Responsive Email: JustRelate, the email builder that makes the difference

In 2013, the first fully responsive email created for La Redoute marked a major technical milestone in the world of email marketing.

At the time, several trends and needs were becoming increasingly clear:

• A strong client demand — to industrialize the production of email campaigns.

• A market trend — the growing number and complexity of email viewing environments.

• An opportunity to seize — an accessible builder that makes it easy to create fully responsive emails.

Driven by this vision, our Email Builder has continued to evolve while maintaining a high level of technical excellence and quality. Nearly eight years after its launch, it has earned the trust of hundreds of clients worldwide and continues to stand out for its responsive design and compatibility.

Its secret? A comprehensive approach that relies on the expertise of its employees and the support of its clients. The result? This unique capability in the market to guarantee and fulfill its promise of compatibility.

Let’s look back at the journey and approach of JustRelate, an Email Builder that truly sets itself apart and continues to explore the possibilities in the world of email marketing.

With over half of the world’s routed marketing emails being opened and viewed on mobile devices, the equation is simple: if your emails are not responsive, your campaigns simply cannot convert.

But what exactly do we mean when we talk about responsive emails?

A responsive email is an email that has been thoughtfully coded and designed to be supported and displayed on any type of device: desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Today, designing a responsive email may seem like a given for everyone, but it hasn’t always been the case, and, more importantly, it’s often less straightforward to achieve than one might claim.

JustRelate stands out as an innovative solution for creating fully responsive emails, addressing the growing need for industrialization and flexibility in email campaigns.

The solution was designed to simplify email creation through lightweight code, modular structures, and methodologies that make content updates more efficient.

At a time when most builders were integrated into sending platforms and relied on a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach, JustRelate chose to go further—offering greater flexibility and compatibility to help teams create professional-quality emails.

The outcome: integrated code and the ability to flexibly edit text and image areas. Despite some shared hesitations and the proclaimed failure by some, JustRelate decided to push further ahead!

In many ways, these early experiments acted as a real R&D laboratory. They helped the JustRelate team understand customer challenges and constraints, and most importantly identify a need that had not yet been addressed but was already clearly present for Marketing and CRM teams: optimizing the production timeline of email campaigns.

From its inception, the JustRelate solution was, therefore, designed and developed with a User-Centric approach.

At the time JustRelate entered the scene, the dominant practice (still widely used today) was the adaptive approach: designing an email for the desktop version and then squeezing it to fit tablet and mobile views.

JustRelate takes a fully responsive approach, enabling the creation of any type of design without technical constraints and ensuring compatibility across all email clients.

The display constraints were already numerous, and the method was not yet fully developed. However, JustRelate believed in this approach, persisted, and year after year, set a new standard in the market.

Since then, hardly anyone would think of designing their emails without a Mobile-First approach. JustRelate, on the other hand, had a head start. Its unrivaled expertise has earned the trust of over 400 brands, including renowned names like L’Oréal, Dior, LVMH, Lacoste, and more.

Designing responsive campaigns is a hot topic, but few templating tools can truly implement it. Why? Simply because the compatibility of your emails across the various devices used in the market doesn’t solely depend on your templating tool.

In reality, the display and compatibility of your campaigns depend on:

• The receiving device and, therefore, the screen size
• The operating system/environment (iOS/Android) of the device
• The email client and even the displayed email address

Ultimately, the combination of all these factors can lead to up to 12,000 possible combinations. That’s as many chances of having your images, fonts, designs, etc., unsupported or altered.

Additionally, the actions of your routing solutions can further transform the code once digested, leading to new display issues.

Conclusion: In nearly 100% of cases, it’s these external factors rather than the coding of your campaigns that cause compatibility issues.

The promise of designing 100% responsive and compatible emails is, therefore, not as easy to fulfill on the design side as it may seem.

Fully aware of these realities, JustRelate has chosen to adopt a comprehensive approach, and it is this approach that allows them to make all the difference and fulfill their promise of compatibility.

The three pillars of their methodology are:

1. The quality of their solution and regularly updated code.
2. The cross-functional expertise of their team members, encompassing both tech-development and design.
3. Daily customer support to help resolve issues almost instantly as they arise.

JustRelate’s Email Builder designer has been designed to offer a customized display based on breakpoints, allowing users to have complete control over personalization and rendering, regardless of the viewing device: desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Translation: the majority of email builders only allow partial customization of the mobile view. You design your campaigns for a desktop view, and either the mobile view is entirely and automatically generated by the email builder (so you have no control over it), or you have limited options for customization.

In the JustRelate solution interface, you have access to three types of views: desktop, tablet, and mobile. Each of these views is independent of the others. In other words, you can make adjustments and customize the mobile or tablet views as you wish.

With the JustRelate solution, you can intervene and customize nearly all elements of your campaign based on the device, far beyond the usual parameters like font size, color, or images.

This level of customization is hard to achieve unless you outsource the design of your emails, which entails:

• Higher design costs and longer lead times.
• Reduced agility in the design process.
• Loss of autonomy and productivity.

In a nearly unique situation in the market, JustRelate does not rely on any third-party solutions and owns its code and email rendering engine.

Why is this important? Because it allows JustRelate’s technical team to regularly update its code and solution (multiple times a week) in response to market changes and constraints.

In essence, we anticipate potential display issues on a day-to-day basis.

With each evolution of email clients, mail readers, and mobile environments, there is potentially a new set of incompatibilities.

JustRelate’s strength lies in its R&D team, which continuously monitors these developments and directly intervenes in its source code to anticipate and resolve potential incompatibilities.

Through this process, JustRelate continuously addresses 95% of display configurations.

For the remaining 5%, we invite you to refer to point 6.

The device Lab: that’s the name of the testing laboratory developed by JustRelate. With an annual investment of tens of thousands of euros, JustRelate has built and regularly updates a stock of nearly a hundred devices, including all the latest and most commonly used mobile devices on the market.

Thanks to this lab, members of the PCM team can continuously test and verify client campaigns on all the most common display configurations.

As soon as an issue (or an update) is identified on one of these configurations, it is immediately reported to the R&D team to anticipate and resolve any display problems.

Despite the entire methodology implemented by JustRelate, it’s not always enough to solve 100% of the display issues encountered by our clients. CRM and Marketing teams are never immune to new problems they may not have the means to resolve.

That’s why JustRelate is there for its clients throughout their journey.

• During the onboarding phase, we share our expertise to enable teams to adopt best practices.
• Our Support Team is available in person and around the clock to respond to and resolve client issues in real time.

JustRelate truly goes the extra mile to ensure that emails produced with its solution are among the most compatible in the market.