Design for Emails

As a design volunteer, you may be asked to:

  • Design a salesforce email 'letterhead'
  • Create images for the body of a salesforce email
  • Create a mailchimp template
  • Create images for a mailchimp campaign

The purpose of this page is to explain the generic requirements for each of these requests.

Salesforce

We use our CRM salesforce to send personalised emails to our supporters, like thank you emails after a donation, or an update on a project that they have supported. Using salesforce (rather than normal email, or mailchimp) makes it quicker and easier to send relevant emails to the right people, like everyone who gave to world water day, and also logs each email against who we send it to.

All that is to say, whilst using salesforce imposes some constraints on our email design options, there are many non-design pros to using it. We still want to make our emails as attractive and engaging as possible, and so we want to exploit the options within salesforce to brand our email layout.

We normally use our Canva pro account to create design images for salesforce emails as this keeps them all in one place, means we can edit them in future and is already configured with our brand colours.

Salesforce "Letterheads"

In salesforce, a "letterhead" defines the overall look and feel of an email.

The picture left shows the things that we can configure for salesforce letterheads.

In the editor, "logo" basically means picture. We have the best results uploading a "logo" that is a full-width header image. This image needs to be 500px wide for both the header and footer "logo" (which can be different).

There are few options under 'header properties', namely we can align the logo image and set a background colour.

Here is an example of how this might appear in an inbox.

In this case, we created the header and footer image in canva. If using canva to create you designs, you should ensure that the images you create are 550px wide, and create 2 separate images. These can then be sent to Anna to add to salesforce.

You can also specify the hex codes for the colours you want for the "background colour" and top, middle and bottom lines.

Once we have a letterhead, we can use it to compose an email to one or more people. The body of the email might also include images, and we might ask for your help in designing them.

Images in the body of an email should be 530px wide or smaller (as all images inserted into the body of the email email have a 10px boarder).

Left is an example of how the thank you letter head from above has been used to send an email that updates to donors. In this case, Alex and Tom ran a triathlon for Made With Hope, and we are updating their donors on what we did with the money they raised.

Mailchimp