A winning partnership with the Rugby Football Union

Brief

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) invited Red C, a specialist email marketing agency, to pitch to become its creative partner for email marketing. Email plays a critical role in how the RFU communicates with its audiences, from fans and members to players, volunteers, and internal stakeholders, making the quality and consistency of its email marketing especially important.

The RFU was looking for an email marketing agency that could combine strong creative thinking with deep technical expertise. The brief called for visually engaging email marketing templates that followed best practice, reflected the RFU’s brand, and could be used at scale across the organisation. With internal teams responsible for sending large volumes of email marketing communications every day, the solution needed to be both robust and easy to use.

As passionate rugby fans, the opportunity to work with the RFU was particularly exciting for Red C. We approached the pitch with a clear understanding of the challenges involved in large-scale email marketing, including responsive design, accessibility, and the practical realities of building emails within an ESP. Our proposal focused on creating flexible email marketing templates that would support consistent, high-quality communication over the long term.

By demonstrating a strong grasp of both creative design and email marketing best practice, Red C’s approach resonated with the RFU team. As a result, Red C was appointed as the RFU’s creative email marketing agency, beginning a long-term partnership focused on delivering effective, engaging email marketing campaigns.

Approach

Following our appointment as the RFU’s email marketing agency, Red C went on to deliver several email marketing projects across the organisation. One of the most significant involved working in close collaboration with brand agency Matta to develop a new suite of email marketing templates for the RFU’s internal team.

The challenge was to create email marketing templates that presented the RFU as a modern, forward-thinking sports organisation, while remaining practical for everyday use. With multiple departments relying on email marketing to communicate with different audiences, the templates needed to be flexible enough to support a wide range of messaging without compromising brand consistency.

Red C’s solution was a modular email marketing system built around reusable components. Rather than relying on a single static design, the modular approach allowed the RFU’s internal teams to build bespoke email marketing communications using a consistent set of templates and components. Each module could be easily edited, enabling teams to customise text, fonts, colours, and imagery while maintaining a cohesive visual identity.

From an email marketing best-practice perspective, each template was designed to be fully responsive and optimised for performance across devices and email clients. Layouts were clean and easy to scan, with clear hierarchy and calls to action to support engagement. Accessibility considerations such as font size, colour contrast, and readability were embedded into the email marketing templates from the outset.

Collaboration was central to the success of the project. Red C worked closely with Matta and key RFU stakeholders to refine the designs and ensure they met both brand and operational requirements. Once approved, the email marketing templates were built and integrated directly into Acoustic, the RFU’s email service provider, ensuring the internal team could use them efficiently as part of their existing email marketing workflows.

The usability of the templates was a key factor in their success. Designed with non-technical users in mind, the modules enabled RFU teams to create and deploy email marketing communications quickly and confidently. As a result, the templates were rapidly adopted across multiple areas of the business, including the Men’s and Women’s England Rugby teams, the RFU membership scheme, Twickenham Stadium, and the Rugby Museum.

By streamlining the email creation process, the templates reduced production time and supported a more strategic approach to email marketing. Internal teams were able to focus less on formatting and more on delivering relevant, engaging content to their audiences.

Conclusion

The RFU has now been using the email marketing templates developed by Red C for nearly two years, highlighting the long-term value of the solution. In a fast-moving digital environment, the continued use of the templates demonstrates their effectiveness, flexibility, and ease of use.

The success of the project reflects Red C’s strength as an email marketing agency that understands both creative excellence and operational reality. The modular email marketing templates have enabled the RFU to maintain consistent, high-quality email marketing across a wide range of audiences and departments, supporting strong engagement with fans, players, members, and volunteers.

Following a major system re-platforming programme, the RFU has asked Red C to recreate the email marketing templates in Salesforce, ensuring continuity as the organisation evolves its CRM and email marketing capabilities. This next phase reinforces the importance of future-proofed email marketing design and further demonstrates the trust the RFU has placed in Red C as its email marketing agency.

Commenting on the partnership, James Reed, Senior CRM Manager at the RFU, said: “The team at Red C are a genuine pleasure to work with. Their expertise and creativity are second to none and they have elevated our email marketing to a whole new level. Their templates are beautifully designed, flexible to use, and resonate perfectly with our fans, players and volunteers.”

Overall, this success story highlights how a strategic partnership with a specialist email marketing agency can transform email marketing performance. By delivering flexible, best-practice email marketing templates designed for scale and longevity, Red C has helped the RFU strengthen its email marketing, improve internal efficiency, and build stronger connections with its audiences.