Brand-Aid for Everyday Email
A simple, effective, inexpensive, powerful branding tool hardly anyone uses.
Whether you send 2 or 200 work-related emails per day, do you do the following?
- Insert a signature with contact information.
- Rarely include a company logo.
- Shy away from including a promotional trailer.
- Rarely add graphics linking to your Web site.
- Forgo tracking or reporting open and click rates.
If the above sound familiar, you don’t use a branded template for your professional email. You should. Would you mail a business letter without using company letterhead? Of course not!
Why do so many professionals continue to send white, text-only, generic email correspondence? Branded email messaging strengthens brand awareness and identity.
Consider a cost-benefit analysis of branded email marketing communications (especially for sales and client-facing personnel).
Tabula Rasa
A potential client I spoke with recently understood the importance of having his company’s logo and message high in the minds of consumers and clients. But a comprehensive branding strategy for his business is financially out of reach right now.
However, his business, like virtually every other, uses letterhead.
Bingo! Companies use letterhead because it’s an inexpensive, effective form of branding every business can afford to implement. Most companies corresponding on anything but letterhead would be regarded as unprofessional. (Business cards play a very similar role.)
Simple but well-designed letterhead delivers a branding message, looks professional, and can include company information, all neatly packaged.
The same applies equally to email. Why don’t more businesses take advantage of such a simple, cost-effective opportunity? Email letterhead is a no-brainer with advantages far exceeding paper letterhead: richer graphics, active links, dynamic offers, and tracking, for starters.
Top 10 Reasons for Email Template Solutions
- Branding. Maintain consistency with branding strategy and visual identity.
- Impressiveness. Enhance the professional appearance of communications by branding the hundreds, or thousands, of messages your company sends daily.
- Interactivity. Recipients can click on template links to reach online destinations.
- Results. Driving qualified visitors to relevant pages on your Web site can increase return on investment (ROI).
- Measurability. Tracking and reporting measures the impact. A system can include simple Web-based reporting of key metrics, such as clicks and v-card downloads.
- Ease of use. If outsourced, a basic template can be ready to deploy in days. Additional features include customized logos, a drop-down menu of optional elements the sender can include, and other tools available companywide.
- Compactness. A basic template adds less than 1K to messages.
- Innovation. For companies whose brand and image are linked with tech-savvy, style, or design, an email template sends the message the sender really does “get it.”
- Quality assurance. You’re in control of your brand. A centralized, Web-based admin system hosts the template.
- Prudence. Like paper letterhead, cost is measured in fractions of a cent per message. Price models are generally per employee. Volume discounts can apply, based on the number of licenses.
You should be jazzed about branded, interactive outbound email! It’s one of the most fundamental and cost-effective branding tools available, and it makes everyone in your organization a brand ambassador.
