Best practice: Mailchimp’s content style guide
Since 2015, Mailchimp has made its content style guide available online, becoming an inspiration for many.
Do you use Mailchimp? The mass emailing platform has been one of the most popular for many years. Its ease of use makes it the choice of a very large number of small and medium-sized companies.
If you have already experienced the platform, you may have noticed that it has a personality. Through its interface, its emails, its help documents, Mailchimp has a tone of its own, a way of speaking that is unique to it.
This tone and voice are documented in a style guide that is fully available online, publicly, under a Creative Commons license.
Robert Mills of GatherContent spoke with Erin Crews of Mailchimp about their style guide, its structure, its use, etc.
The article goes in-depth on what makes a style guide like this one an essential tool throughout the organization, not just for writers and the marketing team.
As Erin mentions, the guide is widely used by “non-content” teams, such as designers and developers, who can make sure that their work stays true to the brand.
Obviously, at Toast, we believe that every brand should have a style guide. It does not have to be as comprehensive and massive as Mailchimp’s, but any foundation for alignment and growth is an excellent start because:
- Your style guide must make sure that your content always has the same voice, the same tone.
- Your style guide must also allow you to eventually increase the rate of content production, to ensure that as your organization grows, your content remains faithful to your brand.
You would like to develop a style guide for your brand? Simply contact us and we can discuss this together.