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As an organisation, we send hundreds of emails every month, to dozens of different audiences. There are fundraising emailsWe send emails for fundraising, events emails, and campaigns emails, emails about services and products , emails or from our shops to their customers – the list goes on.
Some people only recieve receive one or two emails from Shelter every year - others might receive several every a week. Because of the volume of emails we send, it’s critical that we have a consistent style across our emails. By doing so, we strengthen our brand identity and increase the amount of trust recipients have in us.
This guide will help you create emails that are consistent and on-brand. Some of the things in here are rules , while others are just guidelines. And there is always the possibility of experimenting and testing new styles. Having said that, these standards are the baseline, so please try to stick to them.We’ve tried to answer every question you might have on email style, but there are undoubtedly things missing. If you have a question about email style, please email emailchampions@shelter.org.uk, and Shelter’s email community will try to help.
Length
There is no concrete rule about how long and an email should be. However, the golden rule is as follows:
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That means you should avoid unnecessary information that does not contribute directly to the purpose of the email. The world receives a flood of emails – recipients rarely engage with long-winded ones.
Spelling and grammar
The Shelter Shelter’s house style guide contains rules about our approach to spelling and grammar. Please familiarize familiarise yourself with it – it’s vital for anyone who write . Anyone who writes external communications needs to know it.
Please see below for some of the most common house style mistakes that appear in emails:
En dashes – we use en dashes instead of hyphens when breaking clauses. Hyphens are only used to hyphenates a pair of words (e.g. much-needed)
Capitalisation – please see the style guide for details on what we do and do not capitalist (e.g. government vs Government)
Quote marks – we use single quote marks to open and close a quote, and double quote marks inside, eg ‘The most recent report said “New housing starts continue to be stagnant” and provided several statistics.’
Italics – we never use italics. If you want to emphasise text, bold formatting can be used, sparingly.
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The from name is the name that appears next to an email in a recipient's inbox.
Standard format
<First name> – Shelter
E.g. James – Shelter
As a general rule, we don’t use surnames in our ‘from’ names , and - we simply state them as being from ‘Shelter’. If you do wish to use a surname you can, but we’d ask that you test whether this has an impact on open rates.
Alternatives
From a team
<First name> – Shelter (team name, capitalised) team
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The salutation is the greeting with which you start your email.
Standard format
Aim for informality, so go with ‘Hi <name>’.
Use size 16 font.
Alternatives
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This is just a guideline. You may have reason to use a more formal salutation depending on your audience, or you may prefer to go with something more informal for a warm audience , – or drop the salutation entirely to create a sense of urgency.
For example:
‘Dear Mr. Smith...’
‘Hey Richard…'
‘Richard, we need your help’
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The sign-off off is the name and organisation/team name that appears at the bottom of the email. This should always be the same as who the email is from‘From’ name.
Our standard sign-off format should be the ‘From’ name in black, followed by the team name capitalised, and ‘team’ in lower case.
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Subjects lines and preheaders
Subject lines
Your subject line is the first impression people will have of your email, so it needs to be something that will encourage people them to open it.
The best subject lines are short (no more than six words will display on most smartphones), descriptive, and give the user reason to explore your message further. They shouldn’t be an afterthought either – you should start with one or more subject lines and use them to guide the copy of your email.
It’s always worth testing a couple of different subject lines to get a feel for your audience, but some easy wins include personalisation, like using the person’s name, using a question, or being reactive to a trending topic.
Preheader text
This is the line of text that you see in your email inbox underneath the subject line. Usually it is summary text that follows on from the subject line.
You must always include preheader text. Keep it to a short, single sentence as it encourages to encourage open rates. You can use it to expand on the subject line and use more detail, but feel free to test different ways of doing this.
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Bold is commonly used in email to add emphasis and highlight parts of the copy. Our general rule with bold is don’t overdo it. You should just use bold text formessaging that is integral to the what you want people to take away from the email.
Some tips are:
Use bold to emphasise key points.
Make sure bold clauses make sense when read in isolation. Many users will scan on the first read, and just take in the bold text.
Aim for one use of bold per paragraph, max.
