How to Brand Your Emails to Drive Revenue and Success

Email marketing is the perfect tool for keeping in touch with your customers. It’s been proven to generate revenue, yielding an estimated 4,300% ROI, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

But if you’re not providing a consistent experience each time you send an email, your emails won’t be very effective. When it comes to emails, you have to think about more than the message you want to share. You should also keep your emails on brand– you want the logo, colors, and even your voice to be consistent.

Why is branding so important when it comes to email? Read on to find out 4 reasons why.

#1: Consistency matters for brand recognition

First and foremost, you want your customers to know they’re reading the right email from the right company. Ensure your email is in line with what your customers experience visiting your website or store.

An easy way to keep your branding consistent is using an email template. You can customize a template to include your logo and colors, giving you a good starting point for your brand. Once you have a template, add the content that your readers are going to enjoy, still keeping it true to your message.

Using a drag-and-drop template will allow you to add your logo and colors, plus your awesome content. If you can’t code your own email, using a template is a good way to achieve this without too much work.

Virgin Experience Days does a fantastic job of keeping their branding consistent from their website to their emails. Plus, their content and voice give the reader a similar experience.

#2: Change it up with personalization

Personalization allows you to send targeted messages to your readers, with information specific to each reader about your company. This will allow your readers to see what’s important to them, instead of one general email sent to everyone on your list.

This is a fairly simple thing to do too. By using custom fields in your mailing list, you can store information about your subscribers, like their name, birthday, purchase history, favorite color, or even t-shirt size.

After you’ve mastered this, you can go a step further and populate your emails with content specific to each of your subscribers. Using dynamic content, you can include specific links, text, and most importantly, images based on the interests and wants of the recipient. This means you can add a specific product or service that will work best for each person on your list.

Using a template keeps your email looking like your brand. You can incorporate personalization into your template to provide a fantastic experience.

Once you’ve collected specific information about your customers, you can make each email they receive from you more personal, and give them a more consistent experience from your business.

#3: Brand specifically for mobile

Mobile has become very important to marketers. No longer something to think about as an afterthought, mobile use is widespread– 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices.

While you can code your own email, the easiest way to ensure this is to use an email template that’s already set up to work on any screen size. You just need to add your content, images that aren’t too big, and links to your website. The template will take care of determining the size of the screen that the email is viewed on, and adjusting accordingly.

Since mobile screens are considerably smaller, you’ll need to pay some attention to things like images and the amount of text you use in your email. Keep your images, like your products or whatever is being shared, from being too large, they’ll take over a small phone screen.

Keep your text to the point, it’s hard to read a lot on a small screen, and people often have short attention spans. Also, your images and text will be stacked on a mobile screen instead of side by side, so here is where branding will be really important. Use the colors associated with your logo for the border on your template and your call-to-action buttons so your readers know for sure they’re reading the right email.

#4: Share your brand in different types of emails

There are many types of emails that are really effective for businesses. Once again, be sure no matter what type of email you send that you keep your branding consistent so your customers have confidence in the content they’ll see.

Welcome email – A welcome email is a useful email to send, but frequently underutilized by marketers. Sending a welcome email after someone signs to get a newsletter or purchases a product can help someone feel they made the right choice in your business. It gives a new customer, or prospective customer, a warm feeling about your company. They can even be sent automatically, so all you need to do is create it once and still get the benefits from each send. Again, being on brand from the start will help your new customers know what to expect from you.

This is a nice example of a welcome email. Friendly, warm, and they’ve even included a discount code for the first purchase.

If you’re still not sure about this email type, welcome emails see an 86% lift in open rates and generate 320% more revenue than promotional emails.

Promotional email – Most people are familiar with this type of email, probably because they see them in their inbox every day. But don’t let its popularity fool you, it’s still very effective. Believe it or not, 61% of consumers like to receive weekly promotional emails, and some would like emails even more often, according to Capterra. And, not surprisingly, 72% are more apt to open an email that includes a discount.

Newsletter – One the most popular type of emails, an email newsletter is basically an email campaign that’s focused on one main topic and is sent out regularly, such as weekly or monthly. It can be used to convey a variety of information such as new products or services, how-to tips, blog content, or even guides.

Wrap up

Branding isn’t just about logos or colors, it’s about creating a cohesive experience for your customers. Keep your marketing on brand with a similar look and feel in your emails, as well as in the tone and purpose of them. This becomes a simpler task by using an email template that allows for easy changes and automatically fits mobile screens.

About the Author!

Samantha Anderl oversees channel marketing & self-service business at Campaign Monitor. When not immersed in digital marketing, you can find her enjoying a glass of bubbly & all the Pacific NW has to offer. Keep up with her on Twitter @DGsalamander.