Introducing Z Rewards
In 2024, Flybuys shut down, leaving many businesses without a loyalty programme. Z Energy used this as an opportunity to build Z Rewards – a system that gives them greater control over loyalty, while offering more meaningful rewards back to their customers.
Launch emails
With Z Rewards came the need for a series of email journeys – beginning pre-launch and continuing beyond – to help customers join and understand the new programme. We spent six months planning and building these journeys ahead of the March 2025 launch.
Z Energy’s existing SFMC email templates were no longer fit for purpose, so we were tasked with creating a new system that felt more modern and considered, while also acting as a scalable foundation for all future consumer email communications.
Design focuses
Accessibility was a key focus from the outset. While Z Energy’s brand guidelines are visually distinctive, some colour combinations didn’t meet digital accessibility standards. We tested these thoroughly and presented clear, evidence-based recommendations back to the client.
This resulted in Z’s brand orange being reserved for larger text only, requiring an alternative for smaller elements such as hyperlinks. Indigo was introduced for this purpose. As Z’s marketing assets already make strong use of orange and yellow, the template itself was designed to remain largely neutral, allowing content to stand out without compromising accessibility.
Accessibility
With a wide range of future use cases in mind, flexibility was critical. The template needed to support a variety of layouts and content types without requiring constant redesign.
We developed more than 20 core components, many with multiple variations, resulting in over 120 modular options across desktop and mobile. These components used a mix of full-width and split layouts, giving designers the freedom to build emails that felt tailored while still working within a consistent system.
Design and build were developed in parallel across Figma and SFMC, ensuring what the client saw in design could be accurately translated into the final email output.
Flexibility
Dark mode was an important consideration throughout. With inconsistent behaviour across email clients, we tested extensively during the design phase to understand how colours and components would adapt.
While Z’s brand orange remained relatively stable, colours like indigo shifted significantly. This reinforced the decision to keep coded elements largely neutral, with selective use of colour for emphasis. Indigo hyperlinks transitioned to a lilac tone in dark mode, which required alignment with Z’s internal brand team.
Made for dark mode
The Z Rewards Playbook
To support the rollout of Z Rewards and ensure consistency across teams, we created a comprehensive playbook within Figma. Designed to function like a lightweight brand guidelines site, it gave both internal stakeholders and external agencies a single source of truth for the programme – bringing together email components, brand elements, usage rules and communication guidelines in one accessible place.
The playbook featured a fully interactive nav allowing users to quickly find what they needed – from SFMC component libraries and layout guidance to tone of voice and push notification rules. By structuring the file in a way that felt familiar and easy to explore, we made it simple to design, build and deliver communications that stayed aligned with the Z Rewards system.