Steer away from bolding full sentences (unless they’re fairly short)
Avoid bolding single words
For example
Good | Bad |
With the help of Panorama, we’ve shed light on this murky world of profiteering, but we need as many people to see it as possible. Will you help us uncover this scandal and share?
| With the help of Panorama, we’ve shed light on this murky world of profiteering, but we need as many people to see it as possible. Will you help us uncover this scandal and share? |
We’ll be taking our petition to Downing Street on 12 December. You’re one of more than 20,000 people who have already joined us in calling on our prime minister to help the 80,000 children facing Christmas without a secure home.
| I’ll be taking our petition to Downing Street on 12 December. You’re one of more than 20,000 people who have already joined me in calling on our Prime Minister to help the 80,000 children facing Christmas without a secure home.
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Our standard font size is 16. Please make sure that all body copy is size 16, to ensure it appears properly in recipients’ email inboxes.
This is really very important to check – what looks right in Adestra , may not look right to a user when they open the email.
How to make sure font is the right format
After copying and pasting text into Adestra, use the ‘Clear formatting’ button (Tx), and then format all text to size 16.
Subheaders and headers
You can use other font sizes in headers and subheaders. You should always format this copy using Adestra’s font format function. If you just make the text bigger and put it in bold, this can cause formatting problems.
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Using multiple colours in an email can be visually distracting
Some users find coloured text harder to read
Users with visual impairments may find certain colour combinations impossible to read
Exceptions
If you believe coloured font, or black or white font on a coloured background may make your emails more effective, you can test this and feed the results back to the email champions.
If you do wish to use text on a coloured background, please use the Web Accessibility Contrast Checker to ensure that they meet accessibility standards, and exercise common sense about the readability of your chosen combination. Read our accessibility guidelines to learn more.
You should also make sure you are choosing colours from Shelter’s brand guidelines.
Images: Size and resolution
It’s important to find the right balance between image size, resolution, and file size, to ensure images don’t appear pixelated, but also that they don’t make the email too slow to load.
Image size:
Columns | Recommended Image Width |
Full-width section images | 564px |
2 column section images | 264px |
3 column section images | 164px |
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If you require imagery for a specific purpose, you can check the Story House for a library of our assets.
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Images: Mobile-first images
When using images in anywhere in an email, please make sure you use both a desktop-friendly and mobile-friendly version. Landscape images won’t look good in mobile view, and any text may be too small to read.
You can set up your emails so that the appropriate image appears, depending on which device the recipient is using.
See below for an example of this.
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Briefing-in mobile and desktop versions
To make your life easier, when you brief the Creative team to produce you an email asset, you should specify that you want both desktop and mobile versions.
Exceptions
In some cases, this may not be necessary – for example if the image has no text in it, or if it’s a close-up portrait shot. You can use your discretion.
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Alignment: centre
Colour: red (this is an exception to the ‘text on a coloured background’ rule)
Button copy
When it comes to the For copy on the a button, less is more – please aim for three words or less. The copy should communicate the action that clicking the button will result in.
E.g; ‘Sign the petition’, ‘Donate’
Leading in to a CTA
Avoid repeating yourself when leading into a CTA button, and avoid using a colon at the end of the sentence – grammatically this doesn’t make sense. For example:
Sign the petition and call for more social housing: Sign the petition |
Exceptions
As with almost everything else, you can test variants on this and feed them back to the email champions group.
For example
Full-width CTAs
CTAs in different colours
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Use emojis sparingly. Some email browsers don’t display emojis properly, so recipients will see either nothing , or a string of random characters. If you do decide to use emojis, please follow these rules:
Emojis can be used
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In in a subject line or preheader
Avoid
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Using using emojis in the body copy
Using Avoid using emojis instead of a word; e.g. 🏃 for Shelter.
In both of the above examples, if the recipients email browser can’t display emojis then they will just see a string of random characters.
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Be aware of the amount of spacing (or padding) around images and ensure that there’s a bit of white space above and below an image.
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We can’t embed videos into Adestra, so we have to use a screenshot of the video that links on to it, and link the image to the actual video.
Screenshots of video’s videos should always have a ‘play’ button so it’s explicitly clear that it is 's a video. The Creative team can help with this.
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