Creating brand awareness can be tricky, no matter the size of your business or the industry it falls within. Email branding is one way to establish strong brand awareness with your customers when executing email marketing campaigns.
This will help your emails stand out in a perpetually crowded inbox and ensure your customers get to know your organization, your brand, and your products. Not only that but when you do email marketing the right way, you’ll be able to:
Boost customer loyalty
Increase ROI within marketing campaigns
Decrease the rate at which customers unsubscribe
Further establish your brand in the eyes of your customers
Sending the right email to your customers can hold a lot of weight and power, so why not leverage it to your company’s advantage? Not only is it a cost-effective strategy, but it’s also a great way to stay relevant in the eyes of your customers.
Email branding is the use of various elements within your emails that reflect your brand image and voice. These can include anything related to the visual or written elements that relate to your brand, such as logo, colors, graphics, images, fonts, messaging, and tone of voice.
The purpose of email branding is to elevate your audience’s experience, enhance brand awareness, and encourage audience engagement.
Why is branding important in email marketing?
Consistent branding in email marketing is vital for many reasons, including the following:
Builds brand trust: Being consistent in your brand image and voice makes your emails and brand more recognizable over time, leading to a more profound sense of trust in your brand.
Improves customer loyalty: When your audience recognizes and trusts your brand, they will likely buy your products and remain loyal.
Enhances the brand-customer connection: Letting your brand persona shine through in your marketing emails creates an emotional connection with the audience and lays the foundation for building lasting customer relationships.
Increases email engagement: The more recognizable and trustworthy your emails are to your audience, the more open and click-through rates you’ll receive, increasing your engagement figures.
Boosts email deliverability: With increased trust and engagement comes an improved sender reputation, boosting your email deliverability rates.
Drives more conversions: As trust, loyalty, and engagement with your branded emails increase, you’ll experience more sales from your audience and upsells from existing customers.
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When you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and start creating an email marketing strategy, utilize these six methods for incorporating your brand, its imagery, and your products into your customers’ inboxes.
1. Don’t be afraid to get personal
People can smell an inauthentic message a mile away. And yes, even in their inbox. If you treat all your readers the same way, chances are good that they’ll start to notice.
To make sure the correct elements of your brand reach the right people, you’ll need to employ a personal automation and segmentation strategy. The process of email segmentation is when you send out specific and relevant content to each individual subscriber.
This is key for brand awareness because not all your content will be relevant for everyone, and you want it in front of the right people. You can segment your readers based on the following:
Age
Gender
Location
Industry
Once you have this data, you can personalize your emails as you see fit. Doing so ensures readers feel like you really know them and don’t treat them all the same. This will boost your brand with your customers so they feel valued.
For example, let’s say you’re an athletic equipment company about to release a new line of skis. You may consider sending the first round of emails announcing the new product to customers who have either bought skiing equipment from your company in the past or live in a region where skiing is a popular activity.
At the end of the day, you want to keep your audience in mind before clicking send.
2. Find a template that works and stick to it
When creating an email template that aligns with your brand, here are some questions you can consider:
Are we using the same font as the one on our website?
Are the colors complementary to each other?
Is the logo represented accurately?
Is there a signature at the bottom, including our company name?
Can it be easily accessed on all devices?
Is there a section that includes our social media channels?
Is there an unsubscribe link if users wish to opt-out or change their settings?
Thanks to A/B testing, you can push out more than one version of your team’s templates and see which performs better. Some templates may work better for different segments of people.
The more data you can collect here, the more you will be able to reinforce brand recognition in a way that converts while also being easily recognized as coming from your brand.
Regardless of the templates you use, keep your brand guidelines in mind. Don’t create a neon green template if your brand is known for its soft yellow hues. Think of the emails within your marketing strategy as an extension of your website or app. The brand identity should be the same.
The same can be said for the tone of voice being used. If your brand is corporate consulting, you’ll need to keep it professional. If your brand is a beauty cosmetics brand, you can mix it up and have more fun.
No matter the direction you decide to go with, the tone and personality of your brand need to be consistent with all points of contact with your customers. This includes everything from the welcome email to the customer’s email inbox itself.
The tone should start with the welcome email and follow suit for every other message your brand sends.
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An inbox can be a crowded place, and the subject line of your emails within your marketing campaign is your first chance to stand out.
After you know which template works for which customers, you can also start to play around with the subject line. You’ll want to keep it concise but also enticing enough to the customer.
A simple glance at your subject line should give your customer a clear idea of what the email is about. For instance, if your brand offers a deal on a specific product, and the deal ends tonight, the subject line should tell customers that.
While the subject line gives you wiggle room to get creative and potentially have some fun, don’t stray from your tone. Doing so catches your customers off guard and reduces the likelihood that they’ll be reading what you remain have to say.
4. Keep mobile in mind
85% of users use smartphones to access email. If you want your audience to read your email, you must write and format it so your customers can access it on their smartphones.
Doing so means you need to consider elements like:
Font size
Location of your call-to-actions, links, and logo
Length
Load time
Before you send out your email marketing campaign, it’s always a good idea to test how it’ll appear on smaller screens, from mobile devices to tablets, so it can reach and be readable to as many customers as possible.
If you’ve only formatted your email for desktop readability, you’re losing out on a chance to reach the majority of your customers. They’ll also likely scroll right to the bottom and click unsubscribe instead of reading your email.
5. Be entertaining
Utilizing your brand guidelines as part of your email marketing strategy allows you to stand out, entertain the readers, and showcase how you’re unique. How you decide to do this will depend on other factors, like your tone and what your email is actually saying.
As a good jumping-off point, consider that emails that contain graphics and GIFs have a better chance of performing than emails that are a single block of text.
It’s possible that you’re trying to keep it professional and a GIF won’t work, but a graphic will almost always work, no matter the message or tone.
Be more creative than just a stock photo — consider including photos of real employees, images from a workplace event, or even a video.
This is your chance for your audience to learn more about your company, its brand, and your products and services. It also allows you to humanize your brand and be authentic so your customers can know real people are sitting behind the computer.
6. Be consistent in sending emails
In addition to being consistent with your templates, branding, and tone — the same can be said for how often you click send.
For example, don’t bombard your subscribers with five emails in one week only to go completely silent the next. You should create an instance where the customer expects an email from your brand and is excited to open it and see what you have to say.
Similarly, unless you’re testing a new campaign strategy where you email your customers five days in one week, you don’t want to smother your customers, either.
The last thing you want is for one of your emails to appear in their inbox, only for their response to be, “again?!”. Give them some space while being consistent with how often they expect to hear from you.
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Everything we’ve discussed thus far speaks to your brand’s image and voice as a whole. Together, they represent your brand persona—the “personality” behind your unique brand.
The core elements that inform your brand voice and image through email marketing include:
Sticking with your brand’s core color palette
Including your logo at strategic points
Using the same fonts you use on your website and other branded assets
Including photos of your team, products, etc.
Ensuring your messaging stays true to your company vision
Communicating in a tone that makes sense for your brand and audience
Combining these elements for cohesive email branding for your next campaign reinforces brand salience.
Ready, set, send
After you’ve created the templates using design guidelines, written the copy, and previewed the email on varying screen sizes, it’s finally time to click send. Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day and that it’s okay if the first email within your marketing campaign isn’t a viral success.
Stick to your strategy and your customers will soon know what makes your business different from all the rest.
