In marketing, you always want to think about your brand. Although marketing is a great way to activate your customers to visit your stores and buy your products, branding focuses more on cultivating lasting relationships with your clients. Both are crucial to any successful business. With the help of email marketing, you can develop a stronger brand in the long-run. By using email newsletters, you can expand your offline branding strategies online.
Here are some key ways that email marketing can help your brand:
Radiate Professionalism
Email newsletters are an excellent way to make your business look professional. It does not matter if your company is big or small, a start-up or has been around for decades. With email design software like Mail Designer 365, it has become a lot easier for companies to build professional email designs and newsletters. The templates available make it almost effortless for you to create weekly or even daily newsletters that look clean and well-polished.
What if I want to go for a casual vibe? No problem. You can still have a casual feel to your email by adding relevant photos and animated GIFs. As long as the email content and design are well-executed, then the email newsletter will exude professionalism. When customers open a well thought-out email newsletter, they are more likely to read the content and place more trust in the company than if they were to open a plain, black and white, text email.
Brand Awareness
Like other marketing methods, email marketing generates brand awareness. But what makes email marketing effective when it comes to getting your brand known is that even if customers do not open your email every single time, they can still see your brand name from the sender name.
This means that each email you send can create a brand impression as long as the consumer sees the email in their inbox. As you can imagine, email marketing can be immensely useful when it comes to brand exposure. In addition, email marketing is an awesome way for you to get your customers to think about your brand and products, even if it is just momentarily.
To make your emails more powerful, try carefully choosing catchy and relevant subject lines. Readers are more likely to open emails if the subject line of the email has made them a little curious.
Build Credibility
Sharing content through email newsletters are a strong way to build credibility and trust with your customers. People have a tendency to do business with someone who they feel like they know. For example, you go to a store and find two pens that look alike, write alike, and are priced alike. One pen is from a brand that you’ve heard of. The other pen is from a brand that you’ve never heard or seen before. Which pen are you more likely to purchase?
Email marketing is valuable because it gets your brand out there, and you can use it to build your credibility. With time, you can increase the level of familiarity that your customers have with your products or your company. This can be done by sending email newsletters with topics that are relevant to your brand on a consistent basis. By sharing pertinent content, your customers can expand their knowledge, especially when it comes to learning how to use your products to their full potential. By emailing consistently, your brand will be seen as dependable and as a company that puts a lot of effort and time into their customers.
Another way to build credibility through email marketing is to include customer-generated content in your email newsletters. For instance, you can include photos of your customers with recommendations of their favorite products from your brand. Or you can ask them to write content of how they use or apply your products. After all, who are better advocates for your brand than your own loyal customers? When people see real people recommending products, then they have a tendency to trust the recommendation more as opposed to just seeing advertisements from the company.
Deliver Value
If you consistently deliver coupons into your customer’s inbox, then you will build certain expectations with your brand. Your customers may expect that they should receive offers from you at certain days or seasons. Eventually, they will start to long for these great deals. This is beneficial for you because your email will now be more likely to catch your customers at a time when they are looking forward to your deal and want to buy something from your store. The best part is that even if they are not ready to buy yet, they can always keep the email in their inbox to access the deal later on.
Essentially, email marketing allows you to deliver value before you sell your products or services. However, value is not limited to coupons. It could be snippets of your products that get them to want more or a mini preview of what's to come - the possibilities are endless.
Showcase Expertise
Your emails are your domain. You have full control on both the content and artistry of your email newsletters every single time. This is why email marketing is instrumental when it comes to showcasing your expertise. You can share your knowledge in your email newsletters in a genius way - your genius way. Instead of just having step-by-step instructions, you may want to consider adding mini videos for tutorials or even for product introductions with your professional talents.
Some of the most useful email content include professionals who show their customers how to use their products, present some cool tips and tricks that users can do with the products, and then even challenge their customers to exercise their own creativity with their new-found savviness. You can take it further by asking your customers to share with you new ideas that were inspired by your content. It may even spark ideas for your next product or service launch. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in - fashion, software, food, cars, crafts, gardening, etc. With content that showcase your expertise and lets you come across as more personable, your customers will definitely come back for more.
Strengthen Brand Style and Brand Personality
Have a unique brand style and brand personality? Showing your brand style and brand personality is no longer limited to just your stores and online stores. Email marketing makes it simple for you to strengthen your brand style and brand personality. Have a one-of-a-kind brand style? No problem. You can design your email newsletters to match your brand style - same color theme, same font, similar photography styles, and so on. Also, you can set the tone of your email content to match your brand personality. Just think of your email newsletters as an expansion of who you are as a brand.
Take Advantage of Referral Programs
Email marketing is great for creating referral programs. You can email your subscribers, telling them that if they refer someone to your product or business, then they will be receive a gift or perk. Online “word-of-mouth” referral programs are easy for you and easy for your customer. The added bonus for you is that you get to save tons of money from advertising.
But make sure to pay attention to international laws
However, do be careful when you use referral programs as you may be violating spam laws. If you provide some sort of incentive for your customers to forward your email newsletters to others, then you may be guilty of spamming. This is dependent on where the recipient is. Instead, try to provide your customers incentives to get others to signup without requiring them to forward your email newsletter.
An example of a viable referral program:
For example, instead of asking your customers to forward the email, ask them to tell their friends about the deal, event, or your company without specifying how. By not specifying how they forward the information to others, you are giving your customers room for interpretation. Just make sure to require them to use a referral link for the signup or for the purchase. This way, you can reward the referrer for directing another person's attention to your company. At the same time, you will avoid breaking international anti-spam laws because you did not explicitly require them to forward commercial emails to other individuals who can potentially label the email as unsolicited email.
Improved Perceived Quality
Email marketing lets you add value to your products without changing the actual quality of the products. Designing a visually attractive email coupled with great content can show your customers that your products are worth more than what’s written on the price tag. How so? You can use email marketing to differentiate yourself within the market.
Aside from selling your actual product, you can add additional offerings like tutorials on how to use the products given different scenarios, or unique tricks that the average person may not normally pick up on when using your products, or storytelling sections concerning your products. Adding creative and content-filled elements will show customers that you are innovative and that what you have to offer actually goes beyond what they expected. Thus, all of your email marketing efforts can help elevate the perceived quality of your products and overall brand.
Raise Brand Associations
When you send emails to your customers, you have the potential to create memories that specifically link to your brand. Email marketing opens up another medium for you to engrave brand associations into customers’ minds through numerous, repeated email messages. Furthermore, you can add strong imagery in your email newsletters that supplements your key messages, which will help create long-lasting memories. These memories can be feelings or mental images that the customer has learned to associate with your brand.