Topol Enables 12k+ Ecomail Clients to Build 150k+ Email Templates
Ecomail—the leading email marketing platform in Central Europe—needed to give its customers an intuitive, flexible way to design responsive emails without requiring technical skills. But when the company was founded in 2014, no robust, affordable, embeddable email editors existed.
This is the story of how Ecomail’s developers built Topol—a drag-and-drop email editor that now serves Ecomail’s 12,000+ customers, as well as thousands of its own customers.
Contents
Executive Summary
Key Outcomes:
12,000+ happy clients
150,000+ custom email templates built by Ecomail clients
1+ billion emails designed in Topol and sent monthly from within Ecomail
Solution Overview:
2+ years building and refining a white-label email editor (which can now be plugged into any SaaS platform in a single day)
Flexible, user-friendly interface for non-technical business professionals
“The Topol Plugin plays perfectly with Ecomail and our customers love it. Best of all—now that we've done the heavy lifting, any other SaaS vendor that wants Topol’s functionality inside their platform can have it in hours, not months or years.”
— Jakub Stupka, co-founder of Ecomail and Topol.io
Full Case Study
Ecomail is the leading email marketing platform in Central Europe, used by over 12,000 organizations. It is also the parent company of Topol.
Ecomail enables end-to-end management of email campaigns—from design, to scheduling and automation, to contact database management, to analysis. The Topol Plugin, embedded in Ecomail, is the drag-and-drop email design component.
The Challenge: Building a Complete Email Editor In-House
At its inception in 2014, Ecomail's vision was to provide customers with a complete email marketing experience. Naturally, an embedded email design tool would need to be a key part of this. But in 2014, there weren’t any robust, affordable, and embeddable plugins like Topol, which could save Ecomail’s developers months of development time. The only sensible option was to build one in-house.
Ecomail’s target client base includes ecommerce companies, agencies, and SaaS vendors; the design needs of these clients are widely varied, as are the skills of Ecomail’s users. Therefore, the inbuilt editor needed to be feature-rich, easy to use, and highly customizable.
The Solution: Months of Development, Years of Refinement
Ecomail’s developers spent about 6 months building the initial iteration of the email editor. But that was just the beginning.
One of the hardest challenges was ensuring that emails designed in the editor rendered consistently across all major email clients, including notoriously difficult ones like Outlook 2000 and 2007, which interpret HTML and CSS in ways more similar to Microsoft Word than a modern browser. Simple design elements like paddings, background images, and button alignment would break completely, even if they looked flawless in the Topol editor.
Ecomail’s team spent the next 2 years:
Deeply understanding and reverse-engineering email client quirks, particularly Microsoft’s rendering engine.
Testing across dozens of platforms and devices, including mobile clients like Apple Mail and Gmail on Android, where CSS support is limited or inconsistent.
Hand-coding HTML structures using proven techniques like nested tables, inline styles, and conditional comments.
Building a custom rendering engine inside the editor to mimic how real clients would display the email, allowing users to preview and troubleshoot issues in real-time.
Optimizing the system to allow for editable but locked blocks, enabling templates to be reused without breaking.
In short, Topol’s developers had to combine the flexibility of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get tool with the precision of handcrafted HTML, while shielding non-technical users from the complexity underneath.
“In 2014, building an email editor and refining it using in-house resources made perfect sense. But for most small and medium-sized businesses today, it would be much more desirable to simply embed a mature third-party plugin, like Topol, in their platform and literally save 2 to 3 years of development work”
— Jakub Stupka, co-founder of Ecomail and Topol.io
Today, Topol not only meets Ecomail’s needs, but exceeds them to the point that it has become a product in its own right. The Topol Plugin is embedded in nearly 200 SaaS platforms from vendors around the world, and the Topol PRO app is used by thousands of business professionals independently of Ecomail.
The Result: Full Email Design Flexibility for 12,000+ Clients
Despite being an HTML email editor, Topol users don't need any technical skills to adjust templates. This is ideal for the majority of Ecomail users, who are business professionals that prefer no-code, drag-and-drop functionality.
To date, Ecomail has over 12,000 satisfied clients, and these clients have used Topol to build over 150,000 email templates to serve their own business needs. (Additionally, Topol.io offers nearly 400 pre-built email templates.)
Topol offers many additional features that save hours of manual labor for Ecomail users, such as predefined email content, a built-in library of commercially usable images, and linked product feeds.
The number of emails designed using Topol.io and sent monthly from within the Ecomail platform regularly exceeds 1 billion.
“The Topol Plugin plays perfectly with Ecomail and our customers love it. Best of all—now that we've done the heavy lifting, any other SaaS vendor that wants Topol’s functionality inside their platform can have it in hours, not months or years.”
— Jakub Stupka, co-founder of Ecomail and Topol.io