Guides
Guides
craft
Craft is the difference between an email that functions and one that gets remembered. Same information, same audience, same infrastructure — the craft layer is what determines whether it converts. These guides cover the writing, design, and production decisions that make lifecycle messages actually work.
Lifecycle operators talk in systems. Subject lines, preheaders, and copy are where those systems meet a human. A flawless Braze configuration, perfect segmentation, and healthy deliverability all collapse if the email itself reads as generic. Craft is the last-mile work — the tight layer between what you're trying to say and what the reader actually sees.
The guides in this category start with the inbox. Subject line anatomy — the four-part structure that survives the 2-second scan. Preheader text — the second subject line most programs still waste on 'view in browser'. Emoji discipline: when they lift open rate, when they trigger filters, and why the effect is smaller than the vendor case studies suggest. Then the reading experience: mobile-first design (65% of opens happen there), dark-mode render-mode trade-offs, accessibility as the baseline that happens to also survive image blocking.
From there, into production. Transactional template anatomy — the five-section structure that keeps these emails functional without making them look like marketing. The email copywriting pyramid — conclusion first, so the 5-second reader gets the point before the 60-second reader gets the detail. Brand voice discipline, because every lifecycle program eventually drifts toward the generic SaaS CRM voice. Personalisation that doesn't feel creepy. SMS, push, and content-block naming conventions that scale.
Read these when specific emails aren't performing. More often, read them before designing the next template — craft decisions are cheaper to make at the start than to retrofit.
Every Braze workspace eventually becomes an archaeological dig. The convention that actually holds is four dimensions, six seconds to apply, and enforced by tooling rather than a Notion page nobody reads.
9 min read
IntermediateEvery personalised field in every Braze message runs through Liquid. Get it right and personalisation quietly improves every send. Get it wrong and 50,000 people see 'Hi {{${first_name}}}'. This reference covers the syntax and the production habits that stop that happening.
11 min read
IntermediateThere's a line between personalisation that earns trust and personalisation that breaks it. It's not where most people think it is — it's about how you signal what you know, not what you know. Here's the line, how programs cross it without noticing, and the patterns that keep you on the right side.
9 min read
IntermediateSMS is the highest-engagement and highest-risk channel in the lifecycle stack. Here's the compliance architecture, the copy discipline, and the frequency rules that keep SMS from destroying the goodwill it's uniquely positioned to create.
10 min read
BeginnerMost subject-line advice is decoration tips — emoji, length, numbers. The lines that actually get opened share a structural pattern. Four parts in a specific order, the three distortions that ruin it, and the four rules that keep A/B tests honest.
8 min read
IntermediatePush is the highest-interrupt channel in the stack. A bad push burns goodwill in under a second; a good one feels like a useful nudge from a friend. This is the copy discipline — specific words, specific structures, specific anti-patterns that reliably get a user to turn your notifications off for good.
8 min read
BeginnerThe preheader is the snippet shown next to the subject line in the inbox preview. Treat it like a second subject line and you double your hook. Treat it like an afterthought and it says 'View this email in your browser'. Here's how to write preheaders that actually earn the open.
7 min read
IntermediateDark mode in email is four different render behaviours across major clients, each with its own logic. Design without knowing which mode you're hitting and roughly half your audience sees something you never approved. Here's what each client does and the defensive rules that survive all of them.
9 min read
IntermediateTwo-thirds of email is opened on mobile. Most designs still start with desktop and hope it collapses. Here are the mobile-first rules that reliably produce emails that read, click, and convert on a phone.
8 min read
IntermediateRoughly fifteen percent of your audience opens your email with a screen reader, on a cracked phone in direct sunlight, or with images blocked at the corporate gateway. Most programs accidentally design around them. Seven rules — most of them cheap, all of them learnable in an afternoon — close the gap.
8 min read
IntermediateTransactional emails — receipts, password resets, shipping updates — open at 3–5x the rate of marketing and carry more brand signal per send than anything else in the program. Most teams treat them as ops artefacts and miss the leverage entirely. Here's the five-section anatomy that works across every transactional type.
8 min read
BeginnerLifecycle emails — the automated sequences that go out on signup, after a purchase, when a cart is abandoned — drift toward a polished, generic SaaS voice because it's the default in every template library. Here's how to actually write in your brand's voice across an entire program.
8 min read
BeginnerMost recipients give an email five seconds before they engage or delete. The email has to land its point at that depth and still reward a longer read. The inverted pyramid — conclusion first, detail after — is how.
7 min read
BeginnerOne well-placed emoji lifts open rate a few percent. Three reads as spam and drops it. The honest version of the emoji question is smaller and more specific than the debate suggests — here's the pattern that actually survives testing.
6 min read
BeginnerEvery HTML email should ship with a plain-text twin — the same email rendered as bare text, no styling. Most ESPs auto-generate one, and most of those auto-generated versions are garbage. Here's why the plain-text version still matters in 2026 and how to make the version you ship actually work.
6 min read
IntermediateCustom attributes are infrastructure. Designed well, they enable every future campaign. Designed badly, they become the reason "can we segment on X?" is a multi-week engineering project instead of a 15-minute one. Here's the design discipline that prevents the mess.
7 min read
AdvancedGenerative AI inside lifecycle ESPs has moved from novelty to default in 18 months. BrazeAI (formerly Sage AI), Iterable Copy Assist, Klaviyo's subject line generator — they all promise per-message copy at scale. Some uses are genuinely useful. Others are a fast path to brand drift, factual errors, and reputational damage. Here's the line.
8 min read
IntermediateIf you build emails in Stripo and edit them with Claude, you've probably been running a clipboard relay: copy HTML out, paste in, paste the result back. Orbit's native Stripo integration ends the relay. This guide walks through how the loop closes — pulling your saved Stripo modules into Orbit, letting Claude compose new emails from them, pushing the result back as an editable Stripo email — plus the two setup gotchas everyone hits the first time.
13 min read