email branding Archives

October 11, 2016

How To Build Your Campaigns To Match Your Brand

You couldn’t change the font in the old days, now its part of your brand.

Your email campaigns will be better received by your audience if your email messages are branded.

Branding introduces reliability, expectations and above all trust to your subscribers. These are all the qualities a potential customer wants to see.

Here are six simple steps to make your email marketing campaigns better aligned to your brand.

1. Add Your Logo

There is nothing more important than your logo within the body of the email. It is the symbol of your business, and your audience should connect it with your brand within seconds.

A good logo will also describe who you are and what your business’ values are.

There is no one, best location for your logo. However, it could be useful to place the logo at the top for immediate identification, or at the bottom where your signature would usually go.

2. Use Colours That Represent Your Brand

Don’t be too free with your colour choice. Colours have an emotional impact on the reader, and certain colours will represent your brand more than others. For example, blue colours tend to represent expertise and authority while red can be perfect for passionate brands.

Be careful with certain colour combinations as some are copyrighted. While you might not be sued if you are in a non-competitive industry, certain big brands might take offence if you sell similar products and use a similar colour or combination of colours for your logo.

Colours used within the body of the email should complement your logo.

3. Add Visuals

Visuals are an important aspect for your marketing emails. They put your email into context for your audience, making it easier for them to understand your offer or message.

Many sites offer quality visuals, e.g. Pixabay and these photos are free for commercial use. Another site to take a look at is FreeDigitalPhotos.net, which can be free to use for a reference, or images bought for a reasonable price. Check the terms and conditions of any images you use and/or purchase carefully.

Or, if possible, you could take good quality, high-resolution photos yourself.

4. Use Consistent Fonts

In the same way that colours can distinguish your brand and its ethics – so can the font you use. Customers will expect your brand to use one or two fonts in all its communications. Your chosen fonts can say a lot about your brand and how it operates.

Don’t constantly change the font you use in emails. It can get confusing for your audience, and lower the success rate of your campaigns.

5. Include Relevant Links

You may think that links have nothing to do with branding, but it can be the aspect that signifies your brand beyond the email. For instance, if you connect to blog posts, then you are saying that information is a key aspect of your brand, if you connect to a social media page, you are identifying interconnectivity and communication as having a major role.

Think carefully about what you want your brand to represent and then express this by your choice of links on your email.

6. Find Your Voice

Each brand has a unique way of speaking to their audience. Some will emphasise formal sentences while others will be informal. Finding your voice, and keeping it consistent is of vital importance and each tone and style will attract a different audience.

Think carefully about your audience and how they talk to their peers before you decide on any particular voice for your brand. At the same time, consider how your staff speak.

And, keep it consistent. If your mailing content speaks one way, but then the customer gets another style when they contact your customer services, they could get confused and even wonder if they’ve contacted the right business.

Branding Your Emails Couldn’t Be Easier

With these six points in action, your emails will be better placed to connect with your audience. You should start to see open rates and click-through rates increase and with better results will come higher ROI on email marketing, more revenue, and growth within your business.

How do you brand your email marketing messages? Have you changed it recently and regretted it?

Let us know in the comments below.

Read post Post a Comment. Tagged in: audience expectations, branding, email branding, email design

May 10, 2016

Why You Should Design Your Email Marketing To Fit Your Brand?

Brand you emails to be more recognisable to your prospects

Your business is a brand recognised by customers, prospects and suppliers. Without this brand image, external people won’t know what to expect. When customers are speaking to you in person, it is easy for you to present your brand. However, when you are sending an email – the brand image isn’t so easy to convey.

What you need to do, is design your email marketing campaigns so they match your business brand.

Does This Affect Email Marketing Results?

Email recipients are careful about which emails they open and how they interact with them. Customers are also very wary of scams that may seem to be from a legitimate brand but are in fact from internet scammers. Normally these scammers use a brand name, but don’t match the expected brand image.

Therefore, the first advantage of ensuring that your email matches your brand is that you can reassure your audience that the message is from you – and therefore increase open rates. The right brand can also help set you apart from the competition. For example, the subscriber might have signed up to three or four competitors of yours, as well as your email list – if you all send similar messages, the prospect won’t be able to differentiate between you and therefore their purchasing decision would be more difficult.

With more open rates, you’re going to attract more traffic to your website, which will organically grow your sales/enquiries.

Familiarity Grows When You Brand Emails

Research has shown that in 80% of sales, it can take between 5 and 12 interactions. If the majority of those interactions are based on email, you need to ensure that the familiarity of your brand is built up with each email as this makes it easier when you call your prospects.

As the brand familiarity grows, your customers will develop expectations of what is included in your email and that transfers to their treatment as a customer. For example, if you continuously email them useful information that can help them run their business, they will expect your services to be educationally driven.

This can be a great way for your business to impress prospects and for them to determine whether or not you really are the partner they need to help them.

Ways That Your Brand Image Can Be Inserted Into Your Email Design

There are many different ways that your business can create emails to match your brand image. Here is a quick checklist to ensure that you are getting your email design right.

Colour – Colour is vital to your brand image. It doesn’t just look good, but it can also be a visual clue as to the personality of the brand (i.e. blue represents confidence and intelligence).
Logo – Customers will expect your logo or another familiar brand image to be inserted somewhere in your email.
Wording – How you speak to your customers and prospects is very important. Different organisations will have their own ways of conversing with customers or you might have defined terminology for your products/services.
Message – The message that you are sending to your prospects is crucial. Some brands will only send certain messages (like educational, sales, related products to previous purchases).
Social Media – your social media profiles are a good way to communicate your branding.
Layout – Customers will expect to see your emails looking a certain way. This could be a mirror of what your website looks like, or be unique to your emails; either way, it should be consistent.

Conclusion

Your business’ brand image is very important. It’s even more important when you are sending emails as it reassures your audience that your message is legitimate and helps to build the expectations of your brand.

How do you build your brand through emails? How effective is it?