Templates for a global internal communications network

Context

By 2023, one freight forwarder’s global marketing and sales team was sending twenty different kinds of communication under a single banner: service alerts, customer advisories, disruption Q&As, product releases, training launches, sales campaigns, webinar invites, new joiner and leaver announcements, a leadership editorial column, a roundup newsletter. Same name, no two built the same way.

The insight

The harder problem sat underneath the branding: Outlook itself couldn’t hold a consistent identity or a complex layout across devices, and a message that read fine on a desktop screen could turn nearly illegible at phone size. Fixing the look meant fixing that constraint first.

What I did

I reduced the sprawl to three working problems:

1. ConsistencyRecognizable as one organization, while still telling content types apart at a glance
2. FlexibilityReadable on any device or accessibility setting
3. SpeedFast enough to build, review and ship that people would actually use it

The answer was five templates covering the real range of what got sent, and one deliberate exception: internal campaigns kept the branding already designed for them, and with it their creative identity. Every template followed the same underlying rules: header logic keyed to visual size, a single-column layout built from sections and subsections instead of nested lists, and a fixed way of presenting attachments and calls to action.

I didn’t stop at the rules. I built the working template itself: an annotated email ready to duplicate in Outlook, walking any communicator, designer or not, through exact font sizes, how to paste content without breaking the formatting, and how to add or remove a section with one right-click. It got an HTML email’s look out of Outlook’s own tools, with tables and cells standing in for the columns Outlook can’t do natively, and every spacing and image width measured in points and centimeters instead of left to guesswork, so each message would render reliably across devices.

The outcome

• 5templates, one set of rules
• 20message types brought into them
• 170+messages a year under one banner

I made the case for the format message by message, until it was simply how things were done. It rolled out across the global communicator network and is still the standard in use.

Skills and tools

Design

• Email template design
• Header and layout rules
• Outlook tables and cells

Content

• Message-type audit
• Editorial rules
• Annotated template instructions

Enablement

• Guidance for non-designers
• Cross-device accessibility
• Rollout across a global network