Cakemail

Challenge

One of the numerous marketing solutions Cakemail’s customers enjoy is convenient management of their contact list subscription forms that appear on their websites or in their apps. Cakemail’s customers use subscription forms to capture their users’ email addresses via an online form. They can either add a code snippet to their website or redirect their users to a dedicated form page hosted by Cakemail.

Cakemail asked us to redo the frontend part of Forms to align this section with the rest of the upgrades applied to the Cakemail v5 app. Cakemail had completely changed their Contacts module, which affected the way users captured their contacts through online subscription forms. As a result, the original Forms section no longer worked with new Contacts; therefore, it required a brand new code. Although Cakemail came up with a temporary solution to fix this issue, they needed to expand the existing functionality and enable forms UI customization.

Apart from working with the tight deadline, we also had to prepare the frontend without the backend because it was not ready when we started. Using the given static mock data to fake the backend, we managed to realize the frontend part of Forms with all of its new features.

Solution

Our main task was to replace the old Forms section that had limited functionality with new Forms built with React so that all features of the Cakemail v5 app worked in sync. First things first, we performed a precise sprint planning, which allowed us to minimize any deadline risks. We used mock objects agreed with the client’s backend team to ensure further backend-frontend compatibility. One more crucial step we made at the very beginning of the project is streamlining communication channels between the Cakemail and Redwerk teams to ensure effective cooperation.

As far as technical details are concerned, we worked on the following:

• Forms Listing – options to create a form, edit it, and delete it
• Overview – provides analytics on forms performance and vital information about subscribers displayed with the help of visually appealing charts and maps
• Linked Form – allows Cakemail’s customers to add the needed form by pasting the generated URL to buttons on their websites
• Embedded Form – allows Cakemail’s customers to add the needed form by pasting the generated HTML code snippet to their websites; this option presupposes full UI customization of the embedded forms
• Automated Flows – enables managing the subscription flow: what pages and emails new subscribers see after they use this form
• Static Email Templates – prepared HTML templates for different use cases
• Quality Assurance – covered the new functionality with unit tests (Jest, Enzyme), performed manual functional testing and bug fixing