output code is and like how you're authoring it. But there is actually what's cool is there's an open source project that someone in our community has made to make it easier to create MJML based emails in HubSpot.

Oh, I didn't know about that. Obviously we'll be putting a link to that in the show notes as well. That's really cool. Do you know much about it? Can you. What's it do?

So basically what his Project does is it makes it easier to simplify the the authoring experience of an MJML based email and then get it into HubSpot. But so if you're not familiar, the whole purpose of these frameworks like foundation and mjml is basically email dev is hard. You're oftentimes working with tables and using archaic HTML that is no longer valid on the web and trying to make it do things it was not meant to do. Which is like for email devs that love it have been doing email work forever, you're like that is what makes you tick is figuring out these fun little strange things. But. But like when you're trying to just get something done, it's a lot easier HTML that is no longer valid on the web and trying to make it do things it was not meant to do. Which is like for email devs that love it have been doing email work forever, you're like that is what makes you tick is figuring out these fun little strange things. But. But like when you're trying to just get something done, it's a lot easier to say abstract out that code. And that's what MJML does is it abstracts it into similar to like bootstrap for the web kind of a thing. You write out this is my row, this is my column, this is my cell. You don't write out the full actual HTML table and it just makes it a little easier. You can do things like apply classes and styling that way. So it's just a different way of doing it.

Yeah, I discovered that probably oh a year before I joined HubSpot. Actually I didn't have the opportunity to use it enough. Actually I'm a little sad. I might have to go back to the agency life to use it a little more often. There was one more question. I did not add it in here. I'm not sure why. What was an email that you really enjoyed that you produced. And I totally am paraphrasing that. Elisa, how did you respond?

Yeah, I actually talked about this email earlier. The one where I worked with an integration developer to create an email to pull in WordPress posts based off of tag subscriptions. And of course I made one recently with the drag and drop editor for a university client. It was a big long newsletter with a bunch of different custom modules that they can move around.

Really cool, John.

My favorite was one that I unfortunately blew the client's budget out of the water on. But I had a ton of fun making was probably at the moment that I realized that you should be Applying like a background color behind images that aren't transparent. I had an email that was like a big advert for getting like a free beer at a, at a restaurant. And so what I did was I broke down the entire. Like, it was. It was basically a giant graphic, but then in the middle with some text talking about the offer. So what I did was I went and I converted that image basically into a ton of table cells and recreated the entire image of the beer using background colors on the table cells so that when it loaded in Outlook, it would still look like a full glass of beer and. And everything again, blew the budget out of the water. But it was entertaining.

Oh my. I don't know, John. You might be the only person in the world I can actually see you at your computer just smiling as you go through this. Oh my gosh. That's all the questions we have. I don't know, Sarah, if you wanted to say just kind of anything about the future future of email and HubSpot, don't give away too many secrets, but if you have any thoughts.

Just the stuff I've already hinted at. So that we're going to be working on adding drag and drop areas to email templates. So eventually the editor will support kind of this hybrid of like a drag and drop area with also static modules that'll bring the two editors, kind of two editors, the one editor, closer together and it'll be a little bit closer to the page drag and drop editor functionality. We're also hoping to kind of beef out the drag and drop emails to like allow mobile styles. It's something that's been asked for quite a bit. I think those are the main ones. Oh yeah, the, the save emails, a template functionality in the email editor for drag and drop. We're also looking at adding, you know, being able to edit those and eventually when, when we do introduce this drag and drop area, that those will appear in your design manager and you'll be able to, you know, add to them as well and hopefully in the future. So kind of bringing the two different worlds, like coded email templates a bit closer to drag and drop email templates.

Cool. Very cool. I thought. One last thing I wanted to talk about. I apologize. Testing. I would like to know about testing because I think that's a huge topic that probably we should unearth and explore a little bit. So testing and resources for knowing what, like when this is a fun one, something's not rendering properly and you are looking on a litmus or something like that. What resource do you go to to figure out why X is not rendering properly. We'll start with that question and then we'll go on to just asking more about a testing workflow. Alisa, I'll start with you.

Well, the rendering issues I usually run into are on Outlook, so I actually have Outlook downloaded on my computer, which I hate. I often use that to test Outlook and of course in email on acid. I use the email editor a lot because you can just throw your code in and see the screenshots immediately right there as you edit, which makes it so much faster to figure out what the heck's going on.

Yeah, I've always been on a Mac, so the Outlook having my company decided not to let me have a PC and a Mac or even having boot into the os, but I probably should have done more of that. John, what about you?

So what I always liked doing was Litmus has some great tools. So one of the cool things that you can do with Litmus is and I don't know if this tool still works this way, it's been a while since I've used it. But at least at one point in time, while you were actually in the testing phase of an email, you could actually open up an inspector that would live edit in the actual like Outlook or Gmail or whatever client you're testing and you could actually live edit what it looked like in there, which was really useful. They also had a tool that I didn't find it useful. It was more of a depressing tool to look at, but it's entertaining to at least look at is they have a space for coding out your emails and it will tell you all of the things that don't like in your email that don't render in everything else. And because of the way that emails work is you are creating fallbacks on top of fallbacks on top of fallbacks. So like everything that you intentionally write is going to basically not work in something. And so it's just like seeing a giant list of red even though you're actually doing things right. So.

Oh John, I'm sure your your beer ad probably rendered perfectly on all clients. Cool. So I think that is kind of a wrap on everything. You guys have anything else to add? I will ask awkwardly at the end of this.

There has never been a better time to be a HubSpot developer. I will say that every episode.

So yeah, everyone watching this right now, please do. I invite you, encourage you to ask questions. You can email me directly. There'll be a form at the bottom of this. Please add your ideas, your thoughts. If you hate this, yell at me. I don't mind. Really, I don't mind. I like the feedback. Check out. As I said, next month we'll be doing an episode on SEO. Very excited about. And I've already got the people rounded up to do it, which is going to be amazing. Elisa, John, Sarah, thank you so very much for doing this with me. I've had a great time. I hope you guys as well. And Elisa, I saw a cat. Very cute. All right, guys, have a great day. Okay, great.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.