The Future of Smart Design: Interview with the Benchmark Email Product Team
Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2024 9:06 am
As Benchmark Email continues to simplify email marketing for busy marketers with innovative tools, we had the opportunity to sit down with two key figures behind their latest AI project, Smart Design . Jeff Zimmerman, Chief Product Officer, and Paul Rijnders, Product Manager at Smart Design, share their insights on the development and impact of this AI-powered email creation tool. Smart Design is meant to simplify the email design process, making it faster and more efficient for users to create professional-quality emails. Let’s dive into their journey and gain insight into the future direction of Smart Design.
1. What was the background for your decision to develop Smart Design?
Jeff Zimmerman: From the beginning, Benchmark Email has been designed with simplicity at its core. Email marketing can be challenging, so we were excited to build a tool that helps our users bring their marketing strategy to life with ease. Before we started incorporating AI, Benchmark Email was built around the easiest-to-use drag-and-drop campaign editor out there, as well as an extensive library of email templates. The team has always strived to constantly improve the process of creating emails for our users.
Paul Rijnders: Still, we understood the challenges for marketers bahrain telegram lead it comes to coming to a new platform and creating a new email from scratch. Our goal was to reduce a task that usually takes hours to minutes. Generative AI tools have been gaining traction in recent years, even before ChatGPT went public. In September 2022, we launched Smart Content Content to help our users easily create and update the copy of their email templates.
Jeff Zimmerman: Shortly after our launch of Smart Content, ChatGPT opened up to the public. We started leveraging the new OpenAI APIs to build Smart Design. It was a natural progression from helping ideate and write email copy with Smart Content to easing the workload of email template design with Smart Design.
2. What challenges did you face from the development of Smart Design to its launch? Tell us about them.
Jeff Zimmerman: At Benchmark Email, we keep the customer at the center of product development. It’s not about what we think the customer should want, but what the customer actually wants. One of the challenges we faced was not building Smart Design based on assumptions from the start. Instead, we started with a stripped-down version of the product. While the beta version of Smart Design wasn’t as powerful as our last release, it was a valuable starting point for understanding how our users want to use AI in their email design flow.
Paul Rijnders: With unlimited possibilities before us, we worked hard to narrow it down to the functionality that would be most useful to our customer base. We did extensive research to understand the types of emails our customers send and launched Smart Design with categories of promotional, newsletter and welcome email templates .
Another exciting challenge for us was creating AI messages that generated email copy aligned with the company and the goal of the email template. Additionally, additional steps were required to produce robust email copy for Japanese, especially with the early versions of GPT. For example, we quickly learned that OpenAI supports English instructions better. So we designed our instructions in English and asked for the output to be in Japanese to achieve the desired results.
3. How has Smart Design impacted Benchmark Email users in the months since launch? Please share any examples of positive user impact, feedback, or results.
Jeff Zimmerman: We’re thrilled to see our customers gaining a head start on their email design efforts. With the addition of Smart Design, our data shows that users are more likely to create and save an email within their first session logged into Benchmark Email. We’ve also seen an increase in users completing other key tasks within the first seven days of using the platform, such as verifying their email address and adding contacts to their Benchmark Email subscriber lists. These indicators suggest that Smart Design is making it easier for users to create and send impactful emails.
In addition to our data, we are also receiving promising feedback from users. One customer explained how it took him two hours to create a simple email with his previous provider, while with Smart Design he was able to create a similar email in just 45 minutes. Our customers are also sharing their experience with Smart Design with their peers on websites like G2. It is really rewarding to hear the positive feedback.
1. What was the background for your decision to develop Smart Design?
Jeff Zimmerman: From the beginning, Benchmark Email has been designed with simplicity at its core. Email marketing can be challenging, so we were excited to build a tool that helps our users bring their marketing strategy to life with ease. Before we started incorporating AI, Benchmark Email was built around the easiest-to-use drag-and-drop campaign editor out there, as well as an extensive library of email templates. The team has always strived to constantly improve the process of creating emails for our users.
Paul Rijnders: Still, we understood the challenges for marketers bahrain telegram lead it comes to coming to a new platform and creating a new email from scratch. Our goal was to reduce a task that usually takes hours to minutes. Generative AI tools have been gaining traction in recent years, even before ChatGPT went public. In September 2022, we launched Smart Content Content to help our users easily create and update the copy of their email templates.
Jeff Zimmerman: Shortly after our launch of Smart Content, ChatGPT opened up to the public. We started leveraging the new OpenAI APIs to build Smart Design. It was a natural progression from helping ideate and write email copy with Smart Content to easing the workload of email template design with Smart Design.
2. What challenges did you face from the development of Smart Design to its launch? Tell us about them.
Jeff Zimmerman: At Benchmark Email, we keep the customer at the center of product development. It’s not about what we think the customer should want, but what the customer actually wants. One of the challenges we faced was not building Smart Design based on assumptions from the start. Instead, we started with a stripped-down version of the product. While the beta version of Smart Design wasn’t as powerful as our last release, it was a valuable starting point for understanding how our users want to use AI in their email design flow.
Paul Rijnders: With unlimited possibilities before us, we worked hard to narrow it down to the functionality that would be most useful to our customer base. We did extensive research to understand the types of emails our customers send and launched Smart Design with categories of promotional, newsletter and welcome email templates .
Another exciting challenge for us was creating AI messages that generated email copy aligned with the company and the goal of the email template. Additionally, additional steps were required to produce robust email copy for Japanese, especially with the early versions of GPT. For example, we quickly learned that OpenAI supports English instructions better. So we designed our instructions in English and asked for the output to be in Japanese to achieve the desired results.
3. How has Smart Design impacted Benchmark Email users in the months since launch? Please share any examples of positive user impact, feedback, or results.
Jeff Zimmerman: We’re thrilled to see our customers gaining a head start on their email design efforts. With the addition of Smart Design, our data shows that users are more likely to create and save an email within their first session logged into Benchmark Email. We’ve also seen an increase in users completing other key tasks within the first seven days of using the platform, such as verifying their email address and adding contacts to their Benchmark Email subscriber lists. These indicators suggest that Smart Design is making it easier for users to create and send impactful emails.
In addition to our data, we are also receiving promising feedback from users. One customer explained how it took him two hours to create a simple email with his previous provider, while with Smart Design he was able to create a similar email in just 45 minutes. Our customers are also sharing their experience with Smart Design with their peers on websites like G2. It is really rewarding to hear the positive feedback.