Reviews and expert opinion Designmodo Postcards

It’s a Robust Email Template Builder, but Is That Enough?

Let me start out by saying that Designmodo Postcards IS NOT an email marketing service (EMS). It’s an email template builder that offers an intuitive design experience. In short, it promises to help you create beautiful, effective emails as quickly and painlessly as possible.

When you judge it on those terms, Postcards looks great. The interface is very clean, and the tool itself is easy to navigate. Instead of picking from a few templates and being forced to fit your message into a premade layout, Designmodo allows you to create unique messages with fully-editable “modules”.

But we still need to address the elephant in the room. Designmodo charges EMS prices without offering any email marketing services.

If a full-featured email marketing service is what you’re looking for, I’d point you in the direction of ActiveCampaign’s Lite plan to design, send, and manage your email campaigns at a very affordable price.

If what you’re after is a design service that can give you fully customizable email templates, keep reading.

It’s Filled With Extras, but Key Features Are Missing

What Designmodo Postcards does, it does well. If all you’re looking for is a quick way to design modern emails with zero coding knowledge, Designmodo Postcards might be the right choice for you.

When it comes to customization, Postcards can hold its own against even the top competitors. There are hundreds of modules to choose from, and everything from coloring to spacing to module style is fully customizable.

I also found plenty of handy features that make collaboration and content management easier for teams. If you’re on the Agency plan, you can even benefit from Designmodo’s own cloud image hosting service.

Designmodo Email Templates & Modules

Postcard’s design philosophy is unique. Unlike most other email builders, you don’t get to choose from ready-made email templates that you can then edit.

Instead, you drag and drop modules (or content blocks) that belong to different categories (e.g. header, content, feature, CTA) and slowly build your message top-down, bottom-up, or any other way you see fit. All created templates are mobile responsive, and you can quickly switch between desktop and mobile view with the click of a button.

So, here’s why this approach might work better than your traditional email template editing: With pre-made templates, you might often feel tempted to keep blocks that you don’t actually need. The module philosophy encourages you to create minimalistic designs rather than trying to fit your vision into something ready-made.

Each email section contains plenty of modules, and you can pick and choose any combination you like. The eight sections are:

• Menu
• Header
• Content
• Feature
• Call-to-action
• E-commerce
• Transactional
• Footer

In total, there are about 100 modules to choose from. Although that’s enough to create millions of possible combinations, I wish there was just a bit more variety in terms of appearance, especially in the “Content” section.

Many modules seem identical, save for a few minor font and button changes. On a positive note, they all look sleek and modern, coming together nicely once you begin assembling your email.

Customization & Fonts

Designmodo allows you to pick between two different layout styles: card and list. The card style creates small spaces between modules for a more modern look, while the list style sticks to a more classic, unified layout.

You can also play around with a module’s spacing, background color, and button color, and you can even upload your own background images. If you click on a module, a new menu will pop up, and you’ll have the chance to remove, edit, and insert text, buttons, images, and other individual elements.

One way in which Designmodo’s design stands from the competition is the enormous selection of available fonts. Integrating with Google, the builder allows you to pick from 900+ fonts. I mean, wow. If your font’s not there, chances are it doesn’t exist.

This is a big win for Designmodo, as most other builders only include a few dozen font styles at best. Honestly, I’m surprised they don’t advertise this feature more.

Advanced Editor Features

Desigmodo Postcards has several advanced editor features, but I’ve got be honest with you, some aren’t implemented as smoothly as I’d like.

For example, you can easily add custom HTML by clicking the Tools button and selecting the source code option on all modules that contain text. But if you want to add something as simple as a social button or a countdown timer, you’re forced to use external tools and your own HTML code – which is definitely not ideal.

If you’d like to bring your messages to life with royalty-free images, Designmodo’s missing a stock image library. Instead you can browse photos on a stock site and upload them to your templates manually.

Finally, Designmodo doesn’t fully support right-to-left (RTL) languages. If you want to create email templates in Hebrew or Arabic, you’ll have to insert custom HTML to make it work. The support team told me they’re working on implementing full RTL support, but at this point in time, I wouldn’t recommend the tool to people who write in languages written from right to left.

