Email styles and formats

To keep our email communications consistent, it’s important that they are all written in Shelter’s tone of voice, and use the same intro and sign-off formats.

Tone of voice, spelling and grammar

To meet our quality criteria, all emails must adhere to Shelter’s tone of voice and house style. Our house style guide sets out the conventions we use for spelling, grammar and style.  

Some of the most common house style mistakes that appear in emails include:

• En dashes – we use en dashes instead of hyphens when breaking clauses. Hyphens are only used to hyphenate a pair of words (e.g. much-needed)

• Capitalisation – please see the style guide for details on what we do and don’t capitalise (e.g. government not Government)

• Quotation marks – we use single quotation marks to open and close a quote, and double quotation marks inside it. For example, ‘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.

• Exclamation marks - we avoid using exclamation marks. If our words are doing their job, we don't need ‘!’ to convey emotion.

‘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 might make no sense to the recipient. For example, legacy or mass participation. 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.

We have two different salutations within Adobe that have defaults already available. They are:

• ‘Hi <name>,’ / ‘Hi there,’

• ‘Dear <name>,’/’Dear Supporter,’

In the above instances, the default will only be used if the supporter doesn’t have a suitable first name. This could be because it contains special characters (except apostrophe), the word ‘test’, ‘testing’, ’retail’ or ‘anonymous’, numbers, is only one character or is blank.

For direct communications, we can also use just someone’s first name with a dash after it, which will be removed if no suitable first name. This is often used in subject lines.

E.g. ‘John - Sign our petition’/’Sign our petition’

Subject lines and pre-headers

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.

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.

• Subject line: Gove ‘ashamed’ of Social Housing conditions

  • Preheader: Plus, see other ways you can support Shelter.

• Subject line: 7,510 children

  • Preheader: In Scotland without a permanent home.

• Subject line: <name> - Thinking of how you can help...

  • Preheader: Why not donate unwanted gifts for free or volunteer with us?

• Subject line: <name> - Thank you

  • Preheader: Together, we're fighting for home.

Using bold for emphasis

Bold is sometimes used in emails to add emphasis or highlight parts of the copy. Our general rule is don’t overdo it. You should use bold text only for messaging that is integral to the email.

Some tips:

• Use bold to emphasise key points

• Make sure things in bold make sense on their own. Many users will scan 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:

Call-to-action (CTAs)

If the objective of your email is for the user to take an action, you’ll probably need to include a CTA button. Our default formatting for these is as follows:

• Alignment: centre

• Colour: black or white for standard asks, and red for donate asks

Button copy

For copy on a button, please aim for three words or less. The copy should communicate the action that using the button will result in.

• E.g. ‘Sign the petition’, ‘Donate’

Please don’t say ‘click here’. Lots of our users will be on mobile so won’t be clicking. Also the button copy needs to make sense on its own for people with accessibility needs.

Read more about best practice for accessibility in our set of accessibility guides.

Leading into a CTA

It’s a good idea to explain the CTA before the CTA button. Just make sure that the CTA button copy isn’t too repetitive. For example:

Please sign the petition to call on the government to build more social housing.

[CTA button] Sign the petition

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.

Hyperlinks

The destination of hyperlinks needs to be clear from the link text. This is because users with accessiblity needs might see or hear the link text without the text around it.

For example:

Quote marks

Adobe allows the use of graphic quote marks in certain components and templates. These should be used for case study quotes or testimonials only. The CRM team will use the quotation marks template block where suitable, but you can also indicate you want to use this.

Sign-off format

The sign-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.

Related

Read our other content guides

Read our brand guidelines

Contact us

Have a question or comment about email or other digital topic? Found a bug? Or maybe you’d like to contribute to the framework? Use our contact form to get in touch.