Why we launched Email Squad

Email is a weird one. It’s one of the hardest-working channels in marketing, but it’s often one of the last things to get proper creative attention. A campaign gets designed quickly, an old template gets reused for the hundredth time, or something that looked great in Figma gets built, sent to Outlook and suddenly looks completely different.

Somehow, everyone just accepts that this is how email works. We think it deserves better, which is why we launched Email Squad — a specialist email design and development studio helping brands and agencies create better email campaigns, flows, templates and systems.

So, why email?

Email Squad hasn’t appeared out of nowhere. Our background is in digital creative and production, working across campaigns and creating digital experiences for brands and agencies. Over the years, we’ve increasingly found ourselves working across specialist areas of digital production, and email was one that kept standing out.

Email sits in a slightly strange place. It’s part creative, part development, part CRM and part marketing automation. Because it sits between so many different disciplines, responsibility for it can easily become spread across several people. The marketing team writes it, a designer makes it look good, a developer builds it and somebody else eventually loads it into the platform.

That process can work, but it can also mean email becomes another piece of production rather than a properly considered part of the brand. We wanted to create a studio that brings those different pieces together and specialises in making email better from the beginning.

Email isn’t just another digital design

Designing an email isn’t the same as designing a web page, social post or display ad. There are technical limitations to consider from the moment you start designing, and understanding those limitations can make a huge difference to the finished result.

An email needs to work across different screen sizes, devices, inboxes and email clients. It needs to behave properly on mobile, survive Outlook, make sense in dark mode and remain readable when images aren’t available. There’s also accessibility, file size, loading speed and the general unpredictability of different email clients to think about.

The best email design takes all of this into account from the beginning rather than discovering the problems once the design has already been approved. That’s a big part of what being a specialist email design agency means to us. We’re not simply designing something that looks good in Figma; we’re designing something that’s actually meant to become an email.

Design is only half the job

A great-looking email isn’t much use if it falls apart when it reaches someone’s inbox. That’s why Email Squad brings design and development together, thinking about how something will be built while we’re designing it and how the design should behave while it’s being developed.

The aim is to create emails that are visually strong but also practical, responsive, lightweight and ready for the platforms they’re going into. Whether that’s Mailchimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Pardot or another platform, the principle is the same: the email should look great, work properly and be easy for the team behind it to use.

More than one-off campaigns

Sometimes you just need a great email campaign, and we absolutely do those. But some of the biggest opportunities come when you stop looking at individual sends and start looking at the whole email experience.

Welcome emails, onboarding journeys, abandoned baskets, browse abandonment, post-purchase communications, re-engagement, renewals, newsletters and promotional campaigns all contribute to somebody’s experience of a brand. Individually they might seem like small touchpoints, but together they can represent hundreds of interactions with customers every day.

That’s why, alongside email campaign design, Email Squad creates complete email flows, templates and email design systems. Rather than starting from scratch every time somebody needs to send an email, we can create a flexible system that keeps everything consistent while still giving marketing teams the freedom to create new campaigns.

Designed around your brand

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using a template, but there is a problem when every brand starts looking the same because everyone is working from the same template library.

We start with the brand. Typography, hierarchy, spacing, imagery, messaging, buttons and modules should all feel connected to the wider visual identity. From there, we work out how to translate that into an email that can actually be built, sent and maintained.

For one client that might mean creating a single campaign. For another it could mean developing a flexible modular template, while larger teams might need an entire email design system capable of producing hundreds of different communications. The solution changes depending on what’s needed, but the principle stays the same: the brand comes first.

Built for brands and agencies

Another big reason for creating Email Squad is that we know agencies produce a lot of email, but not every agency wants or needs a permanent specialist email team sitting internally.

Email Squad can work directly with brands, but we can also operate as a white-label email production partner for agencies. You can send us the brand guidelines, campaign idea, copy or Figma files and we can take care of the specialist email work behind the scenes, from design and development through to rollout, testing and production.

The agency keeps the client relationship and we become an extension of the production team when specialist email support is needed. It means agencies can offer more without having to permanently increase their internal resource.

Email Squad is also listed on DesignRush as a specialist email marketing agency, helping brands and agencies find the right expertise for their email projects. As seen on DesignRush.

The boring stuff matters too

We love the creative side, but good email production also involves quite a lot of things that nobody is going to put on a moodboard. Testing, responsive behaviour, dark mode, file sizes, fallbacks, accessibility, rendering and QA aren’t particularly glamorous, but they’re often what separates something that simply looks like an email from something that actually works as one.

That’s why testing and optimisation are part of the process rather than something added at the end. For us, the job isn’t finished when the Figma design gets approved. It’s finished when the email works properly where it needs to work.

What does Email Squad actually do?

We’ve built Email Squad around the areas where brands and agencies most often need specialist support. That includes email campaign design for individual sends, email flows for lifecycle and automated journeys, email design systems and templates for teams that need to produce at scale, and email development for turning approved creative into responsive HTML emails.

We also provide email optimisation and testing, ongoing email design subscription support for teams that need regular creative resource, and white-label email marketing support for agencies that want specialist expertise without building an internal department.

In simple terms, we can help you make one great email, or help you create the system behind hundreds of them.

What’s next?

Email Squad might be new, but the thinking behind it isn’t. We’ve taken our experience working across digital creative and production and focused it on a channel that we think deserves much more attention.

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more of what we’re making, what we’re learning and what we think brands and agencies could be doing better across email design, development, production and optimisation. We’ll probably complain about Outlook occasionally too.

If you’ve got an email campaign that needs designing, a lifecycle that needs some love, a template that’s become completely unmanageable or an agency team that could use specialist email support, send it to the Squad.

Better emails start here.