Say Goodbye To Ugly Newsletters, Stamplia Launches Its Email Templates Marketplace

Stamplia, launching today from French startup Kiwup, is an email templates marketplace where web designers can sell HTML templates for newsletters, transactional emails and signup forms, and in turn let companies focus on the messaging of their email campaigns rather than design.

“The current problem is that customers know what they want to tell in their message, but don’t know how to design it,” says Kiwup co-founder and CEO Vincent Martinet. “With Stamplia we can finally say goodbye to all those ugly designed newsletters which are available online or from an email provider and increase the profitability of email campaigns.”

It’s an idea that’s attracted investment, too. Kiwup tells TechCrunch that’s it closed $130,000 in seed funding from Jeremie Berrebi and Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures — capital it’s using to publicly launch the service.

There’s no doubting that the bar for design has been raised in recent years — consumers expect a minimum quality of branding — so it follows that this should apply to email newsletters and other email-based campaigns. “Any company knows that having an email strategy is vital for business promotion; therefore a good newsletter strategy is mandatory,” says Martinet. “Readers are extremely sensible, and they need just a few seconds to see and assess a commercial layout. If the design is ugly or not interesting, then all your work and emails will be useless, so it’s important to carefully create your newsletters before starting the campaign.”

With Stamplia, Kiwup is responding to a trend that has businesses outsourcing as much of their non-core operations as possible — either via companies that focus on a single problem or online marketplaces that efficiently match service providers with clients.

Capture d?écran 2013-05-27 à 22.30.59Stamplia therefore aims to reduce the friction for web designers who spend too much time acquiring clients, producing estimates, invoicing and chasing payments. They simply upload their HTML/Photoshop designs, along with picking a category and including some metadata to help with search, and set a price between $4-15 depending on the type and flexibility of the template.

All templates are manually vetted by Stamplia and a preview is generated of what the email will look like on 25+ email clients/devices, using technology from Litmus, as well as conducting a spam test to ensure it will get through spam filters.

Designers earn a commission of between 50 percent and 70 percent dependent on volume of sales. In addition, Stamplia will offer an API so that email providers or any app developer can include an email template catalog in their wares, providing another revenue stream for the startup.

In terms of competition, there are a ton of sites that offer web design templates and themes for sale. However, Martinet says that Stamplia is the first to focus purely on the email template problem and to include transactional email templates (welcome messages, shipping instructions, service updates, invoices, receipts etc.) which, he notes, are the emails that companies send most.