Dedicated email code editors emerge
Courtney Scharff, manager of marketing ops at Figma, on Figma's marketing operations stack
This is the wedge that turned email coding from a developer side task into its own software category. Generic editors could store HTML, but they did not understand email specific pain points like Outlook quirks, table based layouts, inline CSS, dark mode checks, accessibility issues, and fast browser previews. That is why teams like Figma moved from passing files around or using Git workflows to a dedicated tool built around how marketing emails are actually made and reviewed.
-
Before dedicated tools, teams either used general editors like Atom, VS Code, and Dreamweaver, or built internal workflows on GitHub repos with local preview tooling. Those setups worked, but they required command line setup, package maintenance, and more technical skill than most marketing teams wanted.
-
Parcel won by baking email specific behavior into the editor itself. That included live preview beside the code, inspecting a visual element to find the matching code, table highlighting, email aware syntax handling, accessibility checks, and built in collaboration. Those are small features individually, but together they remove a lot of daily friction.
-
The market split is concrete. Litmus is usually bought for testing and inbox previews across clients, while Parcel is chosen for actually writing and collaborating on email code. Figma reflects that split, with marketing emails built in Parcel and transactional email teams still using Litmus for testing.
The next step is deeper integration between the email editor and the sending platform. The winning product will let a marketer, designer, and developer work from one shared component system, then push finished HTML straight into Marketo, Salesforce, or Customer.io without copy and paste. That turns email production from a fragile workflow into a repeatable system.