Until recently, having an email design system was the sign of a mature, forward-thinking brand. Agencies like ours spent years evangelizing their worth, while many marketing teams remained unaware of just how much of a game-changer they truly are. After all, in the absence of a design system:
- Teams end up spending a lot of time on manual coding, dealing with QA problems, and fixing layout issues.
- Each new campaign needs full QA testing across many different email clients.
- Moving designs from tools like Figma into production often comes with a lot of friction.
But what if the burden of architecting a design system no longer fell entirely on the brand?
Amidst all the noise surrounding AI, agents, and MCP servers, Braze quietly launched an integration with Better Email. The email design system is now an official, native platform feature.
As email designers and developers, we see this as a massive leap forward that will crush the daily roadblocks production teams face. Here is a closer look at what this integration means and how you can leverage Braze’s new email design system.
What is the Braze-Better Email integration?
The integration establishes Better Email as your collaborative workspace for creating templates, while Braze acts as the destination, instantly receiving production-ready code.
For the integration to work, you’ll need a few things:
- An account on Better Email for creating integrations
- A Braze REST API key
- A REST endpoint
Simply put, to connect the two systems, Better Email needs permission (the API key) and a destination address (the REST endpoint) to deliver your templates.
This integration specifically addresses the needs of organizations focused on:
- Systemized scaling: Eliminating the manual HTML overhead required to maintain and update large, complex template ecosystems.
- Guardrailed creativity: Embedding brand guidelines directly into the editor components.
- Pipeline efficiency: Connecting the creation and execution phases directly, turning the traditional design-to-deployment bottleneck into a single, continuous pipeline.
Why email design systems matter more than you think
An email design system is a collection of reusable components governed by a set of clear standards. The components are modular pieces that can be assembled in countless combinations.
However, without a set of clearly-defined governance standards, the system is vulnerable.
This is precisely why brand guidelines alone are rarely sufficient. Most brand guidelines are built with print or web in mind, and email is a genuinely different medium — one with its own rendering quirks, client fragmentation, dark mode considerations, and accessibility requirements. A robust email design system fills that gap with standards built specifically for the inbox.
Beyond inconsistency, the absence of a design system inflates the cost of every campaign you send. A typical ad hoc campaign involves a number of people such as:
- Designers
- Developers
- Copywriters
- Data teams
- Senior stakeholders
- Regional localization teams
- External patterns
This leads to a cycle of edits, re-testing, re-approvals, and re-translations that happen every time you send something out, no matter how simple or complex the campaign is.
All of this takes up a lot of time that you could spend on analysis, audience segmentation, personalization, or planning across different channels.
What Braze content blocks have always done well, and where Better Email takes it further
Braze’s content block library has long offered teams a solid foundation for modular email building. Content blocks allow you to maintain a centralized library of reusable HTML modules that update universally across every template the moment you edit them.
Braze content blocks also support dynamic content, meaning the same template can serve different modules to different audience segments based on attributes like subscription status or engagement tier. It is a powerful system for teams willing to invest in building it out thoughtfully.
The Better Email integration extends this capability upstream. It provides a design-system-native workspace where templates are built against pre-defined, brand-governed components, and then pushed directly into Braze as production-ready code.
How to integrate Braze with Better Email
Sync your email designs directly to Braze by linking the two platforms. Once connected, you can export and update templates with a single click.
1. Retrieve your Braze credentials
Before starting, log into your Braze dashboard to gather the necessary API details.
- REST Endpoint URL: Locate your specific REST host URL (e.g., rest.fra-01.braze.eu).
Note: Make sure to use your API/REST host URL, not the standard browser login URL. - API Passkey: Navigate to Settings > API Keys and generate a new REST API key. Ensure you grant it full permissions for Templates.
2. Configure the connection in Better Email
With your credentials ready, set up the link inside the Better Email platform.
- Head to the Integrations section in your dashboard and click to add a new connection.
- Label the integration (and select Braze from the provider dropdown menu.
- Under the Access settings, define which team members or roles can use this connection.
- Click Save to initialize the setup.
- Input your REST Endpoint URL and API Passkey into the designated fields.
- Toggle the integration status to Active and hit Save once more.
3. Push Email templates to Braze
Now that the setup is complete, pushing your designs over is seamless.
Open any email project within Better Email, click Export, and choose Braze.
On your initial export, Better Email generates a brand-new template inside Braze. The system automatically remembers the unique Braze Template ID. Any future exports of that same design will overwrite and update the existing Braze template, preventing accidental duplicates.
Is your organization ready for an email design system?
The tooling conversation doesn’t account for the importance for organizational readiness when it comes to having a design system for email.
Designers and developers, in particular, can feel threatened by the introduction of a design system, as if standardization is a challenge to their expertise rather than a foundation for it. That concern is worth taking seriously. A well-implemented email design system should actually free skilled practitioners from repetitive, low-value production work, giving them space to focus on the problems that require their judgment:
- Accessibility strategy
- Dark mode implementation
- Rendering edge cases
- Journey design
To do this well, it is important to involve practitioners from the start as co-authors of the standards. They know what the system needs and are best suited to look after it over time.
Leadership buy-in matters equally.
Without it, even the most technically sound design system will erode under the pressure of tight deadlines, last-minute requests, and the organizational inertia that resists any change to established habits.
The last word on email design system
The launch of the Better Email integration signals something worth noting beyond the feature itself: the expectation of what a modern email platform should provide is shifting. Design-system thinking is moving from a best practice championed by specialists to a baseline capability expected of the tooling itself.
For teams that have not yet made this investment, the entry point has never been lower.
For teams already operating with mature design systems, the integration offers a meaningful upgrade to the production pipeline.
If you’re struggling with Braze templates that look great on desktop but fall apart on mobile, you’re not alone. Building consistent templates shouldn’t take days.
As certified Braze partners, we can take that headache off your plate. Let’s get started.