BBC Brand Lab handles something rather important—licensing iconic BBC content to broadcasters worldwide. Think Top Gear, Doctor Who, Sherlock. The kind of shows that sell.
Their marketing team needed email templates that looked stunning, worked in DotMailer, and could be customised without touching code. Oh, and they had to work in Outlook 2007. Because of course they did.
The design they handed us was beautiful. It was also, in the polite language of email development, "ambitious" for a medium that's stuck in 1999.
Email development is genuinely unpleasant work. You're writing HTML like it's 2004, using tables for layout, inline styles for everything, and testing across dozens of clients that all render things differently.
We took a progressive enhancement approach. The base template works everywhere—even Outlook 2007, even ancient versions of Gmail. But if you're using a modern email client, you get the full experience: the gradients, the rounded corners, all the nice bits.
The DotMailer integration was key. We built the template with their drag-and-drop editor in mind, so the BBC team could swap images, change copy, and adjust layouts without needing to call us every time.
The templates shipped and we moved on to the next thing. Which, honestly, is what you want from email work. No support calls, no "it looks wrong in Outlook," no late-night fixes before a big campaign goes out.
It's not glamorous work, but watching a BBC email land in your inbox and knowing the tables and inline styles behind it—there's a strange satisfaction in that.
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