I Tried It - MessageBird Taxi
It’s a compelling pitch! Scaling email production is a challenge we support clients on every day. If it was easy…everyone would do it!
Cathrina Dioniso
Product Review: MessageBird Taxi for Email
Hi, I’m Cathrina, Creative Director at Ragnarok. One of the perks of my role here at Ragnarok is getting to test and try top trending MarTech tools from our partners. I recently had the opportunity to give MessageBird Taxi for Email a whirl. Read on for my honest review!
First off, what is MessageBird’s Taxi for Email?
MessageBird Taxi for Email is a tool designed to help teams scale their email production.
How it works:
1. Create
Brands start by creating their own modular email design system.
2. Edit
Once the system is set, an intuitive email editor allows teams to drag and drop modules and edit text and images to create new emails.
3. Deploy
Once designs are set, HTML is a simple copy-paste into your ESP (or Taxi can connect directly).
My first impression…
It’s a compelling pitch! Scaling email production is a challenge we support clients on every day. If it was easy…everyone would do it!
But, the creative in me had some skepticism about whether this tool would support the high brand standards for visually stimulating content that most of our clients require.
That’s why incorporating personalized products in emails is really the gold standard of personalization. Two product essentials for getting it right:
Digging in
As I started to work with the tool, I uncovered a few tidbits that are helpful to understand:
Getting Started
- This is NOT a no-code option. When setting up your initial system and when getting started with template edits, you will need someone with an HTML skillset to get you off the ground.
- On the design front, my recommendation would be to have a senior-level designer create your initial modular email design system. A senior designer can typically think more strategically about use cases to ensure you’re set up for success and scale.
- An important design note is that Taxi is a completely live text / HTML-based environment and recommends email-safe fonts. It allows for web fonts but not uploaded fonts, and doesn’t allow toggling between sliced modules and live text modules. Your designer should be aware of this so the initial design system can be set up as such.
Template Use
- After getting past the initial setup, it seems like versioning is super easy (especially if your versions only use text variants)!
- The option for dynamic content and modules is great! This can help simplify the process of visual differences based on segments and interests.
Team Rollout
- As you start to roll out Taxi, enforcing brand guidelines and setting up guard rails is essential. Taxi provides a good amount of guidance on how to be successful there.
- Its features for previewing and testing templates across browser types are great! You’ll feel confident that your templates are rendering properly on desktop, mobile, Gmail, Outlook, and more.
- Taxi integrates directly with many of our favorite ESPs including Braze, Iterable, Klaviyo, and Sengrid (full list here). You will likely still need to have some HTML knowledge on-hand unless your templates are always exact duplicates.
Final thoughts
Taxi is a great tool for anyone looking to produce a high volume of templated emails.
Will Taxi replace a design team and a dev team once you’ve built your email design systems? Not 100%. But, it can certainly reduce reliance on those teams, particularly in the case of templated recurring projects such as newsletters, onboarding, abandoned cart, and winback.
The ideal Taxi customer? Top examples that come to mind are media outlets that provide trending news rollups, e-commerce retailers that run flash sales listings or similar templated updates, HR/Recruiters/Job boards that distribute job listings, restaurants with daily rotating menus, etc.
Connect with our team:
Cathrina Dioniso
Creative Director
