How do you track copy changes on websites/emails?

I have been using urlwatch[1] for years, I have a cron run daily which will send a diff of the page(s) via email. You can also use it for checking local file changes and more.

[1] https://github.com/thp/urlwatch

If it's just the text that they're concerned about, then putting that text (email and website text content) into something that can track changes is the right solution. Developers would use git. You could use Google Docs with a separate one for each email template and website content. Maybe MS Word if they use Sharepoint.

The simple answer is probably Google Docs with all the tracking and collaboration turned on so that every change is tracked by who made it and when. But again, that's only relevant for the text and maybe minimal layout.

Ours are all stored and managed in the CMS/DAM we use, which happens to be Adobe Experience Manager. When the email service renders an email, it calls the CMS endpoint which returns the html with handlebars style template placeholders. That endpoint is heavily cached so not too worried about the mail service hammering it.

Staff get to format the email in a graphical editor they’re familiar with that handles revisions etc, and we don’t need to manually import templates.

Visual Regression Testing: Awesome List

https://github.com/mojoaxel/awesome-regression-testing

I loved to use DraftIn for this by YC alum Nathan Konty but it looks like it’s no more. https://matthewsetter.com/draftin-review/

It had a great intuitive UI to track diffs in prose that everyone and anyone could understand. (Truly exceptional and generous work Nate! Made my life better! Thank you!)

Depending on your appetite for Intuit, Oracle, and Salesforce products, they have marketing email suites that do exactly this. It might be a bit expensive/heavier than what you want.

Otherwise I used Mailtrain with a small team and it worked ok. We used git for source code tracking for the designers and then the CMS for small changes.

i had a similar problem but for access control, getting emailed the new/old roles a person should have, or a list of new emails to onboard

i ended up showing them how to use github and create prs with a csv. at first i copy pasted the csv and imported it, but in the end completely automated it

it may seem completely alien to them at first, but if can get them access to a repo and just show them how to edit a file in the ui, it's much easier to do that and create a pr than it used to be in github. to me it was worth the initial headache - after a few weeks they were very smooth with it and changes got through way faster

You can give notify-me.rs a try if you want.

It sends you summarized changes straight into inbox and it has a free tier.

If you do give it a try, I'd love to know what you think

Cheers!

Is there a tool or better way to do it?

What is your budget?

It will determine your options.

Where is the source code for these email templates and websites?

Another vote for visualping.io

For websites, there's a bunch of hosted services for this, like VisualPing or ChangeTower or Sken.io or BrowserStack. It's often called "visual regression testing".

You can also do this yourself with something like Playwright: https://playwright.dev/docs/test-snapshots

For email templates, they usually create a HTML version hosted online somewhere too, don't they? You can probably use the same tools for those if they're publicly accessible.