Additional Features

As a standalone email-building application, Designmodo Postcards comes with some handy features that can improve workflow and make your life as a marketer a bit easier.

Although Designmodo doesn’t actually offer any email marketing services, it makes it easy to export templates to Mailchimp and Hubspot. Unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate as smoothly with other EMS.

In most cases, you’ll have to copy Designmodo’s source code and then import it as a custom HTML template to the email marketing platform of your choice. It’s still possible but it requires a little extra thought.

On the plus side, Designmodo has its own directory system that allows you to group different templates together, keeping everything organized.

Even better, there’s a super helpful version history tool that means you can quickly restore to a previous state with the click of a button. If you have several people working on the same design at the same time, this feature can help you keep track of past edits – much like how editing in Google Docs works.

If you’re on the Agency plan, you can also access Designmodo’s cloud image hosting service. High-quality photos can quickly fill up your cloud storage, and this feature could come in handy if you create emails with heavy visuals.

That said, is it really worth the investment when Google makes it possible to buy multiple terabytes of cloud storage for a few dollars a month?

Helpful, but Not as Quick as the Competition

Designmodo Postcards offers support through the app’s chat function. Once you open a ticket and receive a reply, you can choose to respond directly through email, so you don’t have to return to the app every time.

You can open a ticket whenever you like, but requests are only processed during working days – which means you’ll have to wait a bit longer if something goes wrong over the weekend.

Designmodo does have an FAQ and a helpful instant answer feature you can access through the chat app. If you click on a relevant answer, you’ll be redirected to a guide/article on the website’s knowledge base.

For more general queries about Designmodo’s services (and other products), there’s a dedicated email address and a “contact us” form on the website. Phone support is currently not an option.

My Experience

I wasn’t sure whether Designmodo fully supported RTL languages, so I sent a message to the support team through the app. A representative got back to me several hours later.

I opened the ticket at around 7 pm UTC+2 and heard back early in the morning.

In the interest of fully testing the service, I decided to send another message and see how it compared. I had trouble accessing Designmodo’s version history feature, so I sent another message to support at noon the following day. I received an answer late in the evening.

It wasn’t the quickest experience but it wasn’t the slowest either, and I got the answer I needed in both cases. I’d love a live chat function but at least the current system works.

Way Too Expensive for What It Offers

Designmodo Postcards offers a free plan and two paid plans based on the number of users and monthly template exports.

The free plan offers a limited number of free modules, which means you’re left with zero artistic freedom. If you don’t decide to upgrade, you’re basically stuck with one module for each of the eight email sections (such as menu, header, content). The free plan is okay for checking out the tool’s capabilities, but nothing more than that.

The Business plan, which is set at $24.00/month, is the first plan that allows EMS integrations. You’re limited to 20 monthly exports, and you can only use it to create projects for one brand. But note that you can create as many email templates as you like – you just can’t export them!

The Agency plan, which is set at $39.00/month, includes everything in the Business plan plus some extra benefits. There are no export limits, you can invite up to 5 users to work with you, and you can work with multiple brands at the same time. Image hosting on Designmodo’s servers is also unlocked with this plan.

If you’d rather pay annually, Designmodo offers a 29% discount on the Business plan and a 25% discount on the Agency plan.

Designmodo will only give you your money back in special cases (e.g. product not delivered, download issues, major defects), so I recommend you try the app by taking advantage of the free plan and the monthly recurring subscriptions before setting up an annual subscription.

I won’t lie to you, I appreciate that there is a free plan, but beyond that, it is expensive for what it offers, but if you want a stripped back, super simple email builder, it does the job and there’s nothing else to complicate it.You can focus on getting the custom email template you’ve always dreamed off without any distractions.

If you do want all the features that a standard email marketinng service offers, you can access ActiveCampaign’s email builder for half the price of Designmodo Business. Not to mention that most EMS (including ActiveCampaign) don’t limit the number of templates you can create, and it comes with automation recipes, helps you build and test campaigns and reports on them too… just a thought