Email Design System: Step-by-Step Launch Guide

Systems make or break a business.

McDonald’s success was built upon its “Speedy System” that revolutionized the restaurant industry.

While you may not plan on becoming the next major fast food franchise, you can take notes from the burger behemoth and apply their method to your email strategy.

If you find it difficult to create well-designed emails, frequently come across errors after you hit “send”, or struggle to complete projects on time, then you need to implement an email design system.

An email design system can help you organize your entire design process as it applies to email so you can save time, improve brand consistency, and streamline your operations.

In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know so you can leave here today with a step-by-step plan to launch your own design system to get the most out of your email strategy.

Let’s dive in!

Why Listen to Me? I’ve generated over $1 million with email and written over 1,000 blog posts. I run Storey Time, a newsletter where I teach people how to become full-time digital writers. Feel free to reach out to me on X anytime!

What Is An Email Design System?

Before we dive into email, let’s back up a bit and talk about “design systems.”

A design system is a set of rules and standards to organize and manage design at scale. 

When applied to email, a design system offers a set of guidelines, assets, and templates to ensure you remain consistent with your brand identity, streamline operations within your team, and get more done in less time.

Think of your email design system like Lego.

Each component of your system is a Lego block. They may come in different shapes and sizes, but they all play a role in building a firm foundation upon your email design.

Your design system includes creating a library of pieces you can use to build your email assets. But they also include definitions of how those components are used (and why they’re effective).

An email design system helps you reduce redundancy while creating efficient operations across your team.

Just how important is a design system? 

Well, over 65% of companies leverage one in their business.

Traditionally, design systems were just used for designing websites and apps. But, now they’ve become a necessity when crafting emails.

Email teams need structure to create effective emails on a repeat basis.

This means collaborating with:

• Email marketers

• Project managers

• Developers

• Designers

• Copywriters

• And more

Without design systems in place, your team will be all over the place. They’ll be unsure of how to operate, create inconsistent emails, and release incompetent visual branding.

The two main reasons you need an email design system is for better efficiency in operations and improved visual branding.

The question is, what exactly is included in an email design system?

I’ll answer that next…

Core Elements Within a Design Email System

An email design system is composed of two primary components:

1. Style Guide

2. Component Library

Component Library

In your component library, otherwise known as a design library or pattern library, you’ll have the different reusable elements of your email.

This UI kit will include a collection of predesigned code snippets of “content blocks.”

These components will be guided by branding standards your company has established in advance to remain consistent and efficient:

• Headers

• Footers

• Titles

• Call to action (CTA) buttons

• Hero images

• Logo(s)

• And more

Style Guide

The second part of your design system is your style guide. These are the rules and guidelines which will direct the visual identity of your email design your components:

• Fonts

• Typography

• Font pairings

• Color palettes

• Logo placement

Your style guide will also include non-visual elements like your brand voice and tone, including words to include (and words to avoid).

Your style guide could be as simple as a PDF document you use as a reference. Or, you could attach it to your component libraries depending on your technical setup.

Why You Need an Email Design System

Systems aren’t just a “nice-to-have.”

They are a necessity if you’re serious about taking your email game to the next level.

Here’s why you need to establish an email design system:

1. Save Time

If you want to get more out of your email strategy, then you need to always look for ways to speed up your operations. If you had the option to get more done in less time, would you take it?

Saving time on repetitive tasks and clunky operations is exactly what you get when you implement an email design system.

In a 2019 study, Figma found that designers who worked within a design system completed their work 34% faster than designers without a system.

It’s all about making your email operations more efficient. When you don’t have a system in place, you’re all over the place.

What should you do for font? Images? Brand? Tone?

What kind of headline should you use? What about that call to action button?

What sections do you need to have in your email?

Rather than having to ask yourself these questions every time you open up your email editor to write a new email, you can save mental real estate and always have an answer.

An email design system takes the guesswork out of your email operations. You have a framework, guidelines, and assets to produce beautiful and effective emails on a consistent basis.

2. Improve Brand Consistency

Want to improve your branding?

Then you need to improve your systems.

By establishing a standardized email design system, you’ll be able to craft guidelines for your assets, visuals, tone, and email templates.

