Creating a Unique Brand Personality in Your Email Campaigns
1. Hey, what’s in it for me?
2. Create consistency in your branding
3. Your brand may seem too corporate
4. Make your emails visually appealing
5. Get personal with your subscribers
Daily, about 293 billion emails are processed online (and growing), making standing out in consumers' inbox quite a challenging task. Unless consumers immediately understand the benefit of further interacting with an email, they'll delete your email without opening it or, worse: send it to the dreaded spam folder.
Even if people signed up for your emails, it's still hard to get them to open your letters.
One of the reasons for your low open rates may be the subject line that does not compel people to open your email. Realize that your subscribers are looking for a benefit by opening your email. For example, it can be exclusive content they can’t get anywhere else or a special, limited-time offer. If there is no benefit for consumers in the email, they have no reason to rush to open it.
source: Campaign Monitor
The same goes for the content inside the email. You might have a great subject line like, “Trust us. You’re going to want to open this,” but if the content inside is lackluster, your subscribers will feel cheated. It’s like someone giving you a big birthday present all wrapped up, but there’s absolutely nothing inside once you unwrap it. Make sure you give in an email commutation something to anticipate and get excited about.
Create consistency in your branding
Probably you have two types of emails sending through your company: the emails sent by employees to customers and contacts and marketing emails that go to your subscriber list.
Emails sent by employees
For the latter, set up guidelines for how employees' email signatures should look so that they're consistent across the company. A more efficient way is to use an email signature generator to create and manage all company members' email signatures and ensure every employee has the same and correct signature.
Why is it so important? Each of your team members sends on average 20 to 30 emails per day. That is 400-600 targeted messages per month. If multiplied by the number of employees in your company, you get the total sum of potential branding opportunities:
Digital business card. A professionally looking email signature is a digital-analog of your business card. It helps you stand out from the competitors and makes each of the touchpoints memorable.
Consistency in communications. Centrally managed email signatures help to make your digital communication more consistent. This means no more extra phrases or additional images that can ruin your brand identity.
Branding with every email sent. An email signature is one of the most powerful and cost-effective channels for your brand promotion. You don’t have to pay enormous amounts of money on advertising. Your daily emails do all the job for you.
Marketing emails
Make sure your email marketing campaigns use templates with colors, logos, and images consistent with ones you’re using on your website, in ads, and on social media. The more people get to see your company logo, the more they’ll connect the dots to what you’re known for.
And finally, when it comes to consistency, make sure you’re sending your emails on a regular cadence. If you sent your newsletter on the first of this month, make that your typical day every month. And if you send a second promotional email, space that out far enough after the newsletter so that your audience doesn’t feel like you’re bombarding them with emails.
Your brand may seem too corporate
Even for a large corporation, it is best to spoke directly to the audience. Avoid habitual internal corporate-speak, especially in marketing emails.
Start by getting to know your audience. If it consists of teens, speak to them in their voice. So, like, lots of acronyms and emojis. IKR? Is your audience adults? You can’t use one voice for every demographic. Are they white-collar professionals who have Master’s degrees or blue-collar first-generation immigrants? You might not be able to get this granular in your segmentation, so speak to the lowest common denominator (in other words: don’t speak over anyone’s head).
Your emails need a sender other than your company if you want to infuse them with personality. Who is creating the email? Why not give Sara in Marketing credit and let her include her name, title, and actual handwritten signature in the email? That gives your emails more personality than just coming from Company X.
Make your emails visually appealing
No matter who your audience is, everyone likes to look at something pretty. That could be a photo of the product you’re promoting, a stock photo illustrating a point in your email, a GIF, or even a video. In fact, including videos in your emails could increase your click-through rate by over 96% in an introductory email.
Test out different types of images, then look to your email analytics to see which hits the mark.
source: Single Grain
Get personal with your subscribers
Emails that are sent to thousands of people with zero difference between them don’t work anymore. Today’s savvy consumers expect at least a degree of personalization in their emails from brands, and brands that use it are winning big. Personalized emails can see 6x the transaction rates of others.
There are a few ways to personalize emails. The simplest is to address the recipient by name. If you’ve collected this information in your email subscription form, it should be easy to do.
Send separate emails to existing customers and new customers. You want to reward those who have bought from you before in unique ways that make them want to be loyal to your brand. For new customers, you want to get them hooked with a great first-time coupon or deal.
source: pbs.twimg
The following way is to segment customers based on their interests or past purchases. Any email marketing tool will allow you to add tags or notes indicating that this subscriber attended your beginner macramé workshop. At the same time, that one bought tickets to the upcoming watercolor class.
You can assume based on this information that the first would be interested in a more advanced macramé workshop, while the latter might like an oil painting class. There may be some crossover, of course, but segmenting and sending emails in this way ensures that you know at least a few fundamental things about your audience.
Want to go one step further? Customize based on products subscribers have viewed or bought on your site. If you get emails from brands like Amazon, you already know how this works. You looked at a pair of boots on the site, and the next day you get an email with those boots highlighted and a 20% off coupon! Such a thing requires cookies that track their activity on your site, and not all email marketing software offers it. But it’s an excellent way to nudge people who were on the fence about a purchase to go ahead and make it.
Conclusion
When it comes to creating a unique brand personality in your email campaigns, details matter, they matter a lot. More than that, numerous, at first sight, insignificant components are what form your brand identity and help stand out from the competition. You must carefully get together many small pieces and little details to represent your brand online.
The more effort you put into infusing your brand emails with a bit of personality, the more receptive your audience will be to opening them and clicking to buy from you.
