Keep it consistent: How large teams can streamline email campaigns that maintain brand identity

For major brands and corporations, maintaining brand consistency presents a significant challenge to teamwork, especially for those in which email marketing is carried out by cross-cultural teams working in different markets. 

What you need to know about brand consistency in email marketing 

Brand consistency is about creating visual brand recognition across all marketing channels. For example, your signage and offline store design should match your website, email campaigns, and social media accounts.

And it’s not just about placing your logo in a prominent place. Using the same colors, fonts, symbols, and sometimes even a recognizable tone of voice in communications helps maintain your brand’s individuality.

Companies’ main benefits from this approach are establishing trust and loyalty, standing out from competitors, increasing engagement, and conveying individuality. Brand consistency is paramount because it leads to brand recognition and brand loyalty. Maintaining brand consistency across all channels is crucial for businesses to build trust and drive revenue. 

Here are some key statistics highlighting its importance:

• consistent brand presentation across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23% (Influencer Marketing Hub);
• around 4 in 5 consumers must trust a brand to consider buying its product (Exploding Topics);
• 85% of organizations have brand guidelines, but only 30% enforce them consistently (G2 Learn);

Look at the Starbucks email campaign. It retains all the brand’s recognizable features that you’d see if you walked into a brick-and-mortar café—the logo, corporate colors, fonts, and cups with customers’ names.

(Source: Email Love)

Common challenges in maintaining brand consistency in large teams

Now, imagine how large teams with 100–200 members involved in email production create email campaigns with brand consistency. 

They need to deal with this issue by taking the following into account:

• teams may consist of in-house specialists and digital marketing agency specialists who have delegated some email production tasks;
• branches may be located all over the world, and each is responsible for email localization in their country;
• teams may be cross-cultural, which adds to the complexity.

The work of such teams involves challenges relating to the accurate transfer of information and control of brand consistency, communication gaps, varying skill levels, and duplicated efforts.

Specific situations that create problems and hinder brand consistency in email marketing:

1. Emails from different departments use inconsistent tone, style, or focus.
2. Team members use different fonts, colors, and layouts that do not align with brand guidelines.
3. Multiple edits and feedback loops reduce clarity and require updating.
4. Errors occur regularly for lack of a single repository of modules, email templates, and brand guidelines.
5. Maintaining brand consistency is made more difficult when different teams prepare emails.
6. Rebranding takes time to implement across all departments.
7. Revised guidelines must be quickly distributed to all teams, and even with guidelines in hand, not all team members may be qualified to correctly implement all the recommendations in emails.
8. When seasons change or promotions are required, such as Black Friday, the same design changes must be quickly implemented across all channels.

Below are three welcome emails from Pandora’s brand directed to subscribers in the UK, France, and Spain. Note that despite the differences associated with localization and the work of different teams, the emails retain the main features of the brand—fonts, logo, color scheme, email structure, and its main modules.

Example 1. Welcome email from Pandora (UK)

(Source: Email from Pandora)

Example 2. Welcome email from Pandora (France)

(Source: Email from Pandora)

Example 3. Welcome email from Pandora (Spain)

(Source: Email from Pandora)

Best practices for maintaining brand consistency in email campaigns

The steps that must be taken first to maintain brand consistency in email marketing were mentioned above.

Let’s briefly review the best practices that help teams of all sizes do this:

1. Define and document brand guidelines: In a centralized document, clearly outline the tone, style, visual elements, sender’s name and signature, and other acceptable practices.
2. Establish a standard process for working with guidelines and reviewing: Detail all the steps needed during email production to maintain brand consistency, and assign a dedicated proofreader or team leader to review each campaign for consistency.
3. Leverage templates: Use predesigned, approved templates for recurring campaigns. A centralized design team can prepare such templates in advance and use them without significant changes for other teams.

Why collaboration tools are essential for larger email teams

The real problem is not creating brand guidelines but using them in email production for different email campaigns that run in parallel and are being developed by different teams.

To solve this problem, you need tools that will allow you to apply such an approach.

Unified system for email production

A single source of standards for templates, visuals, and guidelines ensures uniformity. A single system for email production for an entire large team can be applied to as many as 200 people in different countries. This is the only way to ensure easy access to current guides and standards, to make all changes to a single database quickly, and to be immediately available to all participants in a single design and with uniform settings.

Synchronized efforts in real time

Collaboration tools that facilitate simultaneous editing allow teams to work on the same campaign in real time, ensuring quicker turnaround and reducing delays caused by version conflicts. Teams can share ideas instantly, incorporate feedback on the go, and finalize emails efficiently. This level of synchronization eliminates redundant exchanges of communications and speeds up production cycles.

