Affinect Saved 5+ Developer-Months Embedding an Email Editor Their Users Prefer to Mailchimp

Affinect, providers of a customer data, loyalty, and lifecycle marketing platform for hospitality businesses, needed a professional email creation experience inside their product, but they didn’t want to drain their internal development resources on creating and maintaining it.

• 5+ developer-months saved on building an editor + ongoing maintenance costs

• Consistently happy customers (many even prefer the editor in Affinect to the editor in Mailchimp)

• Freedom for Affinect to focus on delivering their platform’s unique value

• Straightforward integration of Topol Plugin, fully white-label

• Custom brand blocks for coupons, loyalty, rewards, and platform data

• Reliable email rendering across devices and email clients

• Friendly, predictable pricing that’s designed for embedded SaaS

Affinect helps restaurants, cafés, leisure venues, and multi-location hospitality groups identify customers across physical locations, collect permissioned first-party data, understand visit behavior, and turn this information into targeted campaigns, loyalty programs, coupons, and measurable customer engagement. The platform brings guest Wi-Fi, QR customer journeys, visit analytics, campaign automation, and promotional tools into a single platform.

Building a complete, drag-and-drop email editor in-house would have required substantial specialist development, and distracted Affinect from the development of their platform’s core functionality, so they set out to embed a third-party editor instead.

The editor needed to meet four main requirements:

• It had to be easy to learn and something Affinect’s customers would enjoy using.

• Affinect's developers would own the integration, so it had to embed smoothly, stay low-maintenance, and produce email HTML that renders reliably across devices and email clients.

• Since the pricing of an embedded editor scales with the customer base, the commercial model had to stay predictable and sustainable as Affinect grows.

• The editor needed to be white-label, and support Affinect’s custom blocks and dynamic platform data.

Affinect first evaluated another popular embeddable email editor against these requirements, but found its integration structure to be difficult, and the pricing to be unpredictable.

Topol Plugin met all of Affinect’s requirements for an embedded email editor.

Initial integration was straightforward, and Affinect's developers handled most of it independently using Topol's documentation. When they needed clarification, the Topol team was responsive, and Affinect valued being able to speak directly with people who understood the technical use case.

White-label implementation keeps the editor consistent with Affinect's own interface, and their team was able to build custom blocks, inject personalized customer variables, and wire email templates into Affinect’s scheduling and automation system. The outputted HTML renders reliably on all devices and email clients, including legacy ones like Outlook 2000.

Very importantly, predictable pricing means that Affinect can count on Topol as a long-term partner.

Affinect estimates that the initial implementation of Topol Plugin saved 5 developer-months. But the savings continue past that, because Affinect never has to maintain the drag-and-drop editor, its responsive behavior, or the underlying email HTML as devices and email clients change.

Most often, no training is required to use the editor in Affinect, and it’s easy for their sales team to demonstrate; very few support questions come in about it.

This leaves Affinect's development team free to work on what differentiates the platform: customer identity and visit data, dynamic audience targeting, event-triggered campaigns, and loyalty and coupon programs.

Moving forward, Affinect plans on building more platform-specific content blocks and deepening the connections between email content and other platform features.

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