The Email Template Builder Problem Nobody Talks About
I’m going to be upfront about something: this is a post about our own product. Composa is an email template builder, and yes, we’d love for you to try it. But that’s not really why I’m writing this.
Andrew and I have spent over twenty years in email. We built Email Love. We’ve worked at ESPs, consulted for enterprise teams, and watched the same painful workflow play out hundreds of times. A designer builds something beautiful in Figma. Then someone — a marketer, a developer, sometimes a dedicated email specialist — has to rebuild the entire thing from scratch inside whatever email tool the company happens to use. Every. Single. Time.
We didn’t build Composa because we wanted to launch another email template builder. We built it because after two decades in this industry, we couldn’t understand why this problem still existed. The tools kept getting shinier, but the fundamental workflow was still broken. Designers and marketers were still maintaining two separate versions of the same design system, and nobody seemed to think that was strange.
So this post isn’t a product pitch dressed up as content marketing. It’s an honest explanation of a problem we’ve watched eat teams alive for years — and how we think about solving it. If Composa turns out to be the right fit for your team, great. If it just helps you think more clearly about what to look for in your next email template builder, that’s fine too.
You’ve used an email template builder before. Maybe several. And at some point, you’ve had the same quiet realisation every email team eventually has: this tool is making me rebuild work that already exists.
Your designer spent weeks building a component system in Figma. Buttons, headers, footers, content blocks — all carefully specced with Auto-Layout, Variants, and Variables. It’s clean. It’s thorough. It’s the source of truth for the brand.
Then you open your email template builder, and none of that matters.
You’re starting from scratch. Rebuilding every component by hand inside a proprietary editor. Matching hex codes. Eyeballing spacing. Hoping that what you produce will actually look like what was designed.
This is the rebuild tax — and it’s quietly eating your team’s time, quality, and patience.
What Most Email Template Builders Get Wrong
The typical email template builder gives you a drag-and-drop canvas and a library of generic blocks. Some let you customise those blocks. Some even let you import from Figma — once — as a snapshot.
But here’s the problem with snapshots: the moment you import, you’re disconnected. Your Figma file evolves. The brand guidelines shift. A button radius changes. A new footer gets approved. And your email template builder? It’s frozen in time.
So you rebuild. Again.
For teams producing a handful of emails a month, that’s annoying. For enterprise teams managing dozens of templates across multiple brands and regions, it becomes a full-time job. Two people maintaining two separate design systems that should be one.
That’s not a workflow. That’s a workaround.
What an Email Template Builder Should Actually Do
A good email template builder should respect the work that’s already been done. If your design system lives in Figma — and for most modern teams, it does — the builder should connect to it. Not copy from it. Not export a flattened version of it. Connect.
That means when your designer updates a button component in Figma, that update should flow through to every email using that button. The marketer’s content stays intact. The design stays current. Nobody has to rebuild anything.
It also means designers stay in Figma, where they’re fastest. And marketers build in the email template builder, where they can drag and drop approved components without writing code or accidentally breaking the brand.
Clear ownership. One system. No drift.
How Composa Approaches Email Template Building
This is the problem Composa was built to solve.
Composa is an email template builder with a live, persistent connection to Figma. Not a one-time import. Not an export-and-forget. A live link that keeps your design system synced between where it’s designed and where it’s used.
Here’s what the workflow looks like in practice:
Step 1: Your designer builds email components in Figma using the Email Love Plugin. Full support for Auto-Layout, Variants, and Variables — no flattening, no workarounds.
Step 2: They sync the design system to Composa with one click. The component library populates automatically.
Step 3: Your marketer opens Composa and builds emails by dragging in approved components. The guardrails are built in — they can customise content, but they can’t break the design.
Step 4: When the designer updates a component in Figma and re-syncs, every email using that component updates automatically. Marketer content is preserved.
Step 5: Export to your ESP — Braze, Iterable, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Marketo. Clean, MJML-based code that renders properly across every major email client.
No rebuilding. No re-syncing. No maintaining two parallel systems.
Who This Email Template Builder Is Built For
Composa isn’t trying to be everything for everyone. It’s built for teams where the design system matters and the current workflow is costing real time.
For designers who are tired of being a bottleneck — and tired of watching their carefully built systems get poorly translated into email. Composa lets them stay in Figma and control the system from there.
For marketers who want to move fast without waiting on design or dev. Composa gives them a library of approved, always-current components they can assemble on their own.
For marketing ops leaders who are done maintaining two separate design systems and want a single source of truth that actually works across the full production pipeline.
The AI Layer: Brief In, Email Out
Composa also includes an AI feature that reads your campaign brief, selects the right components from your synced design system, and assembles a production-ready first draft — complete with copy, CTAs, and links.
This isn’t generic AI slop. It’s constrained by your design system, so every output is on-brand from the start. The marketer reviews, adjusts, and ships. The AI just removes the blank-canvas problem.
How Composa Compares to Other Email Template Builders
Most enterprise email template builders — Knak, Stripo, Beefree, Stensul — treat Figma as a starting point. You export once, then manage everything inside their proprietary editor. Updates to the Figma file? Those are your problem to manually propagate.
Composa takes a fundamentally different approach. The design system lives in Figma. It stays in Figma. Composa reads from it, builds with it, and updates from it — automatically.
The result is less maintenance, fewer inconsistencies, and a workflow where both designers and marketers are working from the same system without stepping on each other.
Choosing the Right Email Template Builder
If you’re evaluating email template builders, the question worth asking isn’t “which one has the most features.” It’s “which one fits how my team actually works.”
If your design team lives in Figma and your marketing team needs to produce on-brand emails without depending on design or dev for every update, Composa is worth a look.
The team behind it — the same people who built Email Love — have been working in email for over twenty years. This isn’t a design tool company dabbling in email. It’s an email company that finally built the bridge to Figma that the industry has been waiting for.