Email style guide

Introduction

What is a style guide, and why do we need one?

As an organisation, we send hundreds of emails every month, to dozens of different audiences. We send emails for fundraising, events, and campaigns, emails about services and products or from our shops to their customers – the list goes on.

Some people only receive one or two emails from Shelter every year - others might receive several a week. Because of the volume we send, it’s critical 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.

Length

There is no concrete rule about how long an email should be. However, the golden rule is as follows:

• An email should only be as long as it needs to be.

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

Shelter’s house style contains rules about our approach to spelling and grammar. Please familiarise yourself with it. 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.

‘From’ Name

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 - 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

• E.g. Grace – Events team

In some cases, you may want to address an email from a team. Only include a team name if there’s a specific reason to.

Remember, some team names will make no sense to the recipient. In these cases, you should just use ‘Shelter’.

From a named member of staff with job title

There may be rationale for using first name and surname, and a job title. These are the exception and can be considered on a case-by-case basis. For example:

<First name, surname> – Shelter (job title)

• E.g. Polly Neate – Shelter Chief Executive

Salutations

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

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’

Sign-off format

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 the ‘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.

Please avoid putting ‘Shelter’ before your team. It should be clear to recipients that the email is from Shelter, so this isn't necessary.

Format details

• Size: 16pt

• Colour: Black

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 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 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 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.

See below for some good examples of subject line and preheader combinations.

Bold for emphasis

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 for messaging that is integral to what you want people to take away from the email.

Some tips:

• 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

Font sizes

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 very important to check – what looks right in Adobe may not look right to a user when they open the email.

Subheaders and headers

You can use other font sizes in headers and subheaders. You should always format this copy using Adobe’s font format function. If you just make the text bigger and put it in bold, this can cause formatting problems.

Fonts and colours

Our default position is that we use only black font on a white background, for several reasons:

• 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 slow to load.

Image size:

Resolution: 72 dpi is an adequate resolution for email images

File size: Please aim for a maximum file size of 1mb 

Images: Finding images

If you require imagery for a specific purpose, you can check Story House for a library of our assets.

Please be conscious of the usage restrictions for each file. If in doubt, check with the case studies and/or Brand team.

Images: Header/Hero Image

When replacing the standard Shelter header with a hero image, make sure the image is clearly branded with a Shelter logo, or that the image itself has Shelter branding within it.

For example:

Open

Images: Mobile-first images

When using images 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 the appropriate image appears, depending on which device the recipient is using.

See below for an example of this.

Open

Briefing-in mobile and desktop versions

To make your life easier, when you brief the Creative team to produce 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. 

Images: Alt text

It’s very important to add alt text  to your images. Alt text is an essential requirement for accessibility, as well as users who might have trouble downloading your images.

Alt text should clearly explain what is displayed in the image. See below for some examples.

Call-to-action (CTA)

Most emails will include a CTA button. Our default formatting for these is as follows:

• Alignment: centre

• Colour: red (this is an exception to the ‘text on a coloured background’ rule)

Button copy

For copy on 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:

Exceptions

As with almost everything else, you can test variants on this.

For example

• Full-width CTAs

• CTAs in different colours

Emojis

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 in a subject line or preheader

• Avoid using emojis in the body copy

• Avoid using emojis instead of a word; e.g. 🏃 for Shelter.

In the above examples, if the recipients email browser can’t display emojis then they will just see a string of random characters.

Spacing

Be aware of the amount of spacing (or padding) around images and ensure there’s a bit of white space above and below an image.

Hyperlinks

The destination of hyperlinks needs to be clear from the link text, or from the context (e.g. the words in the direct vicinity of the link.

​For example:

Quote marks

Adobe allows the use of graphic quote marks in certain components and templates. Please make sure you only use these for case study quotes or testimonials only.

Videos

We can’t embed videos into Adobe, so we have to use a screenshot of the video, and link the image to the actual video.

Screenshots of videos should always have a ‘play’ button so it’s explicitly clear that it's a video. The Creative team can help with this.

To learn more, visit our video guides.

Read our other content guides

Or use the menu to the left.

Framework questions?

Here are people to contact