Branding is one of the most important aspects of marketing, with brand familiarity contributing to customer confidence in the quality and services that a company offers. Companies that can establish themselves through their branding allow customers to more easily recognize them. Considering that 71% of customers will only buy from brands they know, this element of brand recognition is vital, meaning that companies should maximize their branding coherence as much as possible.
When companies talk about branding, the obvious places that come to mind are external advertisements, marketing campaigns, and even the company website. While inserting strong branding into all of these locations is indeed vital, there is another area that is continually overlooked when it comes to branding.
Company email accounts are typically the front line of communication with customers. The vast majority of business-to-client communication will occur over email, only followed closely by social media. If you’re looking to create a cohesive branding experience, you should incorporate elements of your company brand into your email account.
In this article, we’ll cover exactly how you can match your emails with company branding, looking at the four best practices to make sure your customers instantly recognize your company over email.
Let’s get right into it!
Logos
The very first lesson in branding, and the first thing that company owners typically turn to, is creating a company logo. If you already have a business that’s pulling in customers, it’s highly probable that you already have a logo that you feel reflects your company values and ideals well.
Alongside featuring that logo on your social media accounts and company website, you should always include it in any emails that you send out from your business account. Not only does the company logo provide a level of professionality, but it further demonstrates that your company has thought about branding and incorporated it into all of your media channels.
As the first point of contact for many customers, a company email is a perfect place to include a logo. If customers are routinely emailing your business account, they’ll see your logo on all the replies, helping to build up familiarity with the symbol that represents your company. With this done effectively, customers will instantly recognize your brand logo when it’s in other contexts, with its appearance within emails helping to increase this familiarity.
Color Scheme
Color is one of the most powerful ways of presenting certain emotions within branding. Each color has certain associations that have been built up over time, with red being known for love or danger, passion or excitement, while blue is known for calmness, tranquility, and trust. Depending on what you want to present, the colors that you use throughout your branding will change heavily.
Once you’ve settled on the colors that you feel best represent your brand, you’re able to then incorporate them into your email account. Whether that be through the specific marketing photos and materials that you include, the border colors of photos, or the style of design you use within your email signature, email is a wonderful place to include branding color.
By using your company email as a space to include your branding colors, you’ll create cohesion between your website and email. Whenever someone receives an email from your company, even just by color association and blend alone, they might have an idea which company it comes from. Over time, this association only grows further with effective branding.
If you think about some of the most successful companies in the world, their company colors are ingrained in our minds, with cohesive branding across all social channels – including email – being vital.
Tone of Voice
One aspect of email branding that’s continually overlooked is including your company’s tone of voice in all marketing communications.
If your company is fun and energetic, the copy you use in your email marketing campaigns should reflect that. By creating a tone of voice structure and style that is carried across all of your client-facing surfaces, you’ll create a more solid idea of who your company is and what they represent to customers.
Tone of voice, although often forgotten about, is a great way of further branding your company and getting your business’ personal style just right.
Email Signatures
Within a typical business, it’s probably the case that every single one of your employees has a company email address that they use for any work-related matters. One of the easiest ways to incorporate branding into all of these accounts and provide cohesion across your company is to include an email signature at the end of any emails they send.
A cohesive email signature that is carried across the business will give any of your employees using the account the ability to use branding with their emails. Alongside this, it gives them an air of professionality when using the business email account, helping to further the image of your company as an active and dedicated company.
That said, not every single email signature should be exactly the same. While including the same branding elements, like company logo and colors, is a great idea, you should also give your employees the opportunity to alter their signatures. An easy way of doing this while still remaining professional is to include an electronically generated physical signature of the employee’s name.
By using a handwritten signature maker, you can quickly make a customized digital signature which you can then insert into your overall email signature. With this, you’ll be able to incorporate branding while also giving employees space to include a personal element within their email signature.
Final Thoughts
Company branding is vital for ensuring the success of a company, with a brand that is recognizable being one that customers flock to time and time again. When constructing a company email account, through which you’ll launch your email marketing campaigns, you should endeavor to include elements of branding everywhere.
Think of your company email as an extension of your website. The logo, brand colors, tone of voice, and business style should all match up perfectly. By focusing on each of the above areas, you’ll be able to create an impressive customer experience within your emails, allowing your branding to shine through in all areas of communication.
With branding effectively incorporated into your marketing emails, you’ll have a much easier time presenting your company as cohesive, professional, and understanding of what you represent.
