What is SSO?

Single sign-on (SSO) is an account security feature that allows customers to mandate sign-in requirements and member access to their systems through a single identity provider. When configured, instead of creating a new username and password for each individual platform, your team members will use login information from your identity provider to sign in.

SSO has become the gold standard for enterprise authentication. As organizations grow in complexity and employees interact with more digital tools, SSO offers a streamlined approach to access management. Instead of managing access across the many tools in your digital stack, SSO allows you to manage only one. Onboarding a new team member? Have a team member who no longer needs access to your systems? All you have to do is enable or disable their access in your identity provider to make sure that the right people have access. 

Connecting your Sendwithus account with your Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) SSO provider (such as Okta, Google Workspace, or Entra ID) lets you manage user access to your team’s account without needing to manually invite or remove each user in Sendwithus. This can make it easier to manage user access, enforce security policies, and scale your organization’s operations.

The Benefits of Using SSO in Sendwithus

Enhanced Security

The password problem is well-documented - when employees need to remember multiple credentials, they often resort to dangerous practices like password reuse or simple passwords. SSO eliminates this problem by reducing the number of credentials needed, making it easier to enforce strong authentication policies.

With SSO, you can implement centralized security controls including:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all your digital tools 
• Ensure team members adhere to your password policies
• Immediate access removal when employees leave your organization

Simplified Compliance

For organizations in regulated industries, SSO can simplify compliance efforts by providing:

• Centralized audit trails of authentication activities
• Consistent access controls across applications
• Easier reporting for regulatory requirements

This, in turn, will make compliance for internationally recognized standards like SOC 2 compliance much simpler to attain. 

Better User Experience

Perhaps the most immediately noticeable benefit is the improved user experience. Your employees will appreciate not having to remember and enter different credentials for every digital tool they use in their day to day. Improved end-user experience is the most reported benefit of implementing SSO with 70% citing it as a benefit. 

Though using a password manager, like 1Password or Lastpass, will also ensure that your employees are using a secure, non-repeated password, using SSO saves them time. Clicking on “log in with email” and following the steps provided by Google Workspace to login, for example, will be the same for each tool they use. 

Cost Reduction

The IT cost savings from SSO implementation can be substantial:

• Fewer help desk tickets for password resets
• Reduced administrative overhead for account management
• Less downtime from access issues

Moreover, SSO does not require specific knowledge to implement or manage, meaning that even teams without dedicated IT support or oversight can benefit from its implementation.

Gartner reported the reduction of IT support tickets as the third highest benefit of using SSO at 61%.

If your organization is still managing multiple sets of credentials across different systems, now is the time to consider SSO as your authentication standard. Want to set up SSO on your Sendwithus account for increased security? 

Contact us to configure SSO for your team

Personalization is no longer a recommendation for marketers today—it's a necessity in order to achieve success. In a sea of generic messages to customers, email marketers must create highly tailored email campaigns that resonate with individual customers while maintaining efficiency, brand consistency, and scalability.

Scalability Challenges: Start By Building a Robust Foundation

Maintaining quality at scale begins with developing a comprehensive email design system. This goes beyond traditional email template management. By creating a library of pre-approved content modules, you ensure visual and messaging consistency across all communications, regardless of who builds the templates and uses pre-built Blueprints. With an email design system, marketing teams can dramatically reduce time spent on individual email creation, minimize errors, and maintain a cohesive brand voice, which is key to building customer trust.

A successful email campaign production process also requires seamless cross-team collaboration. This is why marketing teams leverage sophisticated platforms that adapt to their needs, with indispensable collaboration features such as:

• Real-time commenting 
• Shareable links to share feedback & promote cross team collaboration
• Multi-stage approval process & audit trails

These collaborative approaches break down silos between creative, marketing, and technical teams, enabling faster, more efficient campaign development.

