The Future of Smart Design: Interview with the Benchmark Email Product Team
As Benchmark Email continues to simplify email marketing for busy marketers with innovative tools, we had the opportunity to sit down with two key figures behind their latest AI project, . Jeff Zimmerman, Chief Product Officer, and Paul Rijnders, Product Manager at, share their insights on the development and impact of this AI-powered email creation tool. is meant to simplify the email design process, making it faster and more efficient for users to create professional-quality emails. Let’s dive into their journey and gain insight into the future direction of Smart Design.
1. What was the background for your decision
Jeff Zimmerman: From the beginning, Benchmark Email has been designed with simplicity at its core. Email marketing can be challenging, so israel phone number list we were excited to build a tool that helps our users bring their marketing strategy to life with ease. Before we started incorporating AI, Benchmark Email was built around the easiest-to-use drag-and-drop campaign editor out there, as well as an extensive library of email templates. The team has always strived to constantly improve the process of creating emails for our users.
Paul Rijnders: Still, we understood the challenges for marketers when it comes to coming to a new platform and creating a new email from scratch. Our goal was to reduce a task that usually takes hours to minutes. , even before ChatGPT went public. In September 2022, we launched Smart Content Content to help our users easily create and update the copy of their email templates.
Jeff Zimmerman: Shortly after our launch
of Smart Content, ChatGPT opened up to the public. We started leveraging the new OpenAI APIs to build Smart Design. It was a natural progression from helping ideate and write email copy with Smart Content to easing the workload of how to reduce bounce rate and improve deliverability email template design with Smart Design.
2. What challenges did you face from the development of Smart Design to its launch? Tell us about them.
Jeff Zimmerman: At Benchmark Email, we keep the customer at the center of product development. It’s not about what we think the cz lists customer should want, but what the customer actually wants. One of the challenges we faced was not building Smart Design based on assumptions from the start. Instead, we started with a stripped-down version of the product. While the beta version of Smart Design wasn’t as powerful as our last release. It was a valuable starting point for understanding how our users want to use AI in their email design flow.