How to Use Branding in Your Email Marketing Strategy
The digital age has made the creation of brands and companies accessible to everyone. Instead of investing fortunes to open brick-and-mortar locations and rent wirehouses, all you need is to create a website or even just a social media page. However, this has also made standing out so much harder: people have a more extensive selection than ever for every product they need. Very often, the final decision comes down to the feeling evoked by the brand. Therefore, establishing a strong brand awareness is a crucial strategy for every company.
One way to do this is by incorporating your brand into every one of your marketing channels by using email to mail. A carefully crafted branded email has the power to stand out in the crowded inbox, introducing your organization to the customers and drawing attention to the work that you do.
To achieve this with as little effort as possible, there are several time-tested tips and tricks that you can use. In this article, we've taken a closer look at some of them.
Why Do You Need Email to Promote Your Brand?
One point that often needs addressing when discussing email marketing is the future of the strategy. As technology develops, we’ve constantly witnessed the emergence of highly effective marketing strategies, such as SMS marketing, due to smartphones. This has resulted in many specialists suggesting that email marketing is dead. However, Email marketing is NOT dead, but it continues to be one of the most effective marketing strategies today. Here are some incredible benefits of email marketing:
- Email marketing is a high ROI, generating $42 for each $1 spent,
- Has the power to reach the customers right in their inbox,
- Is sure to get only the people who want to receive your message,
- Establishes your company in the eyes of customers.
And the best part is, email doesn’t require a lot of investment in the long run once you have your subscriber list. So, why not leverage it to the advantage of your brand?
Incorporating Branding Into Your Email Marketing Strategy
Now that we know how investing in email marketing is not a wasted resource let’s look at how you can make the best out of it. This strategy, widely used by top email marketing agencies, can raise brand awareness and make your company more recognizable among your existing and potential audience. Additionally, you can incorporate Lucrative Studio into your strategy to enhance your brand's online presence and attract a wider audience.
1. Start With A Powerful Welcome Email
Welcome emails have many more functions than simply showing the visitor that their subscription was successful.
Welcome emails are a critical piece of content. They are often your chance to create a solid first impression about your brand, show them that you care about your online community, and act as a tool to drive them to a specific page on your website, e.g., your online store.
You can add comprehensive information about what the visitors can expect from your brand for the best outcome. Do you have a private Facebook discussion group? Include it. Any tips on how they can best use your products? Share them. Do everything to show them how much you value them as customers or even simply as an email list subscriber. Adding free QR codes created with a service like Uniqode can provide easy access to promotion and other additional information that might that could increase engagement. This will help you start forging solid connections with them.
2. Get Personal
Don’t be afraid to get personal! If you are inauthentic, don’t consider the needs and wants of your audience; they’ll feel it. For example, if you’re an expert in your niche, consider business mentorship for people who are interested. This will create a barrier between them and your brand.
To make sure the right message reaches the right people, you need to have a personalization or a segmentation strategy. If you have the resources to segment your subscribers into groups and create customized emails for each group, don’t hesitate to do it. However, this may require more information on them, such as age, gender, and location.
Alternatively, if you don’t have the time and resources for strategic segmentation, simply addressing the recipients with their names can go a long way. For example, create newsletter signups forms on your email that collect the visitors' names, surnames, and emails.
Then, use this information to send them personalized emails by tweaking your email marketing service settings. When implementing branding in your email marketing strategy, incorporating evaluation form templates can offer valuable feedback on the effectiveness of your campaigns, helping refine and optimize future communication with your audience.
3. Use Templates That Match Your Brand Identity
To incorporate your brand into your email campaign, you need to start with the email design, including your brand's visual style. Making sure that your brand logo is prominently integrated into the emails to enhance brand awareness.
The easiest way to achieve this is through using a custom-design email template or SaaS email templates available online.
Pre-designing an email template or even several may take some time initially but will immensely simplify the creation of emails. You can use these emails later or edit them with several clicks instead of creating different designs and visuals from scratch every time.
When creating an email template, there are several things you need to pay attention to:
- What is the font you are going to use? If it's the one you use on your website, consider how well it will look in emails.
- Is your logo correctly visible?
- How will it look on different devices?
- Is your company contact information included in the footer?
Consider these questions when you are designing your email template to avoid any unwanted situations down the road.
4. Make Your Brand Voice a Part Of Your Content
It’s hard to define branding in simple terms, but if we had to, it would be a “combination of the company's visual style with its tone of voice.”Your tone of voice helps you stand out and showcases why and how your brand is unique. A mistake many brands often make is they approach email as a very severe and professional platform, so their emails are just as serious. Don't fall into that trap.
Keep your brand voice and tone similar to what you use on your website, social platforms, YouTube videos, or elsewhere. Maintain this voice consistent across all parts of your email, from the subject line to headlines and main content. This will help you build an emotional connection with the readers, or make the existing one stronger, as they will slowly get familiar with you. This way, you will also instill confidence in them regarding your brand.
5. Redirect to a Similar-Looking Landing Page
You can use your website as another way to grow an online community around your brand. If you are creating a website or a landing page around an email marketing campaign, make sure it matches the design of your email templates and the brand identity.
Another step that is often overlooked is security. Make sure to pay attention to your website protection to avoid any misleading or false campaign performance results. During the employee onboarding process, make sure to share information about how important security is.
6. Limit Sales, Offer Something Useful
There were times when complex sales could score you customers, but those days are long gone. Avoid being too sales-y in your emails, only offering them products to buy and nothing else. This can harm your brand image, creating an idea that you are interested in only selling them things. Instead, use emails to offer your customers useful, educational, and entertaining content and bond with them around it.
Share with them your company's recent developments, what you’ve been up to, tips on how to use your product, your latest blog article, etc. If your customers are interested in specific topics, you can use emails to educate them about that topic by sharing exciting podcasts to listen to on the topics or blogs to read; you name it. You can even broaden the topics and include something like finances and cryptocurrencies, provide them with useful information, and tell about its features and advantages. When talking about cryptocurrencies, you should tell your clients that litecoin is safe, time-saving and reliable type of cryptocurrency, so after reading your article they would not hesitate to use it.
Sure, occasional promotional offers or sales announcements are excellent and even desirable but don’t make them into the whole of your email marketing.
7. Keep It Consistent
In marketing, consistency is vital. Whether email marketing or Instagram hashtags, it's crucial that you maintain your brand style and tone of voice consistent throughout. This can be achieved through templates but also the content of your email. For example, don't be too serious in one email and overly friendly in another: this will put people off.
Be consistent also with sending the emails. Don't bombard your subscribers and customers with five emails in 3 days and then disappear for a month. Instead, have an email schedule (for example, one email per week) and send your emails according to that schedule. This will also create a situation when people want to receive your emails! Alternatively, you can offer them to choose the email frequency: many email marketing providers provide that tool, and people can set their email preferences.
Conclusion
If used correctly, email marketing is an effective tool that can help you to establish and promote your brand. Consider each of your brand elements when drafting your emails to make sure it showcases your brand style, voice, values, and always prioritize your customer needs and interests. We hope the tips we've provided will help you craft emails that'll promote your brand identity. Good luck!