A critical yet often overlooked mistake is decoupling transactional and marketing emails when they are sent from a different ESP or CRM. Streamlining the approach to managing both templates provides email marketers greater control over messaging and guarantees a unified brand voice across all customer communications. 

Data-Driven Personalization: Transforming Insights into Action

Leveraging customer profiles has become the cornerstone of sophisticated email personalization. Email marketers can now test and refine campaigns by utilizing comprehensive customer data, creating highly targeted segments and personalized messaging that speak directly to individual preferences, behaviors, and journey stages. This data-driven approach transforms generic communications into meaningful, personalized interactions.

Some key examples of powerful customer profiles driving personalized messaging include:

• Purchase history segmentation that recommends complementary products based on previous buying patterns
• Behavioral triggers that respond to specific actions like abandoned carts or product page views with timely, relevant content
• Geographic customization that tailors content to regional preferences, local events, and time zones
• Engagement-based optimizations based on individual open and click patterns
• Cross-channel interaction data that creates a cohesive experience across email, website, and mobile touchpoints

Visual conditional builders have emerged as a major breakthrough in the complexity that was inherent to email personalization. New, intuitive tools make sophisticated and highly personalized campaign creation accessible to marketers without technical or coding knowledge, enabling them to develop dynamically personalized email experiences. 

Maintaining Quality, Precision & Consistency

Maintaining quality at scale requires a robust QA process that goes beyond traditional testing methods. By utilizing tools like Litmus for comprehensive email client testing, marketing teams can ensure consistent experiences across all platforms. Improving upon this testing process with a library of pre-tested, on-brand modules, and implementing continuous email monitoring, prevent code decay and maintain high-quality standards regardless of which email clients your customers are using.

Comprehensive testing, coupled with built-in approval workflows have evolved from a previously manual process to a sophisticated, transparent collaboration framework. By establishing clear approval roles and integrating marketing automation platforms, organizations can create more efficient review processes to ensure that every email meets brand standards while allowing for rapid iteration and deployment.

For instance, Culture Amp transitioned their email production process to scale to 45 languages for thousands of worldwide customers. This required precision and oversight in email and SMS creation with compatibility across multiple platforms. Leveraging Dyspatch to enhance their email personalization strategy ensures that each recipient receives perfectly tailored and relevant information, contributing to lasting relationships between Culture Amp and their customers.

Scaling Your Personalization Strategy to SMS, Push, and Voice Notifications

Unifying cross-channel communication is key to scaling personalization. The Dyspatch SMS builder makes extending your personalization strategy to text messages ridiculously simple. Just like with email, you can use customer data to create targeted messages that feel one-to-one rather than one-to-many.

The conditional elements used in email work just as beautifully for SMS. For instance, they empower you to send custom promo codes to first-time customers or loyal shoppers, or change your message tone based on purchase history. 

The real game-changer isn't just personalizing across channels—it's doing it all in one place. Dyspatch lets you create, manage, and collaborate on emails, SMS, push notifications, and voice notifications without jumping between platforms or rebuilding templates.

This streamlined approach means:

• Your brand voice stays consistent across every touchpoint
• You can repurpose content easily between channels
• Your team spends less time on production and more time on strategy
• Approval workflows apply to all channels, maintaining quality control

And the result? When a customer gets a push notification about a flash sale, then an SMS with their personalized discount code, followed by an email with product recommendations based on their browsing history—all with consistent messaging and timing—that's when the magic happens.

Building for the Future of Personalization

Scaling your highly personalized email campaigns is a complex challenge that requires a strategic approach balancing technology, creativity, and operational efficiency. By implementing the advanced techniques above, email marketers can create more impactful, personalized email experiences that drive engagement, conversion, and ultimately, business growth.

The future of email marketing lies in the ability to combine sophisticated data insights, cutting-edge technologies, and human creativity. Those who master this balance will not just communicate with their audience—they'll create meaningful, memorable interactions that set their brand apart.

