Would you notice if a competitor’s writer wrote your next email?
Most brand guidelines answer that with three adjectives and a font. A voice guide has to answer it with rules somebody who has never met you can apply on a Monday morning, to a failed-payment email, without asking permission first.
What a guide made of adjectives costs you
“Friendly but professional” is not a rule. It is a mood. A mood cannot settle an argument, so every piece of writing goes through a taste debate, and the most senior person in the thread wins it.
The visible cost is time. The invisible one is drift: a year on, the voice is wherever the last six writers happened to land, and nobody can point to the moment it changed.
The contents
- Rules written as rules
- Do this, not that, with a rewritten sentence beside each one. Nothing that can only be applied by somebody who already agrees with it.
- A banned list, with reasons
- The words and constructions your brand does not use, each with the reason it is out. This site runs one on itself and the build fails when a page breaks it.
- Register by channel
- How far the voice may move between a pricing page, a dunning email and an incident note written at two in the morning. Most guides cover only the marketing, which is the easy half.
- Six to eight of your own sentences, rewritten
- Taken from pages you already publish, with what changed named. Invented examples are comfortable to write and teach nobody anything.
- The edge cases
- Apologies. Price rises. Outages. Saying no to a feature request, and saying no to a refund. A voice either holds in those places or it was decoration.
- Names and grammar decisions
- How the product is capitalised, whether you take the Oxford comma, what the features are called and what they are never called. Small, endlessly re-argued, and settled here in writing.
- A one-page version
- Because the long one will not be read by the person writing a push notification at five to six.
How it is made
We read what you already publish
Not the guidelines. The actual emails, the help centre, the last four announcements, and the replies support sends when nobody is watching.
The rules get derived, not invented
Where the writing already works, we name why, so it can be repeated. Where it contradicts itself, you pick, and the pick gets written down.
Then it is tested on the hard things
Every rule is applied to an apology and a price rise before it ships. Rules that only work on a homepage do not ship.
Price and the bundle
- On its own
- €3,400.
- With the architecture
- €7,600 for both, because half the research is the same research. It is the only discount on the site, and the reason the guide is rarely a first purchase.
- Turnaround
- 10 business days standalone, or five days more on top of a Messaging Architecture project.
- Revisions and payment
- 2 rounds, one structural and one line-edit, then €85 an hour. 50% to start, 50% on delivery.
Where it gets used
Lifecycle & Retention Email
The place a voice guide earns its price. Lifecycle email is where a brand writes most often and edits least.
Website Copy
Written to the guide, so the site and everything published after it hold the same register.
Two questions
Almost certainly not. Brand guidelines normally cover the logo, the colours, the type, and a paragraph on tone that stops at adjectives. This is the applied half: what a sentence may and may not do.
Send the existing document and we will say which parts stay. There is no point charging you to re-decide something you decided already.
Only if it can be argued with. Every rule carries its reason, so somebody who wants to break one has to break the reason rather than override a preference.
The one-page version exists for the same purpose. A rule nobody can remember is a rule nobody applies, and fifteen pages contain about one memorable page.
Send something you have written
Three emails and one page you are not happy with is enough. We reply within two business days with what the guide would change first.