The prebuilt components and predefined styles give us the flexibility to be creative within a set of standards.While it’s not the same as drag and drop email building with a WYSIWYG editor, it’s almost like choosing toppings from a build-your-own pizza menu.
One thing that Senior Graphic Design Francois Sahli loves about our email design system is that he can be 100% certain we’re following brand guidelines. In this case, we were dealing with the brand identity of not one but three brands. The system ensures the right colors, typography, and logos are being used in every email.
However, consistent email code is also important. An email design system gives us a single base of trustworthy code to work with. And, because it’s already been tested, the QA process goes much faster.
What you get with an email design system is a
hared workflow for email production, which helps keep things consistent because everyone is playing by the same rules.
4. Accuracy
Without an email design system, your production process for a new campaign might look a lot like this:
- Someone writes the email copy.
- Someone else puts together an email design.
- It all gets reviewed, edited, revised, and approved.
- An email developer works to code everything up.
- The email goes through quality assurance (QA) before getting deployed.
In between each of those steps, there’s a lot of back-and-forth between the team: requesting assets, getting clarifications, and making tweaks.
Not only does that take time, but when you start email production from scratch, you leave a lot of room for mistakes. That could be a typo, a bad link, or a campaign with code that doesn’t render correctly in certain email clients.
When Email on Acid partnered on aback in 2020, we found that 60% of respondents admitted they’d sent an email with an error over the previous 12 months. Mistakes were somewhat more likely within with more “cooks in the kitchen.”
The consistent design, trustworthy code, and repeatable process of an email design Mali Business Email List system help improve accuracy and help you avoid those
“Once the design and development are done, you just have one last check at the end of the process to make sure everything is alright. But you don’t have to rework everything every time.”
An effective email design system should also grow with your strategy, team members, and organization. The system makes it much easier to build new emails, add components and modules, or make universal changes across campaigns.
As Francois explains, rather than having to start from square one, you just make the necessary tweaks and keep moving forward.
~ Francois Sahli, Sr. Graphic Designer
For example, if we want an interactive map for an email in the future, we’d build it based on our existing standards. Then it becomes part of the design system and is ready to go the next time it’s needed.
If we update the logos or colors for our brands, the design system makes it easy to implement universal changes. If we were to add a fourth brand, the email design system provides a guide that helps us scale up quickly and efficiently.
Starting an email design system
Now that you understand all the advantages of an email design system, let’s take a closer look at what goes into the process of putting it all together.
This will definitely be a collaborative project. Marketers, designers, and developers have got to work together to agree on the best solutions. So, don’t go rogue and try to do it alone.
1. Take an email inventory
The first step is reviewing all the types of emails in your existing program. Julia and I went through all of the email templates for each brand (Mailgun, Mailjet, and Email on Acid). That helped us understand what we needed from a big picture perspective.
Every organization will have different types of emails. There could be transactional emails for ecommerce, webinar emails, newsletters, promotions, reminders, and more.
If you’ve recently done an that should help you take inventory of all the ongoing campaigns, and newsletters.
In fact, I wouldn’t start creating any assets for the email design system UAE Cell Number before auditing everything first. That’s the only way to see what you do and don’t need.