Contact us now for a personalized demo of the Dyspatch email production platform. And you’ll be on your way to utilizing your transactional and marketing emails to their maximum potential. 

Email design can be a tricky egg to crack. These days, if you aren’t using an email builder, your campaigns may be prone to getting stale, not keeping up with your brand guidelines, and being difficult to update. With so many user-friendly options available, modernizing and updating your emails for 2025 is no longer such a monumental task requiring major stakeholders from across the company. 

In this detailed guide we’ll go over where to start, what to prioritize, and how to future-proof your email redesign process. Coupling this process with adopting an email production platform like Dyspatch will ensure that your team is creating engaging, on brand email experiences in no time. 

Part 1: Where to get started in the email redesign process

Analyze your data:

Before firing up Figma and dropping a bunch of rounded rectangles on the canvas, it’s crucial to understand your current campaigns’ performance. Look at your email analytics to get an understanding of  which email clients your audience uses. This information will provide insight into the technical limitations and opportunities you need to consider.

For instance, if a significant portion of your audience uses Gmail or Outlook, you’ll need to ensure compatibility with these clients to avoid rendering issues. Alternatively, if they’re using Apple Mail, you’ll be rejoicing at the unprecedented design freedom, and you can rest assured that your email designs will degrade gracefully when opened with older email clients. For a list of common design challenges, check out our article here on top email clients and devices to test for seamless communication.

Evaluate your engagement:

If you have a library of pre-sent emails in your CRM or ESP, identifying which email designs and campaigns are performing well might offer valuable learnings and help shape the modules you’ll be implementing in your new email design system. Keep context in mind when you are reviewing your email design to make sure you’re developing designs that align with your viewers’ expectations. 

Here’s what to keep in mind:

• Placement: where are your CTA buttons landing when rendered on desktop versus mobile? Does your audience require more text, or an immediate call to action to get them to engage? Using built-in device testing will help you determine where the major breakpoints are in your email, and help you optimize for all screen types
• Imagery: what types of images are your audience engaging with? Do they prefer real world examples of your product in action, or are they more engaged with abstract icons and imagery? Keep in mind that the images you use in your emails should be optimized for delivery over slower mobile networks, since some locations may have limited speeds, which will slow down loading of your emails. 
• Skim rate: Popular CRMs like Hubspot will provide you with a skim rate metric that will let you know if your users are only engaging with your content for a short time (2-8 seconds). This metric will be pivotal in determining whether you need to adjust your email designs to get your key point across. 

Re-review & dream big:

Before completing your analytics review, it’s important to take a step back and assess how your current email design aligns with your existing brand guidelines. If you found yourself making concessions to adapt your brand guidelines when implementing your original designs, now is the time to take another look at these limitations.

HTML email elements like as buttons, typography and other advanced styling might be worth re-implementing now. You can be confident that there is a graceful fallback when your email is rendered in older email clients. Modern design elements made possible by CSS3 and HTML5 can still be implemented, as long as you are testing them across all popular email clients, and are confident that they will not hinder readability of your emails when they are opened in an older email client. For a list of in-depth email accessibility requirements be sure to check out our new guide: Email Accessibility 101: The Ultimate Guide.

And last of all, you can rest easy, knowing that anyone still opening their emails in Outlook 2011, or Lotus Notes 8.5 are already used to a sub-optimal email experience and likely won’t even notice any major issues with your email design.  

Now that you’ve compiled all of your major analytics and reports, it’s time to get on to the fun (at least for me) part. Your email design system!

