Beefree blog

Email Design Systems for Human Resource Teams

Emily Santos
Emily Santos
May 9, 2022
Email Design Systems for Human Resource Teams
Email Design Systems for Human Resource Teams

Human resource departments are an essential part of any growing business. Their number one goal is to ensure that employee engagement remains high. This helps HR teams foster strong company culture and ensure employee retention. It’s simple: the happier employees are, the more willing they are to stay at their job. But also the more inclined they are to be productive, engaged, and proud of their work.Managers and HR departments are in constant communication and collaboration to ensure employee engagement efforts are successful. Some of these efforts are regular surveying of employees, in-person check-ins, and continuous communication of company-wide updates. These tasks are often time-consuming and repetitive and keep human resource professionals from working on more significant tasks. Because of that, these teams are reliant on smooth systems and tools that help them conduct these tasks faster and more efficiently.

Here enter email design systems:

A design system is a set of guidelines and principles that outline the components and patterns that make up your brand. When it comes to creating email newsletters, email design systems ensure that communications across the organization remain on-brand. Human resources teams often face challenges when creating engaging email content. For one, they believe that they have to build designs from scratch every time. Secondly, they over-rely on designers to maintain the visual identity of outgoing emails. These challenges take time and result in a loss of productivity and deadlines. Design systems help tackle these challenges by providing guidelines and assets to quickly and easily create professional and on-brand newsletters and landing pages.

How to Use Email Design Systems in HR

In today’s era of remote work, email has become the most effective way of communicating. According to a DMR report, the average office employees receive 121 emails per day. For this reason, each email sent out by a company needs to be on-brand and engaging. If not, they might be ignored or worse, sent to spam.Many HR teams see email marketing as essential but time-consuming. Implementing email design systems helps reduce time spent on employee newsletters, announcements, and updates.An effective email design system includes:

  • Brand colors and brand guidelines: font size and usage, logo usage, icons, etc.
  • Reusable content blocks: headers, footers, call to action buttons, social links. Reusable content blocks are an example of modular design. 
  • Email templates: templates for job opportunities, onboarding, offboarding, or employee satisfaction surveys.
Email templates for Recruitment and HR

BEE Pro has over 1,400+ professionally designed email templates for any occasion.While there are many other email design systems HR teams can implement, these are the three most essential. Not only do these systems help save time in the email creation process, but empower HR teams to stop overlying on designers.The next step is to find the right tool.

Finding the right design tool to implement email design systems.

Enrica Lipari from our People & Culture team shared that finding the right tool should “enable us to do our work efficiently and effectively.” Many design tools take some time to learn, adding to an already busy HR schedule. They are also not user-friendly and can be complex for non-designers. When it comes to finding the right tool to implement email design systems, there are three things HR teams should look for:

Collaborative Features

HR teams often collaborate with designers and copywriters to ensure all outgoing communication is consistent and cohesive. A design tool that offers collaborative features helps cut down the time spent emailing back and forth. As well as, ensuring everyone is working together to achieve a common goal.Collaborative features include anything from co-editing, the ability to leave comments on the platform, to user roles and management control.BEE Pro is a free no-code design tool that makes it easy for everyone to design, collaborate, and send emails all in one platform. The multi-user support allows teams to easily design, review content, and leave comments, speeding the email creation process.

multi-user support BEE Free

Time-Saving Features and Ease of Use 

As previously mentioned, most of the tasks done by HR teams are repetitive and time-consuming. The right design tool should help HR teams save time at every step of the process, as well as,be intuitive enough for everyone to use regardless of skill level. The BEE Template Cataloghelps you do both. With over 1,500+ free customizable templates and the global setting options, you can easily customize any template and make it your own. For instance, Enrica and the rest of the People & Culture team use email templates within BEE Pro to quickly onboard employees and send out company updateThe saved row feature allows HR teams to build design systems and reusable content blocks to reuse across emails and landing pages. Synced rowstakes it one step further and helps keep design systems updated, error-free, and on brand. With synced rows, changing the contents of a row in one templates automatically "syncs" said changes in all area where that row takes place.This is especially useful for headers, footers, social links, and menu bars that need to be updated regularly.

synced row animation

Ready to get started? 

Sign up for a free BEE Pro account today and get access to 1,400+ email and landing pages, including The BEE Recruitment Templates Collection. This collection was made with HR teams in mind. Quickly onboard new team members, share company-wide updates, and post job opportunities.

Use this template in Beefree!

Use this template in Beefree!

Editor’s Note: This post was updated on February 2023 to ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness. 

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The challenges of designing emails directly in Marketo

Marketo’s built-in email editor is useful for basic templates but presents several limitations for marketers and designers.

  • Limited design flexibility – Customizing layouts, fonts, or interactive elements can be difficult without custom HTML or Marketo’s proprietary syntax.
  • Technical barriers – Advanced customizations often require HTML knowledge or an understanding of Marketo’s email template language, which may not be ideal for non-technical teams.
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Due to these challenges, many marketing teams turn to external email builders like Beefree, FeedOtter, or Knak to improve design efficiency and automation.

