All marketing practitioners know how email marketing works for success. In fact, Shopify’s Ecommerce University summarizes why email marketing is the key into 5 key points:
- Email Outperforms Twitter and Facebook for Selling Online
- It’s Getting More Difficult to Strategically Climb Google’s Ranking Algorithm. (So it would be more beneficial and effective to create a strong mailing list than solely rely on potential one-time click on search.)
- Email is Content Marketing’s Best Friend
- It Drives Traffic and Sales
- Email Allows You to Build a Relationship With Your Customers and Potential Customers
However, it’s easy to get caught up in open, click-through, and conversion rates, use of data and testing, often bypassing a crucial element of the marketing tool—branding.
Before customers can even begin to consider what you’re selling, they need to be sold on your brand. And the way that email marketing fosters connections and relationships with your customers on a more personal level means that your brand – its persona and story – must be embedded all throughout your emails.
But there are lot of different elements that goes into incorporating your brand into your email marketing.
Below are some of the most important elements. Use these elements to make people recognize, remember, and identify with your brand. And stand out from the hundreds of other emails people receive daily.
Make your first impression count
Before even getting into the meat of the email, before they even think of clicking to open your email, you need to ensure that you’re already putting your brand out there. There are three fundamental ways of doing so:
“From”
It is important that you already have your brand name as the sender, so your customers don’t have to guess who the email is coming from. They need to know who exactly they’re dealing with if they’re to consider opening the email.
Subject line
This has to have enough power to draw them in and convince them to open your email. Be it with a question that’s aligned with a pain point like “Looking to change your entire workout plan for a third of the price?” or a fantastic offer that expires in a couple of days, you need to create a want, and/or a sense of urgency for your customers.
Pre-header
They know who the email’s from. Your subject line caught their eye. Go for the trifecta by having the first line of the text that shows up in the inbox preview screen something that piques their interest even more; something that adds more information to the engaging subject line often does the trick.
Consistency
This is considered the Golden Rule of increasing brand recognition – and consistency has to be maintained across all the elements of your email, from the persona’s tone and voice, to the timing and messaging, to the template you use, to the fonts and colors—everything has to work together to consistently reflect your brand.
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Persona
Having a consistent and well-defined persona is integral to every brand.
To begin crafting a brand persona, you can imagine it as a person and identify how you would like your brand to be—its voice, character, and personality.
Take Apple for example – they centered their brand personality on being imaginative, innovative, and passionate; and its products empower people’s lifestyles through technology.
Once you’re able to define what you want your brand’s persona to be, make sure you stick to it (its tone and voice – is it professional, funny?) in every marketing endeavor you do, which adds to your brand recognition.
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Fonts and color
Similarly to having a consistent tone and voice, you’d also want to choose fonts and colors that customers can quickly identify with your brand.
For the font, once you pick one main font type, use it in all of your content. You can also add a couple of complementary fonts that you can use for headers and subheads.
When it comes to colors, you can draw from your logo’s main colors to get a palette of hues and gradients that work well with it.
For an added branding touch, make sure that the fonts and colors that you have on your website are in tune with what you send out in your emails. Consistency in branding should be across all channels.
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Template
Again, with recognition being at the core of branding, you’re going to want an email template that is quickly recognizable to your customers – and being consistent with whatever template you come up with is a great way to breed familiarity and trust.
You don’t have to come up with the above elements all at once. After all, it takes time to develop a branding presence. But once you reach a decision on which ones to work with, be mindful of the fact that the more you work with them to convey your brand across all marketing touch points, the more recognizable your brand is going to be.
Creativity
You might have made a good enough first impression to catch their attention. Maybe the elements of your emails are consistent enough to make your brand familiar with your customers. But in this age of fleeting attention spans, you need to keep injecting creativity to your email content and marketing strategies.
This will allow your brand to stand out from the ocean of emails that your customers get daily.
Takeaway
They say that the best brands equate to well-defined brands; as such, it could take time to come up with all the elements that lead to a strong branding presence. And even when you do reach a decision on which elements to work with, it may not resonate with your customers right away.
That’s why, apart from the above lessons of making a good first impression and consistency, you’re going to also have to pay attention to details—from understanding what appeals to your customers, and what kind of brand persona works for them, to coming up with a logo, fonts, colors, and email template—it takes good attention to detail to strike branding gold.
Take a look at your current email marketing, and find out how you can turn it into more of a branding machine.