Part 2: Thinking modular

Identifying common elements

Now is the time to determine which common elements are shared across your email templates. Let’s consider both your marketing emails as well as your transactional emails. If you haven’t already seen it, the Dyspatch email builder design system Figma community file is a great place to start. Our email builder design system covers all of the common blocks you can use to build out your baseline email templates, including:

• Headers & footers
• Headlines
• Text blocks
• Images
• Tables
• Button & CTAs
• 1, 2, & 3 column layouts with images text and CTAs

Using the shared components of our Figma community files, you’ll be able to set your baseline text styling and size, your button styling and image treatments. When these components are updated, you’ll see their changes reflected across the sample email mockups 

Building your email design system

Now that you’re using an email builder and your design horizons are expanding, there are a number of decisions you’re going to have to make to ensure your email designs are consistent and the right fit for your audience. 

• Light or dark theme? Depending on your existing brand guidelines, this question might be answered for you. But if they’re more flexible, this is going to be an important decision to make. A light theme might feel more positive and minimal, but you run the risk of the design being haphazardly inverted in dark mode email clients. Alternatively, you can design your theme to be dark mode first, and not have to worry about major inversions happening to your color schemes. 
• Email width: Will you stick with the standard 600px width established across HTML email designs to date? Or will you go with a wider design at 700px or 800px wide? Keep in mind that the wider your email gets, the more of a gap there will be between your desktop and mobile designs. Large blocks of text images might look good on desktop, but will quickly become overwhelmingly large when rendered on mobile devices.
• Image treatments: Strengthen your brand by carrying iconic brand images over to your email designs. Add in rounded corners, borders, and even drop shadows where you see fit, knowing that they will render correctly in supported clients. 
• Typography: Using the correct branded fonts is crucial when designing your HTML emails. Implementing custom fonts provided by Typekit or Google Fonts is recommended. But always provide web safe fallbacks for your custom fonts to keep your emails legible on older clients. 
• Theme: The theme is where all of the major design decisions of your email brand guidelines will take place. Use the theme to set your email width, headline and body copy styling, padding and background images used in your email templates. Modules should remain as theme agnostic as possible to ensure they can be used in a variety of different emails.

Prioritize mobile first design

Depending on your customer base, a large portion of your users might be accessing your emails via their mobile devices, you’ll need to ensure that your emails are mobile friendly. On average, over 40% of emails are opened on a mobile device first. 

Optimizing your email design system for ease of use

Workspaces
Workspaces can be split up by campaign or email type depending on how many emails your team is managing. Utilizing workspaces in Dyspatch will allow you to not only specify integrations by email type, but you’ll also be able to ensure that the emails you’re creating are always shared with the right people internally. This guarantees that the most important eyes are always viewing the emails they need to.  

Internally we sort by type:

• Transactional emails
• Newsletters
• Product announcements
• Release notes
• Onboarding drip campaigns
• Internal company communication emails
• Webinars
  • Promotional
  • Registrations
  • Alerts / follow up

Themes

Themes are created to be shared across workspaces, ensuring that our transactional emails match our newsletters and onboarding drip campaigns.

• Light theme - this theme is built to render nicely in dark mode as well, but is primarily used for our standard communications, product updates, newsletters, etc.
• Dark theme - Our dark theme is used as a highlight, and we’ll use it for special announcements. 

Blocks 

Blocks are grouped by type and complexity. You’ll want to keep your shared and most-used modules easy to find and work with. With the inclusion of our easy to use block search, you’ll always be able access any block of your choosing with just a click.

• Headers/footers
• Body copy
  • Text
  • Images
  • CTAs
• Layouts
  • 2 column - image / text / CTA
  • 3 column - image / text / CTA
  • Featured posts
  • Call to action blocks
  • Image carousels

Conclusion

Redesigning your email in 2025 is most successful with a blend of data analysis, modular design, mobile optimization and the adoption of an email production platform. Getting started with a thorough understanding of your current campaigns’ performance and utilizing modern design principles will help you create engaging, effective, on brand emails that will stand the test of time. For more detailed insights and tools to aid your email redesign process, chat with someone from our team now. 

For further reading be sure to read our in-depth breakdown of email accessibility requirements with our post: Email Accessibility 101: The Ultimate Guide.