Every email that you send out is a golden opportunity that can reinforce your branding – or shatter it. Whatever you send to outside prospects or community partners are important.
In addition to converting necessary information to your readers, your emails shape the perceptions they might have about your business.
Consistent email design can be efficiently achieved by creating custom email templates in advance. With an email style guide, you build brand authority. Your email can be instantly recognisable by means of visual cues; this goes instantly even if your contact does not read the content right away.
A business professional sends out an average of 40 emails per day and receiving double or even triple that amount. It is therefore crucial to move swiftly with your email communications.
Perfecting Your Email Style Guide
Perfecting your Email Marketing Style Guide is one aspect in business that you’ll need. This is to decrease the likelihood of your email getting lost in the inbox clutter. Also, to increase your chances of getting a reply.
Since you can’t talk with your recipient face-to-face, the words you use will affect their perception of you. It is so important to keep in mind that all your marketing sources as an extension of your brand, both in visuals and content. Every email is an opportunity for your target audience to get on board with your brand or shun from it.
In sales, if you foul up your initial cold outreach, getting a response will significantly decrease. A bad email sends out a bad first impression, which may result in lost sales opportunity.
An email style guide can help your team create and send consistent email correspondence. The key components involved in an email marketing style guide are:
- Header – The introduction of your email. They are totally optional, but they can set the expectations for the email. Putting in a header immediately tells the subscriber what exactly they are going to get out of this email experience.
- Body – If the header sets expectations, the body fulfils them. It is highly important that you follow through and deliver what your audience expects from your email. The body of your email is an area where perfecting your email marketing style guide comes in handy.
- Footer – This is your opportunity to round off your email and to remind your audience that there is a person at the other end of the internet. This opportunity is a great way to humanise your brand. This also reminds your audience that the email is coming from another person, and not a robot.
The Email Style Guide
As we have mentioned above, the area where you can concentrate in perfecting your email marketing style guide is the body of your email. As such, we will discuss below 5 tips you can improve on to make for a compelling email body.
If you’re running a distributed email program, where people outside your marketing team are building and creating emails, or if you’re a one-person email show, you require a style guide. Consider the following tips:
1. Being Consistent is Beautiful
The most obvious reason to have an email style guide for your organisation is to be consistent. This can be quite challenging if you’re working within the structure of a distributed email program.
When you have different teams within your organisation sending out emails, it helps to have a singular source of information or truths that everyone, across all levels and departments, can look for answers. An email style guide keeps everyone functioning efficiently and staying on the same page.
2. Your Emails Should Sound They Come from the Same Place
Your email style guide is not all about design. It is a perfect opportunity to reinforce your brand’s voice, tone, and your brand message. How are you going to speak to different audiences via email?
Should you use a more formal tone or a more conversational one? Is it appropriate to use emoji’s in your subject lines or the body of your email copy? These are just some questions you need to address and decide on to help clearly impart your brand message across.
3. Your Email Should Look They Come from The Same Place
Though we said that an email style guide is not all about design, it is also a vital element to incorporate in your style guide. By incorporating consistent colours, fonts, spacing, and even link utilisation in your basic template, you instantly build on your brand’s visual identity that your audience can immediately recognise from other platforms.
It is advantageous to incorporate and leverage the same elements you use on your website within your email. Just make sure the elements you use such as fonts and images are supported within whichever email tool you use.
4. Treat Email as a Special Kind of Animal
Email is obviously not a website, nor is it in print – and as such, it shouldn’t be treated similarly. Email comes with its own technical considerations inherent to the medium.
Rules around accessibility standards, font, GIFs, and even plain-text versions are all important factors to address in your email style guide.
5. Keep Track of all Adjustments You Make
There are various emails that you may send out that will depend on your goals. As such, you will find certain emails work well while others, not so well. This is where you get to make changes or adjustments to your template/s to garner better, if not the best results.
Whatever changes or adjustments you implement should be noted in your email marketing style guide. This way, your emails maintain a consistent look and feel, regardless if you make the emails yourself, or choose to have it outsourced.
Other Considerations
Successful brands take pains in carrying out their brand aesthetic across all platforms. Keeping consistency between your website, socials, and emails, and bringing that all in across all platforms immediately trigger visual recognition in your audience.
Additionally, it is a bright idea to integrate subscription management into your email marketing style guide. Knowing your recipients also helps determine the content of your email and provides avenues for you to adjust the visuals and focus accordingly. That way, you can cater to what your audience expects to get out of your correspondence.
If you are tired of hearing crickets every time you send out emails and, in a quandary, who would handle email tasks or basically streamline your entire email marketing workflow, we at The Growth Manager is here to help. Make the most of your email campaigns with our Email Content Planner, and stop hearing crickets today.
