Every email marketer has a send they’d like back. The promo code with a typo. The webinar that moved to Thursday. The shipping promise that stopped being true an hour after the campaign went out. Once an email lands, the copy is frozen, and the only fix most of us have is a “Sorry, wrong link” follow-up that gets opened by a fraction of the people who saw the original.

Images are the exception. An image in an email is fetched when it’s opened, which is the whole idea behind Alterable. This release takes that idea in six new directions: a banner you can switch on after the send, a calendar drawn with each reader’s own dates, charts drawn from each reader’s own numbers, slideshows that fit five pictures in the space of one, polls whose answers show the vote as it stands, and a count of how many people have clicked.

Updated October 28: polls and the social count shipped after this post first went out, so they’re in here now, along with a few more things the designer learned.

Critical messages: a switch for emails already in inboxes

A critical message is a banner you place in your template before you send, and leave switched off. Off, it’s a transparent 1×1 pixel, so it takes no room and nobody sees it. If something changes after the send, you switch it on in Alterable, and emails opened from then on show the banner.

You start from one of four presets (service outage, shipping delay, event change, offer correction) or a blank 600×200 banner, and design it in the same editor as dynamic images. It always carries a link, so you can add the click URL after the send, when you actually know where people should go.

A Buy More spring sale email with an Offer correction banner switched on at the top: the code had a typo, SPRING20 is the right one. Under the email, a switch for the spring sale emails is on.
The email is a recreation; the banner is a real render of the Offer correction preset, switched on after the send.

A few details that matter when you’re the one holding the switch:

  • Switching on asks for confirmation, and every member of the team gets an email and an in-app notice saying who switched it. Nobody should learn about an outage banner from a customer.
  • Only opens while the message is on count as impressions. A banner waiting in the dark costs nothing.
  • You can switch it from the API, the MCP server or Zapier, so a status page or an order system can flip it without anyone logging in.

One honest caveat: a change reaches a reader the next time their email app loads the image, and most emails opened for the first time after you switch get it. Apple Mail can hold on to the copy it already loaded, though, so someone who opened the email before the switch may see the old state for up to a couple of days.

Building critical messages works on every plan, and so does switching them off. Switching one on needs Pro or Scale.

Calendars: each reader’s own dates, in a month view

The image designer has a new layer: a month calendar. Its highlighted dates and ranges usually come from merge tags, so the renewal date, the booking, the class schedule or the delivery window is different for every reader. It reads dates the way ESPs tend to send them (2026-10-14, 10/14/2026, 14/10/2026, Oct 14, 2026, timestamps), and skips a tag your ESP left unfilled instead of drawing a wrong date.

You pick the month (current, next, or the one the dates fall in), the first day of the week, the language, font, colors and how highlighted days are marked: a circle, square, ring, dot, or an icon you upload, so each night of a stay can show a bed. Dates that mean different things can look different: mark the stay one way and the payment deadline another, up to five kinds of date, and turn on the legend to name each one under the calendar. Because the calendar is a layer, it sits in a dynamic image or product with your logo, text and anything else you’d put there.

A Buy More delivery email showing Jane's October calendar with her delivery window (13 to 15) and Nerd Herd setup day (19) marked, beside the add-to-calendar page a tap opens, with Apple, Google and Outlook buttons for each date.
Jane’s own dates, and the page a tap on the calendar opens. A recreation; the real calendar is drawn when she opens.

Turn on Add to calendar and a click on the image opens a page with the reader’s dates and buttons for Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook.com and Outlook for work or school. Several dates go into one file. Dates that have passed aren’t offered.

Countdown timers use the same page. When a timer’s click opens a calendar event, the reader picks their calendar app (Gmail on the web and Android included) and gets an event that lands at the right time.

Charts: each reader’s own numbers, drawn at open

Loyalty emails have a habit of saying “You have 1,240 points” in plain text and leaving the reader to work out what that means. I’ve seen plenty of them. A number on its own rarely tells you how close you are to anything.

The designer now has a chart layer too. Its numbers usually come from merge tags, so each reader sees their own: points toward the next reward, a fundraising total against its goal, where their money went this year, their activity month by month. There are eight types: a progress bar, a gauge (a full ring or a half), pie, doughnut, bar, column, line and area.

Alterable's Chart dialog on the Tier status template: a progress bar selected among eight chart types, its value and goal set to the tier_points and next_tier_points merge tags, and Readers without a value set to Don't show the chart.
The chart settings: eight types, numbers from merge tags, and what happens when a reader’s tag is empty.

The labels do some of the work. A progress bar or a gauge can show a percentage, the value, the value against the goal, or a sentence of your own, like “{remaining} points to your next reward”, with the gap filled in for each reader. Numbers come through the way ESPs send them (1250, 1,250, $12.99, 45%), and there’s a setting for platforms that write decimals with a comma.

And when a reader’s tag arrives empty? You decide: leave the chart out of their image, draw a fallback value, or draw zero. Nobody should open an email telling them they have 0 points because a field didn’t sync.

Like the calendar, a chart is a layer in a dynamic image or product, and the API and MCP server can set charts too. Two templates in the gallery start you off: Reward progress and Tier status.

Slideshows: five slides, one GIF

A slideshow is one animated GIF that plays two to five slides. A slide can be a library image, a hosted image, a dynamic image or a dynamic product, and each one gets its own timing. You choose to loop or to play a set number of times, and the whole slideshow takes one click URL.

