Bayer Emailer Design System | Discovery Audit Report

01 — The Problem Statement

02 — Business Goals & Objectives

03 — Design Discovery Timeline

04 — What's Working Well

05 — Brands Audited & Component Mapping

06 — Upcoming Initiatives

07 — Key Takeaways

The use of the Santhali language in its written form is declining, largely due to the shift towards digital communication, which is predominantly in English. As a result, native languages across the country are gradually fading from everyday use.
Most Santhal youngsters can communicate verbally in Santhali, but proficiency in reading and writing is significantly low.
Santhals have deep-rooted connections to their villages, where their parents originate. However, the lack of communication in Santhali between parents and children is causing the essence of Santhal culture to fade.
Reading and writing in Santhali are declining even faster, as neither parents nor children in many families are proficient. Some may claim they can read, but not fluently.
As more Santhals migrate to cities for education and jobs, exposure to their native language diminishes, leading to a gradual disconnect from their cultural roots.
Despite Ol Chiki being officially recognized, Santhali is rarely included in mainstream education, limiting opportunities for children to learn the script.
Hindi, Bengali, Odia, and English dominate formal communication, reducing the necessity of using Santhali in daily life.
While Ol Chiki has Unicode support, there is a shortage of digital content, limiting its presence in online platforms and social media.
Older generations are fluent in Santhali, but younger ones rely more on regional or foreign languages, weakening intergenerational transmission.

Email marketing plays a crucial role in reaching healthcare professionals and patients.
Client faces email communication challenges with its diverse brands. Collaborating with Advertising Agencies of Record (AORs) in developing emails which lack consistency and incur high costs. There’s less reusability of design, hence standardiing email design is vital for improvement.

The solution sought is a flexible and user-friendly email design system and development kit (HTML code) empowering AORs to create rapid and reusable creatives for various brands. This initiative aims to ultimately reduce costs and save time while enhancing the quality and consistency in designs.

A successful solution involves striking a well-balanced combination between design and content without excessive emphasis on either.

The client does not have effective and uniform communication across its diverse brand landscape. Currently, client collaborates with their Agencies of records (AORs) to develop email campaigns targeted to both Healthcare professionals (HCPs) and Direct to Consumer(DTCs) audiences. An email design system is imperative for the business to avoid inconsistency and fragmented branding, high developmental cost, and wasted time in production which leads to missed opportunities for engagement.

Bayer faces a challenge in achieving effective and uniform email communication.

Bayer faces a challenge in achieving effective and uniform email communication across its diverse brands. Currently, the company collaborates with Advertising Agencies of Record (AORs) to develop email campaigns targeted at Healthcare Professionals (HCP) and Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) audiences.

However, these emails often suffer from either an excessive use of graphics or an overload of text, leading to the crucial messaging being buried and not prominently displayed. Moreover, the emails for different brands exhibit a consistent appearance, lacking the necessary variations.

The absence of a standardized email design system results in inconsistent branding, design inefficiencies, and missed opportunities for engagement.

The high expenses associated with creating email campaigns every time constrains the creative design capabilities of the AORs to quickly visualise and present design options.

Business Goals And Objectives

Standardise Email Design

Establish a unified email design system across all Bayer brands to ensure consistent, on-brand communication with HCP and DTC audiences.

Reduce Production Cost

Reduce the time and cost associated with creating email campaigns by providing reusable, modular design components for AORs.

Improve Engagement

Improve email open rates and HCP engagement by delivering clearer, more impactful messaging through well-structured email templates.

Strengths Identified Across Bayer Brands

Clear Brand Identity

Individual brand colour palettes are well-established and consistently applied within each brand’s email campaigns.

Strong Content Strategy

Messaging across HCP communications is medically accurate and strategically targeted to the right audience segments.

Regulatory Compliance

All audited emails met Bayer’s internal regulatory and MLR review requirements with no significant compliance issues identified.

Brands Audited

Aspirin

10 email templates audited across HCP and DTC audiences. Key finding: heavy reliance on imagery with insufficient CTA hierarchy.

Xarelto

14 email templates audited. Key finding: overloaded text blocks with insufficient visual hierarchy and inconsistent spacing.

Adalat

8 email templates audited. Key finding: brand identity diluted across different AOR interpretations, no unified colour application.

Glucobay

9 email templates audited. Key finding: inconsistent typography scale and font usage across campaign types.

Nexavar

12 email templates audited. Key finding: MLR-compliant content, but layout structure varied significantly across batches.

What’s Next

Email Design System Build

Build a comprehensive modular email design system in SFMC with reusable blocks, shared tokens and brand-specific theming for all five Bayer brands.

AOR Onboarding & Training

Onboard all Agency of Record partners to the new design system with documentation, usage guidelines and collaborative training sessions.

Performance Benchmarking

Establish email performance baselines across all brands and track improvements in open rate, click-through rate and engagement post design system adoption.

Key Takeaways

A centralised email design system is critical to achieving brand consistency across all Bayer brands and AOR partners.

Modular, reusable email components will significantly reduce campaign production time and cost for all agencies involved.

Email content strategy needs to evolve — moving from image-heavy or text-heavy approaches to a balanced, hierarchy-driven layout system.

AOR partnerships benefit from shared design tooling. A common system enables faster iteration and more creative flexibility within brand guardrails.

Bayer’s HCP and DTC email channels are strong assets. With systematic design investment, they can become significantly more effective engagement tools.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Executive Summary

Problem Statement