Email at Scale

Sumeru runs MarTech for a Fortune 100 healthcare company and the largest investor-owned utility in the United States. Combined, the two clients touch more than 50 million customers a year through email. Both industries are heavily regulated. In healthcare, a single line of careless copy can affect treatment decisions. In utilities, a missed outage notification can affect daily life. Email is not a marketing channel here. It is infrastructure.

An email took one to three weeks to go from brief to implementation. The journey was long, and every handoff introduced drift.

Design was done in Figma, Development in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but the two never quite matched. By the time a developer rebuilt the design in SFMC, things had shifted: padding, colors, line heights, sometimes whole sections. QA caught it. QA caught it again. Two full QA rounds were standard, one in design and one in development, and the same errors kept resurfacing.

The email was passing through too many hands, and with each hand the likelihood of mistakes went up.

Before building anything, I validated the market. I tested Emailify, Marka, and Email Love. Each one generated HTML that was technically functional but architecturally chaotic: randomized class names, deeply nested structures, code that fought our SFMC master templates instead of slotting into them. Devs couldn't debug what they couldn't read.

We looked at MJML next. Cleaner output, but it pulled designers out of Figma, which broke the source-of-truth principle the whole project was meant to solve.

Nothing on the market closed the gap. So we built our own.

I designed and led the build of a custom Figma plugin tailored to Sumeru's SFMC stack and our two clients' regulatory needs. The principle was simple: the design in Figma is the email, and the code that comes out of the plugin reflects exactly that.

Three things made it work.

I ran training sessions for designers, developers, and QA across the practice. The same tool, three different audiences, three different versions of the demo. Designers learned the component library and starter templates. Developers learned the class system and how to patch output when needed. QA learned which checks the plugin handled automatically and which ones still needed a human eye.

After a month of testing across both client accounts, the plugin replaced the existing pipeline entirely.

Emails that used to take a week of back-and-forth between Figma, SFMC, and three layers of review now move from brief to production in a single working session. The gap between what leadership sees in Figma and what the customer receives in their inbox is, for the first time, zero.

The plugin is now Sumeru's proprietary tooling for enterprise email production, and the model we'll extend to future clients in regulated industries.