Email Marketing
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Email Design Systems can improve both the experience for your subscribers and the production processes within your team. Here's how.
Whether you're exploring if an Email Design System should be a priority for your team or you already know that you'd like to implement one but need some help convincing your boss, here's a breakdown of the three key ways an Email Design System can help your team.
Brands are built through the consistent delivery of the brand promise through all stakeholder touch points (see this Forbes article) and that includes—you guessed it—the email channel. Only if you're delivering a consistent message, tone, and look and feel through every interaction with your customers and prospects can you create a memorable brand experience. But that's easier said than done, especially when a channel is handled by different parts of an organization like it's often the case with email.
For example, it's not uncommon to see a marketing team running newsletters and promotions, the CRM team covering customer campaigns and retention programs, and the product or engineering team owning triggered emails. What should be a consistent inbox experience can evolve into a patchwork of emails that feel disconnected, and too often off-brand.
If you look at every email sent from your brand—from the big promotional campaigns down to the password reset emails—do they have brand recognition? Or do they look like they come from different teams in your company? Or even different brands?
An Email Design System can help bring consistency into the look and feel of your campaigns, no matter how many teams or stakeholders are touching them. Picture an Email Design System as your brand's unique library of pre-designed building blocks that your team can combine as they please to match their needs. A strong Email Design System is the foundation of a consistent email experience, and makes it easy for every organization, no matter how decentralized it might be, to create emails that look beautiful and follow brand guidelines.
While design consistency is one of the most important benefits of an Email Design Systems, it's crucial to know that an Email Design System can be so much more than just a design library. When done right, it also codifies guidelines and email marketing best practices that make it easy for your team to create high-quality emails.
The best Email Design Systems go beyond design advice. They also help you implement email marketing best practices and prevent costly mistakes.
For example, take a look at Stack Overflow's Email Design System. Yes, it features a broad range of copy-and-paste-ready code snippets, templates, and modules but it also includes instructions on when and how to use them and highlights email marketing best practices that help the Stack Overflow team create campaigns that look great and perform.
If you're using a tool like Taxi for Email to manage your Email Design System and create your campaigns, you'll have even more control over your campaigns. Whether you want to enforce the use of ALT text on all images to ensure your emails are accessible, set file size limits on images or GIFs to optimize loading speed, or give direction on maximum character counts for headlines or body copy, you're in full control over the email editing experience. And when you set the rules for what your team can (and cannot) do when creating campaigns, that helps prevent mistakes from happening and improves overall campaign quality.
What if you had full power over your templates and how people use them?
Taxi empowers you to do just that. Create the perfect HTML, then use the power of the Taxi syntax to control how it's used, what can be changed, and what can't.
But there's another benefit to implementing an Email Design System that's invisible to your subscribers but will make a huge difference to your team: Email Design Systems are a powerful driver of workflow efficiencies (and time savings) because they help streamline multiple stages of the email creation process.
If you design and code each campaign from scratch, creating an email can easily take up hours of your team's time. Or maybe you don't start from scratch but use previous campaigns as starting points for new emails— but adjusting the designs and code to match your needs too takes time and effort, and often doesn't give your team the flexibility they need. With an Email Design System, your team can pick and choose from your library of email modules to create emails that fit their needs. That's flexible and fast.
Success Story: Saving time with Email Design Systems
Global Radio cut their email production times by 80% with the help of an Email Design System powered by Taxi for Email.
With an Email Design System, you're investing time in a thorough design review process once—when you set up your email module. That means you can cut these discussions from your day-to-day email production process. Rather than going back and forth on feedback about certain design elements when all you want is getting a campaign out the door, your team can focus on reviewing the campaign's content. That saves time (and your sanity.)
From Dark Mode to new rendering issues, the email industry is constantly changing and you'll have to regularly update your emails' code to ensure that your campaigns continue to look great. If you're relying on a range of different templates that means you'll have to make that code change to every single one—and that takes time. With an Email Design System in place, you can focus on one set of master design modules that you keep updated. You need to make a change to a header module? Update it once in your Email Design System, and the change will automatically trickle down to all campaigns that use that module.
Would you like to get started with an Email Design System but aren't sure what tool to use to manage it? Taxi for Email makes it easy to set up and maintain your Email Design System and provides an editing experience that empowers your team to create on-brand emails in minutes.
Learn more about Email Design Systems in Taxi or reach out to get a free tour.
What's an Email Design System? And do you need one? Watch our on-demand webinar and find out.
Taxi helps marketing teams make better quality email, quicker, at a larger scale.