Ensuring role clarity

Assigning clear roles within collaboration tools (e.g., editor, designer, approver) ensures that everyone knows their responsibilities, thus minimizing confusion and duplicated efforts. With defined permissions, team members can focus on their specific tasks without the risk of inadvertently changing other parts of the campaign. This approach streamlines workflow and keeps the production process on track.

How Stripo helps large teams maintain brand consistency

Stripo can become a single system for collecting and storing information for brand consistency in email marketing. It is also a place where information will be immediately available for email production. The main features that help teams maintain brand consistency are as follows:

1. Real-time co-editing functionality 

Using Stripo, teams can co-edit the same email without delay. In large companies (enterprises and corporations), the decision on whether each email complies with brand guidelines can be made after it is approved by the appropriate departments—general marketing, legal, and PR. Then, certain departments can deal directly with email production and make corrections.

Real-time co-editing allows several people to work with an email simultaneously, simplifying communication, making corrections, and monitoring brand consistency.

Practical tip: Establish live editing sessions to finalize designs and content before approval. After creating the email design and texts, invite all stakeholders to access the email to add suggestions and corrections in real time.

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2. Customized role assignments to streamline workflow

Stripo allows custom roles (e.g., writer, viewer, designer) to be assigned. ​​In the updated version of the Stripo editor, we’ve improved the management of roles and permissions. With custom roles and permissions, you can fully customize the process with unique names and descriptions, giving you complete control over who has access to which features. This increased flexibility allows you to create customized team member roles that fit your team’s needs perfectly.

The email’s owner will distribute access levels for different participants, allowing them to change only the part of the email in their area of ​​responsibility. The parts in which clear parameters are already spelled out according to brand guidelines, such as fonts, colors, banner size, and signatures, remain unchanged. 

Practical tip: Create role-based guidelines so that each team member knows their scope. Find out how to invite and assign team members in accordance with their responsibilities, and how to distribute roles in a project here.

3. Quick access to brand guidelines

Stripo allows you to create email brand guidelines in one minute with the special Stripo option. It will appear in PDF format in the account, where each participant can download it and review all the recommendations for preparing emails. Based on this guide, you can create three branded email templates. 

Therefore, you can store and enforce brand rules directly in the email editor and ensure that fonts, colors, and design elements align with brand identity. Quick access to the guidelines solves the problem of transmitting information to all participants, including newcomers to the team, since it is always at hand and easy to update.

Practical tip: Regularly update guidelines to match evolving brand strategies.

Use case: CleanMyMac (MacPaw) told us that they use brand guidelines and palettes to work in dark mode for email teamwork. This allows designers from different teams to compare notes and know exactly what color combinations to use and how they will look. This saves time when designing and building emails and allows you to stay within a single brand style.

Look at how the brand’s website and email look—all branding components are perfectly preserved.

(Source: CleanMyMac website)

Here is the email campaign for Black Friday from CleanMyMac:

(Source: Email from CleanMyMac (MacPaw))

4. Modular email design system with saved modules

Reusable modules can help teams quickly build emails without straying from branding. The principle of modular email design allows you to create all the necessary modules once, assign them all important parameters for brand consistency, and then give access to specific distribution teams or the members of one team for their use. 

This way, you will be sure that the modules created with strict adherence to brand guidelines do not change or “break” while working with them.

Practical tip: For easy identification, make module tags by campaign type (e.g., promos, newsletters).

Use case: Lyreco told us that the outsourcing agency team creates templates and ready-made modules first in the Stripo editor, and then in-house team representatives can quickly prepare email campaigns.

The best Stripo option that saves us time is modules that we can save and share in other projects. I can search for great examples in the “Prepared Email Templates” folder and save some ideas regarding what we can use in future email templates. The Polish market generally does not have applications that can compete with Stripo. Our outsourcing agencies were pleasantly surprised by the high-quality tool, which minimized the time and resources we spent.

Kateryna Tietievina,

Campaign and lead acquisition specialist Lyreco Poland

5. Seamless integration with 80+ ESPs and CDPs

If email marketing teams located in different countries prepare emails for those countries, they may work with different systems to send messages to ESPs and CDPs. Therefore, the email editor must allow seamless integration between ESPs and CDPs.

In this way, representatives of different teams will be able to use all the features of teamwork and maintain brand consistency across their email production. They can then export emails to the necessary systems while preserving all the features of the on-brand design.

Practical tip: Be sure to test the export of emails to systems you need to ensure that all parameters are transferred correctly. In addition, use the testing function as your design renders in different email clients.

Wrapping up

Maintaining brand consistency in email campaigns is challenging, especially for large teams that manage multiple campaigns simultaneously. By leveraging collaboration tools that centralize guidelines, enable real-time editing, and streamline role assignments, teams can ensure that their emails consistently reflect the brand’s identity. Stripo’s features make this process seamless, helping email marketers save time, avoid errors, and create campaigns that resonate with their audiences.

Ready to take your team’s email production to the next level? Start exploring Stripo today!