Unboxing: Taxi from Action Rocket

Taxi for Email from Action Rocket calls itself an Enterprise Level Email Content Management system and is designed to streamline design and workflow processes allowing coders, designers, editors and copywriters to work more efficiently while cutting down on iterative testing and saving man hours and cost.

Key to Taxi is Taxi Syntax. The Taxi Syntax allows coders to create reusable elements that can be combined into different templates which hides the underlying HTML when editors, designers and copywriters begin developing various email campaigns. This allows each element to remain on brand across campaigns and allows each member of the email team to do what they do best without interferring with the code, which dramatically cuts down on testing. The Syntax is a simple markup language that determines which areas of each template and module can be edited and which can't. The syntax is stripped out of the code at the time of export into your favorite ESP for sending. Taxi comes loaded with lots of prebuilt templates which can be cloned for various campaigns and iterations, or you can upload your own HTML and add the Taxi Syntax to it.

For this article, we'll use the template that comes with the Taxi demo account.

In the Taxi workflow system, everything starts with a Project. An example Project could be "Weekly Newsletter", or "Welcome Series". Within a project, you can further break things down into Mailings (i.e. "Week 3") and Versions (i.e. "Chinese Version"). Every project, mailing and version can be assigned to specific people on your team so only those who have been authorized can work on each individual Mailing.

Once I have my Project created I can create my Mailing, clone existing Mailings, assign editors and copywriters to an individual project, and choose the template.

One more step to create the first version of my mailing and I'm ready to open the template in the Taxi editor in order to create my campaign. Below is the demo template with sample content. Taxi is a true WYSISYG editor, with every change being instantly reflected in the central viewing pane. You can preview each step of the design as well to see how it will look on a moble or desktop device. To the right of the viewing pane, for this particular template, I can begin editing the document settings, the text and links in the preheader, the images, links, logo, and call to action of the Hero section and edit the footer. The main content area will be added later as we need to add modules to that section.

Editing the "Hero" section of the email campaign is simply a matter of editing the various parameters such as image, call to action, Logo, and Background color. It was a simple matter to replace to sample content with the Only Influencers logo, call to action, and Hero image. Images can be uploaded as files or just specify a URL.

Now it is time to add our main content. For each template you can specify specific modules that will make up the campaign. Using the default Template that comes with the demo version of Taxi, I have 3 different modules to choose from: a Large Image Story, a Two Column Image left module, and a "Featured Tweet" module. Let's add all 3 to see how it looks in our campaign:

Each Module can be easily edited by your Editor or Copywriter without having to deal with HTML Code:

At this point you can preview your campaign as it would look on a mobile device, on the desktop, or you can connect it to your Litmus account directly in the Taxi Interface for further testing. Once you are satisfied with the campaign, you can export it to a zip file, a hosted URL, or directly using one of Taxi's ESP Connectors:

I was easily able to export my campaign from Taxi and import it into Mailchimp, the ESP that I use to send out the OI newsletter.

Here is the exported email as it appears coming from Mailchimp.

Pricing:

Pricing for Taxi is designed for large Enterprise users, with a license starting at $750 a month or $7,500 a year but startup pricing is in the works. 

Taxi for Email is a simple to use, flexible content management system for email marketers that allows each member of your team to do their work without getting in each others way. It allows for quick and easy turn around of campaigns and versions of campaigns that will significantly cut down on man hours and costs of testing. The modular system and the Taxi Syntax which hides the underlying code from the designers, editors and copywriters allows CMO's to maintain control over the total brand experience across email teams.

To learn more about Taxi go to TaxiforEmail.com