The result?

Your readers will experience a consistent look and feel whenever they open your emails. This means you’ll create greater trust and professionalism with your audience so people keep coming back for years to come.

You probably don’t remember the first can of Coke you ever drank. But, for some reason you kept coming back. Now, whenever you see the bold, red logo, it reminds you of that experience.

This is the same feeling you want to create with your audience. And that’s only possible by standardizing your visual branding, specifically when it comes to consistency within email.

People love what’s familiar to them. Your audience wants a similar experience when they open up your emails. It’s all about repeated communication and consistency.

If your email design, layout, or tone is off, it’ll be a negative experience for your audience.

On the other hand, creating that consistent, beautiful, professional experience that your audience can rely on will help draw them to your brand over and over again.

3. Reduce Errors

A standardized email design system isn’t just about improving the positive experience that consistent visual branding creates.

It’s also about reducing negative experiences and confusion.

How?

By reducing errors.

If you don’t have guidelines in place, your email marketer might miss a crucial design block that he should have included in the latest email.

For example, if you’re always supposed to include a call to action with a specifically designed button (and copywriting) and he misses it, that could cost the company conversions.

But, with an email design system, you can have a set of processes in your email implementation to ensure nothing gets missed.

4. Scale Easier

If you plan on expanding your email newsletter or your marketing efforts, then you’ll need to set up an email design system.

Why?

Without structure, you won’t be able to scale your brand. Not only will you struggle to create the consistent experiences necessary to create loyal customers, but you’ll also struggle to build cohesive operations with a team.

If you’re trying to grow your brand, at some point in time, you’ll probably need to hire a designer, email marketer, developer, or copywriter.

But, without a system in place, your team will be confused about what to do and who’s doing what, which will likely lead to errors and delays in implementation.

An email design system allows you to insert (or remove) a specialist into your structured email system without your operations falling apart.

8 Steps to Build Out Your Email Design System

Now that we’ve covered what an email design system is and why you need one to get the most out of your email strategy, let’s launch your system.

Here’s a step-by-step plan to build out an effective email design system:

1. Review Your Current & Past Emails

You don’t need to create your email design system from scratch.

You already have a baseline structure even if you don’t know it.

First things first: let’s take a look at the emails you’re already sending. Take a look at your past broadcast emails and your current automation emails. Then, look at your email templates (if you use any).

So take inventory of:

• Past broadcast emails

• Current and past automation emails

• Any email templates (past or present) you use

Then, break down your emails into different categories:

• Newsletters

• E-commerce

• Transactional

• Promotions

• Winback

• Re-engagement

• And more

Next, we’ll break down the elements we’re already using.

2. Break Down Your Email Components

Now that you’ve got your emails organized, it’s time to analyze the different components you’re already using.

Remember, we don’t want to create any assets or guidelines until we’ve assessed what you already have (so we can decide what to keep or toss).

It’s time to break down your emails into their different elements.

The only way to do this is to ask a few questions:

• What elements do you like?

• This could be fonts, colors, buttons, blocks, images, etc.

• What do you want to get rid of?

Also, keep in mind that you don’t want to just go off your gut feelings. There may be certain elements, templates, headlines, or CTA buttons that have led to greater opens, clicks, conversions, and more. Dive into your analytics to dissect the effectiveness of your email elements.

• What’s working?

• What’s not working?

Remember to look at different email layouts:

• Will you create specific mobile designs?

• Do you need two or three-column emails?

• What about light and dark-mode emails?

This is where you should essentially break down everything you currently do within your emails and decide what to keep and what to cut.

3. Find New Ideas

Now that you’ve assessed your current email setup, it’s time to look outside for new ideas.

You now have a list of components (remember those Lego pieces?) for your email design system from what you were already working with.

But now, it’s time to get some fresh ideas.

Go make a swipe file of great email newsletters like our favorites from 2023.

Another solid resource for email designs is Really Good Emails, a directory of thousands of winning design-centric emails from various brands.

Start adding your favorite email newsletters to a mood board.

Keep in mind that if you’re working with developers, you won’t just want to look at the design elements. You’ll also want to inspect the code to see how the developers built out the emails.

