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Email 2025

Year In Review Email

ObservePoint

A personalized "Year in Review" email template that surfaces each customer's audit data such as tag governance, cookie compliance, performance metrics, and accessibility scores, alongside actionable recommendations and feature upsell opportunities.

Role
Lead Engineer
Timeline
3 days
Stack
HTML CSS MJML
Year In Review email

Overview

This is a customer-facing “Year in Review” email sent annually to ObservePoint accounts. It surfaces personalized audit data across five key categories — Tag Management, Consent Management Platforms, Cookie Analysis, Web Vitals Performance, and WCAG 2.1AA Accessibility — along with tailored recommendations and an upsell section encouraging customers to expand platform usage across their organization. The email closes with a referral incentive and a direct line to the customer’s CSM.

Why it's notable

Most engineers treat HTML email as a solved problem. It isn’t. This template required deliberately unlearning modern web development: no flexbox, no grid, no CSS variables, no position, no calc(). Every layout decision had to survive Outlook’s Word-based rendering engine, Gmail’s aggressive style stripping, and Apple Mail’s auto-scaling, simultaneously.

Beyond compatibility, the engineering challenge was building a data-driven layout system in pure table HTML. Variable-length content (different numbers of domains, tags, cookie vendors, and accessibility scores per customer) had to flow cleanly without breaking the grid. Pill containers, two-column stat boxes, and bordered data tables all needed to stack gracefully on mobile using nothing but inline styles and media query overrides injected into the <head>.

The result is a template that reads like a polished product but is built on constraints most front-end developers never have to work within.

Unique challenges

Building a fully responsive HTML email that renders consistently across major clients (Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail) using table-based layouts with no flexbox and no grid. Designing data-heavy sections like domain comparison tables, metric pills, and two-column feature lists that remain readable and well-structured at mobile widths. The template also had to accommodate variable-length customer data (different numbers of domains, tags, and vendors) without breaking layout, requiring careful use of spacers and conditional structure.