Northline Market
A ground-up email program for a 12-property boutique hotel group — built for dark mode, accessibility, and a design system that had to hold up across a dozen very different inboxes.
1600×900 recommended
The Challenge
Kestrel's design team had a strong visual system but no way to ship it reliably to the inbox. Past campaigns broke in Outlook, ignored dark mode entirely, and had no consistent accessibility baseline across the twelve regional teams sending them.
They needed a modular template library that non-developers could populate safely, without re-testing every send from scratch.
- Templates built
- 14
- ESPs supported
- 3
- Regional teams
- 12
- Build time
- 6 weeks
Approach
Audit & discovery
Reviewed the existing design system and past campaign performance to identify where rendering broke down across clients and where accessibility gaps were costing opens.
Modular build
Built a component-based HTML library — hero, promo block, room grid, footer — so any team could assemble a campaign without touching markup.
Dark mode & accessibility
Implemented dark-mode-safe color logic and screen-reader-friendly markup: real text over images, logical reading order, sufficient contrast throughout.
QA across clients
Tested every template across major desktop, mobile, and webmail clients before handoff, with a checklist the internal team could reuse going forward.
The Work
Results
- Click-through rate
- +38%
- Rendering issues
- 0 reported
- Time to send
- −60%
The new templates gave every regional team the same reliable starting point — no more guessing whether a send would hold up in the inbox.
— Marketing Director, Northline Market Group
Contact
Let's make it work.
- hello@inboxstandard.com
- Phone
- +1 (XXX) XXX-XXXX