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Why Beefree is the best email builder for Marketo Engage

While other external email builders like Knak and FeedOtter also integrate with Marketo, Beefree offers distinct advantages.

  • No-code drag-and-drop builder – Enables teams to design professional emails without writing any code.
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Learn more about Beefree's integration with Marketo Enagage [https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/24837761625618-Export-Emails-to-Marketo]

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How to update existing email templates in Marketo

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Frequently asked questions on using Beefree with Marketo Engage

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Yes, there are a few important limitations to be aware of:

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Additional resources and links

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Ready to elevate your Marketo email marketing? Try Beefree today and streamline your entire email creation process.

Start your 15-day free Business trial today!

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Email is king when it comes to talking directly to your customers. Sure, we might send texts or share voice notes, but we all still check our emails. It’s how we keep in touch with work and the businesses we connect with. 

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The victim could be anyone. The link could lead to a ransomware virus that holds your data captive or be the start of a data breach. It could even lead to a traditional scam that has you input your credit card details so a thief can steal them. 

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Just as phishing and spam emails have become more sophisticated, so have the tools designed to protect against them. All providers, including big names like Gmail, use SEGs to secure communications and other features, such as Gmail’s unsubscribe feature

What do SEGs flag as spam? 

SEGs continually update their parameters. This means that what they check for is constantly in flux. What SEGs look for today, for example, could include: 

  • Strange or suspicious subject lines
  • Highly urgent capitalization or excessive exclamation points
  • Strange URLs
  • Poor grammar and/or spelling
  • Generic greetings that don’t address the recipient 
  • Suspicious email addresses
  • The volume of emails sent at once
  • Attachment types 
  • Image-heavy content 

SEGs are far more advanced than just ticking boxes, but that doesn’t mean your emails can’t get blocked or sent to spam. After all, you might put together a great email campaign, but if your email is too image-heavy, it might get quarantined or sent to spam. 

The good news is that once you know what the SEGs look for, you can work to design better emails. Beefree can help you get started, with a range of templates for responsive email designs.

How to create newsletters with secure email gateways in mind 

The good news is that you can implement and send out most, if not all, of your newsletter ideas without issue. So long as the emails are well-made and are sent at a reasonable frequency, you’ll be golden. 

Start by first improving your security methods

In general, you should always look at ramping up the security measures in your business. You can use one of the top types of risk assessment matrix to understand your business's threats and how to resolve them. Then, since you already have that information, you can use it to create better newsletters and emails. 

Make sure the personalization feature works

One of the biggest red flags for an SEG is a generic greeting. Adding Dear Sir/Madam at the start isn’t going to fly in today’s world. Even if your email gets through, it’s unlikely the recipient will open it. 

That’s why you need personalization. Linking your email marketing tools to your customer relationship management system means you can offer easy personalization, like addressing your customers by name, or even offering personalized recommendations based on their order history. 

Avoid image-only emails 

Image-only emails are tempting for an email marketer. They’re striking, they look good, and you can fine-tune what they look like in Photoshop or another image editor. 

They can also be a red flag for SEGs.

Thankfully, the solution is simple: enrich your emails. The best part about this approach is that it also improves the accessibility. Improving email accessibility will help ensure that all your customers can engage with your emails on their terms. Those emails will also load faster, look great on all devices, and be more engaging. 

Align your emails with the landing pages 

SEGs look out for suspicious links. A link might be suspicious if there’s a misspelling or if the link doesn’t sound like the content in the email. So, how do you ensure that SEGs don’t see any of your links as suspicious? 

You make them predictable. 

An easy way to do this is to create a landing page from an email. On top of aligning the landing page with the content of the newsletter, you’ll want to: 

  • Make a custom URL for every link that matches the content of the page 
  • Ensure there’s no misspelling
  • Don’t use urgent language around your link

Use 2FA to boost security

Do you need 2FA to get past SEGs? No, but it’s a great way to help protect you and your customers. 

You can protect sensitive data by adding user identity verification. For example, a customer may get an order confirmation email but wants to cancel or change the delivery details. Including a two-factor authentication step ensures only the customer can request changes. 

Building in extra security features puts your customers at ease. It also protects your endpoints and, in turn, your business. So, no, you don’t need 2FA to get past SEGs, but it’s worth looking into for you and your customers’ protection. 

Avoid urgency 

Urgency can be a flag for SEGs. So: 

  • DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS
  • Minimize the use of exclamation points

Think of the copy in your newsletter as a chance to win over your audience, not scare them into clicking the link. Doing this will improve your relationship with your customers since they’ve come to you on their terms. It’s also essential to get emails past the SEG.

Key takeaways 

Secure email gateways are a primary defense against spam and phishing attacks, but they can pose a problem for email marketers. By working to understand the security risks associated with email scams, you can then understand what your email needs to make it into inboxes. 

From there, you’ll want to make your emails more personable, accessible, and secure. Once you’ve found that sweet spot, your newsletters will be more likely to get past the secure email gateway and into your audience’s inboxes. 

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