Rebel launches new tools for developers to build marketing emails

Until now, Rebel has been known as a platform allowing marketers to incorporate interactive elements into their emails. Today, it’s launching a new version of its API that will allow developers to build entire emails, interactive or not.

Co-founder Joe Teplow explained that the new Rebel Lite API was created in response to developers who were already using the company’s API.

“Our customers loved being able to build these actionable modules in bite-sized chunks with our API,” Teplow said. In fact, they loved it enough that they started asking, “Could we build the entire email with your API?”

So with the Rebel Lite API, Teplow said they can create emails using JSON, “without writing one line of HTML.”

And yes, this is a tool built specifically for developers, not a drag-and-drop email editor for marketers. Teplow said that as the industry has become more complex, “Email as a channel requires a really tight integration between marketers and developers.”

But what’s so hard about sending an email? Kevin Dutra, who leads Rebel’s product team, explained, “The main problem is email market fragmentation on the rendering side.”

In other words, Dutra said it takes extensive testing to make sure your email shows up properly on every device and email client, turning the creation of email into a full-time job. Rebel, on the other hand, is constantly keeping track of changes in email rendering, so if you build an email using the API you can take advantage of all that work to know that your code is up-to-date and that your emails will render properly.

In addition, Rebel has created a number of reusable components to enable the creation of complex layouts.

Teplow added that the new API could also help Rebel reach a new audience — not just large enterprises, but also “regular developers at a smaller company.”

“They weren’t a fit for Rebel before, but we’re slowly starting to let those people in,” he said.