It’s easy to slip up when it comes to brand compliance, whether it’s a slight color change, a different font, or an image outside your content library. When you’re in a large enterprise with a variety of marketers working across email, it’s hard to police everyone without causing massive delays.
Address this brand marketing gap using the five ways listed here, however, you can ensure brand compliance across your email marketing efforts:
- Set guardrails from the beginning
- Be consistent across your email designs
- Make the most of modules
- Limit controls and establish a strict approvals process
- Test, test, and test
Set guardrails from the beginning
As Dr. Phil would say, it’s all about setting boundaries.
Setting strict brand guardrails and communicating them across your marketing organization will help build the foundations you need. When implementing these brand and style guidelines, remember to include email-specific guidelines that dictate how marketers can incorporate branding into their email campaigns.
At Stensul, we preconfigure your brand guidelines into our platform and create modules that are custom to your brand aesthetic. This approach means it’s impossible for someone to use a color, font, or image in an email that hasn’t already been approved.
Be consistent across your email designs
Consistency is key when it comes to brand marketing.
To ensure your email designs comply with your overall brand marketing, communicate with your creative teams on a regular basis. Inform them of any updates to the brand guidelines and oversee all creative through a lens of brand compliance.
Check that all fonts and colors are on-brand, reference your image library to ensure assets were approved, and compare emails to both previous campaigns and other marketing materials.
Make the most of modules
Of course, all of this is much easier if you use email modules in an email generation platform like Stensul. That way, the brand guidelines and rules are set in stone within the modules, and whoever creates an email must abide by these rules.
This approach also cuts down your email generation time dramatically because all you need to do is assemble the modules and add copy and images—no design or coding work required.
Limit controls and establish a strict approvals process
Limit who can generate emails and how they generate them, and set up a multi-stage approvals process that checks their work.
At Stensul, we are big believers that your emails should ideally be created by your central marketing team and then disseminated to your local distributed teams to customize (within reason). Emails shouldn’t be created by just anyone—there needs to be oversight from the central marketing team.
Ensure brand compliance across your emails by enforcing the guidelines mentioned above and restricting who can contribute to or update email campaigns.
Test, test, and test
Remember to test across email clients to ensure each customer is getting a consistent experience from your brand. Although your email may be brand compliant, it could appear completely differently in one email client versus another. Use testing sites like Litmus or Email On Acid to see how your email will appear in a variety of email clients.
Again, there’s no need to test if you’re using the Stensul Email Generation Platform (nudge, nudge).
If you’re interested in discovering how Verizon and Disney are using Stensul to reduce email production timelines and costs by up to 90%, schedule your personalized demo now.
