Now that you have your Email Design System up and running in Taxi, this is just the beginning of what you can achieve with it. Unlike a standard email template, your Design System is a living tool that you can constantly update and improve to make sure that you're getting the most out of it.
You'll have done a lot of work to make sure that your team has everything they need to create emails. However as they use the Design System in Taxi, they are likely to have feedback on improvements that can be made to make it more efficient. You may also eventually introduce new types of emails that you want to send out, which will require new modules or perhaps new members will join the team that need to use the design system in a slightly different way.
All of the above will require you to constantly communicate with those using your Design System and listen to their feedback to make sure you can adapt it in the right ways. It's worth thinking about the best way to gather this feedback, to ensure nothing is lost and you don't become overwhelmed with requests or questions. Project management tools can be very useful for capturing this, or you may want to introduce a process where your team can fill out a form when giving Design System feedback.
Another challenge emails teams are constantly facing is ensuring campaigns render well across as many email clients and devices as possible. What is supported can often change, so it's important to frequently test and review how your emails are rendering, to know whether any updates or fixes are needed.
Given how important it is to continually update and improve your design system, you may want to think about how you can make this process as smooth and easy as possible. You can read more about how to upload and update templates here.
One of the benefits of using your Design System in Taxi is that anytime you make an update, it applies to all of your emails that were created from it. This is really useful when you add a new module or fix a rendering issue, because it only needs to be done once, instead of manually updating multiple emails.
You'll need to be careful when updating a Design System's HTML, to ensure that any changes you make to the Taxi Syntax don't cause any previously entered content to un-sync with the Design System. This can happen if you remove or rename a module, modulezone, editable or field. Taxi reads the name="" attribute on these tags, and uses that to match any existing content.
If you would like to change how the title of an element is displayed in the editor interface, you can update this using the label="" attribute.
A way to test this and ensure this doesn't happen, is to set up a test Design System in your account to make sure that your changes will work exactly as you need. Once you've tested, you can override the HTML being used to create all your emails.
When you are making changes, the best place to get the most up to date HTML is by downloading the current HTML in your account. This way you'll know that this is the most current code and there's no chance of overriding or losing any work. If you do prefer to make changes without downloading the HTML every time, then make sure to keep offline versions organised to avoid editing the wrong file.
If there's more than one person who'll be working on your HTML, make sure you communicate with them whenever updates are made. This will avoid any changes being lost or two people working on the same or similar parts of the code. Also make sure you work from the same HTML file, so if updates are made by one person, anyone else editing the code will be working on the most up to date version.
If you do ever need to revert back to a previous version of your HTML, then a list of the files you have previously uploaded is available in Taxi. This'll make it easier to manage the versions of your HTML as you won't have to keep them all offline to keep track of them. If you ever have any questions about a previous version of the design system that was uploaded, you are easily able to see who has uploaded the code.
If you send emails with very similar layouts but just different logos and branding then you should consider using sub-templates in addition to your Email Design System. Sub-templates in Taxi act as another template that you can use to create emails, but it uses the same HTML as your main Email Design System. It contains all the same modules and editable options but you're able to change default branding and content, such as colours, logos and links.
It means you won't have to manage multiple HTML files, so anytime you need a new module or any other update to your design system, you can do it once and have it apply to multiple branded templates.
