Components Drive Email Design Systems
Avi Goldman, founder of Parcel, on the email developer experience
The real advantage of components is that they turn email building from copy and paste production into reusable software. A partial is a saved chunk of HTML that gets dropped in, but a component can take inputs, apply rules, and regenerate the messy table based email code underneath. That matters because teams can give marketers simple knobs like button text, link, or style, while developers keep one underlying source of truth that can be fixed once and updated everywhere.
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In practice, many Litmus users still work by pasting compiled HTML into Litmus, previewing it across clients, then making edits or exporting it back to their sending stack. That workflow is useful for QA, but it starts after the email code already exists, not at the higher level system where components live.
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Teams using component based workflows can separate jobs cleanly. Developers define the code once, designers lock in approved styles like primary and secondary buttons, and marketers fill in content fields. When Outlook or Gmail breaks something, changing one shared component can repair every email that uses it.
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This is why companies often keep both tools. Figma writes marketing emails in Parcel for collaboration and code organization, but still uses Litmus for previewing and QA on templates or transactional work. The split reflects two different jobs, authoring the system versus checking the output.
The market is moving toward email design systems, not one off HTML files. As more brands manage many templates across marketing and product teams, the winning tools will be the ones that let one small developer group maintain shared components, while everyone else edits safely at the content layer and still gets reliable previews before send.