A Buy More slideshow built in Alterable: Jane's reward points, then two more slides, in one animated GIF

The personalized slides are drawn for each reader at open, like any dynamic image. I’d put the personalized one first: classic Outlook for Windows only shows the first frame of a GIF, and the editor warns you when slide one is static. Static slides work on every plan; dynamic slides, retina and the templates need Pro or Scale.

Polls: answers that show the vote as it stands

A poll is one question with two to six answers, and each answer is its own linked image. The reader clicks the one they want, and that’s their vote. Each answer image is drawn when the email is opened, so it shows that answer’s share of the votes at that moment. Someone who opens on Thursday sees a different split from someone who opened on Monday.

You choose bars or gauges, and whether an answer shows the percent, the vote count, both, or the bar alone. Results wait until the poll has a number of votes you set (10 by default), because one early vote reads as 100% and that tells nobody anything. Until then, the answers look like plain buttons.

Two copies of the same Buy More poll, What should we stock next? On Monday, with 4 votes, Jane sees four plain answer buttons: Gaming chairs, Smart rings, E-readers and Drones. On Thursday, with 37 votes, John sees the same answers with bars: 41%, 27%, 19% and 13%.
The same poll before and after it reaches 10 votes. The answer images are real renders; the emails around them are recreations.

Counting votes from an email is messier than it sounds. Security scanners in company inboxes click every link in a message, often before a person has opened it, and a poll that counted those would be fiction. So:

  • One ballot per subscriber. Alterable goes by the subscriber ID your ESP fills into the embed code, or a browser cookie when there isn’t one. If someone changes their mind, their latest vote counts.
  • Clicks on several answers within seconds of each other are set aside instead of counted. A real reader caught by it is asked to confirm with one more click.
  • Where images are blocked, the alt text shows as a button in the answer’s colors, and it still links to the vote.

Polls work on every plan, and you can build them in the app, over the API or through the MCP server, which can create a poll, edit it and read its results. Five templates start you off, from “This or that” to “Email frequency”.

Social count: how many people clicked, as of each open

Social proof in email is usually a line someone typed before the send. “Join 10,000 happy customers.” Everybody gets the same number, and it’s often been the same number for a year.

The new {{signal.count}} tag prints a live one instead: how many people have clicked the image’s link so far, counted at the moment each email is opened. It goes in a text layer of a dynamic image or product like any other tag, so “{{signal.count}} people grabbed this deal” could read 312 for an early opener and 1,480 for someone who opens on Sunday. ({{signal.count.short}} writes 1.5K.) Word the line as what it counts: a click, not a purchase.

A Buy More deal-of-the-day email for the Nerd Herd Tab 11 at $249, with a banner under the price reading 1,480 people grabbed this deal beside a Get the deal button. Below it, the same banner before its 10th click reads Be one of the first to grab this.
The count line and, below it, the line that shows before the 10th click. Both are real renders with a sample count; the email is a recreation.

A few rules keep the number honest:

  • Each person counts once, and link checkers’ clicks don’t count. You can count opens instead when your embed carries your ESP’s subscriber ID; Apple Mail’s automatic loading doesn’t count.
  • You set the number the count shows from. Below it, the count hides and a line of your own takes its place, like “Be one of the first to love this”. Nobody should read “1 people”.
  • Add a signal_key to the embed code (a word like spring-sale, or your ESP’s campaign merge tag) and each campaign keeps its own count. Without one, the design keeps a single count.

The social count works on every plan, and two social-proof templates in the gallery show it in place.

A designer that forgives mistakes

If you’ve built dynamic images in Alterable, the designer is where you’ll notice the difference first. It has undo and redo (⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z), a layers list where you can pick a layer hidden under another and drag to restack, copy, paste and duplicate (⌘C, ⌘V, ⌘D), and a canvas that zooms to fit your screen. Shrink the image size and your layers scale to fit instead of getting cropped.

The Alterable image designer with the Tier status template on the canvas, the size, undo and redo controls above it, the layer tools on the left, and the Layers list on the right.
The designer with undo and redo above the canvas and every layer listed on the right.

It’s picked up a few more tricks since. A text layer can now shrink to fit its box, so a long name or city gets smaller instead of running off the image or into the layer below (at 11px it stops and cuts the rest with an ellipsis). Weather tags ({{weather.*}}) write the reader’s local conditions, temperature and forecast for the week, and can write them in the reader’s own language. Pass their city from your ESP and it works behind the image proxies most mail apps use. You can upload SVGs now too. And every list page has a Duplicate button, which copies a service as “Name (copy)” without its impressions or votes. A copied critical message starts switched off.

The editors around it were rebuilt too. Every create page opens with a grid of starting points (local maps included), the preview stays next to the form, and you can move between steps in any order.

Countdown timers, lighter than ever

The countdown GIFs your subscribers download are smaller than they’ve ever been. Same timer, same look, less to load, so it shows up sooner, especially on a phone with a weak signal.

Survey results that read like a report

The survey results page now counts people, not clicks. Each person’s latest answer stands, and the earlier ones are kept as votes. You get a response rate, the average with its top-two share, answers over time, and a table of who said what with a filter by rating and a CSV export. Click any rating to see who gave it. If your votes carry merge tags (source, campaign, segment), you can compare averages between groups.

And the rest

The header was rebuilt around your team, with a team switcher, a Create menu and help where you’d look for it. We also went through the app for keyboard and screen reader use: labelled fields, focus that lands where it should, 44px controls on phones.

Everything above is live in your account today. If you have a send coming up that could go sideways after it leaves (and most do), a critical message is a two-minute insurance policy. Log in and drop one in the template before you send.