How comprehensive are your email brand guidelines? Do you even have any?
Here at Tagpair, we often see brand guidelines that include email as a side note or an afterthought. It’s usually because they have been created by someone with limited experience of working with email.
The fact is, email design is very different to any other type of design. That means it needs to be treated differently, meaning that it needs its own dedicated brand guidelines. And these guidelines need to have been created by someone who not only understands your brand identity, but also knows how to translate that into a striking inbox presence.
What Are Email Brand Guidelines?
Variations in rendering across email clients make design for email a much more complicated process than when designing for print or web.
An email designer will need to consider fallbacks, opportunities for progressive enhancement, and how to maintain brand consistency across all clients.
Email brand guidelines need to contain guidance on how this should be done, so that any designer could pick them up and clearly see how to represent your brand appropriately in email.
What Should They Include?
1. Logo
Where should your logo appear in your emails? Will you be using your main logo, or an alternative? Think about the way your email will render across the different clients and devices.
2. Typography and Fonts
Not all fonts are supported in email. If your brand font is one of those that isn’t, you’ll need to choose an alternative font for email. Font styles can be specified for headings, sub headings and body copy. Brand fonts can be embedded into images, however, type size needs to be considered when displayed on mobiles.
3. Images
What size? Should you use PNG or JPEG? How should ALT text be managed?
And don’t forget to consider how an email will look when image blocking is in place, particularly if you have included graphical text in the image. Will the message still come across if your subscribers can’t see the pictures?
4. Dynamic Content
Dynamic elements within email can really enhance the user experience, and help you to make more meaningful connections with your subscribers.
When developing email brand guidelines, it’s a good idea to consider how you can make the best use of your data to deliver a personalised experience for your audience.
5. CTAs
Do you want your Calls To Action to appear as buttons, or text? What colour should they be? How will you differentiate between primary, secondary and tertiary CTAs?
Think also about the language you want to use on your CTAs.
Extending your Guidelines into a Design System
There are likely to be a range of design elements and code blocks that you use frequently across email designs. In this case, you can go a step further and develop an email design system for your brand. This can help to save time, and help you to create consistent, on-brand, quality emails every time.
Tagpair can help with creating an email design system for you. If this is something you would like to know more about, get in touch.
Keeping your Guidelines Updated
Stripo’s Brand Guidelines Kit helps businesses to bring all aspects of their email branding together in one easy to access place.
As a Stripo Associate, we believe that Stripo’s quality code saves our clients time and money. Its time saving processes allow us to provide a quality service for less, making email marketing more affordable for everyone.