4. Establish Email Design System Rules

Every effective system comes with clearly defined rules.

For your email design system, you’ll also want to create rules that need to be followed.

Start by analyzing the rules and style guidelines for different aspects of your brand’s designs. For instance, do you have guidelines in place for your web design or social media?

Use any guidelines there as a starting point for your emails.

If you’re able to leverage fonts and colors, then carry that consistency over into your emails.

In some cases, fonts are an issue, especially since some email clients don’t render some fonts from the web, so you’ll want to double-check to ensure you are using consistent text and renders correctly.

Here are some elements you’ll want to make guidelines for:

• Spacing and margins

• Column widths

• Mobile and desktop breakpoints

• Styles for title levels (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

• Styles of body copy

• Styles for numbered lists or bullet lists

• Rules for fonts

• Rules for buttons

5. Design the Chosen Components

Now that you’ve got your guidelines in place, it’s time to get to work to create the designs for your chosen components.

This means you need to:

1. Create a design library.

2. Create the code to implement the design.

You’ll want to start by creating mockups within a grid layout.

Establish the visual representation of every component you’ve chosen for your style guide.

Then, once your team is happy with the design mockups, it’s time to create the code for the individual components and your email templates.

6. Create Your Code Library

Now that you have your design library in place, it’s time to create the code to make those designs come to life.

This means you’ll need to create a collection of reusable code snippets you can easily plug and play whenever you need.

Create each design element you need and save it within your code library like GitHub, GitLab, or Adobe Dreamweaver.

7. Create Reusable Email Templates

Once you have your components coded, it’s time to put them all together into email templates.

Take your coded components (blocks) and put them together to create your main email template.

With beehiiv, you can create several templates you can pick and choose from depending on the type of email you want to create. Simply insert your coded blocks into beehiiv’s editor and hit save as a template.

Start by logging into your beehiiv account (Don’t have an account yet? Get a 30-day free trial. It takes two minutes to get set up).

Then, head over to your Dashboard (I’ll show you how to create a template using my beehiiv newsletter, Storey Time).

Then, click on “Posts.” In the upper right corner, click on the down arrow and select “Use template.”

Once you’re on the email template page, click “New Template.”

Now that you’ve started a new template, you can create your new template by placing in your custom code snippets you’ve established in your design library.

Once your template is complete, just hit the “Save” button and you’ll be able to use the template anytime you write a new email.

Remember, you can create endless templates, depending on the type of email you want to send.

If you have certain blocks you want to save within beehiiv, simply add them all within your main email template so you can pick and choose which ones you want to use in every email.

8. Document & Delegate

Now that you’ve created your email design system, there’s one step left to complete: document and delegate.

You’ve created the system, but unless you get it in writing, you won’t be able to implement it effectively.

Make sure you create a knowledge base of all libraries including your designs, code, and email templates. Save your links and make it easy to access them.

Next, make sure your rules and guidelines are all documented.

Finally, make it easy for your team of developers, designers, marketers, project managers, and copywriters to access them.

If necessary, create tutorials, FAQs, and step-by-step processes to ensure your team knows how to leverage the email design system to its fullest. 

Then, once your knowledge base for your email design system is complete, establish a kick-off meeting with your team. 

And, if necessary, create team training sessions to get everyone on the same page.

Finally, conduct quarterly or bi-annual meetings to internally review your system and operations to ensure operations continue to run smoothly (and everyone is using it to its fullest). And, look for new ways you can optimize and improve your email design system.

Establish Your Email Design System With beehiiv

Email is one of the best ways to communicate with your audience.

But, if your email design isn’t systemized, you’ll struggle to maintain a consistent brand image and you’ll waste time on redundant tasks.

By implementing an email design system, you’ll be able to streamline your design efforts, produce beautiful and powerful emails, and create loyal fans to establish a long-lasting brand.

One of the key parts of the email design system process is to create stunning and practical templates. With beehiiv, you can create email templates with ease with our world-class editor.

Used by major newsletters like Milk Road all the way to renowned celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, beehiiv is the best email platform for creators.

Get started with beehiiv for free today (no credit card required).