For many business owners, email marketing is viewed solely in terms of sales. After all, a report found that 82% of marketers rate email marketing as the most powerful channel to increase lead nurturing and conversion rates. However, while email marketing can be incredibly beneficial for increasing sales, it also can (and should) be utilized to create and deepen your relationship with customers.
Ask any branding expert, and they will tell you that email content is valuable because it is a direct line of communication with your customer. For this reason, a high-quality email marketing strategy can aid any business in cultivating customer loyalty, leveraging the ROI of marketing campaigns, and establishing the brand as a thought leader in the industry. Keep in mind that it is also one of the most cost-effective marketing mediums.
By developing your email marketing strategy with your brand in mind, you can create a valuable content experience that strengthens your brand identity and builds trust with the people that matter the most. To help your business benefit from this form of content, keep reading to learn how to enhance brand awareness through email marketing.
1. Curate a consistent experience
Consistency is the most integral element of any successful brand. A customer’s perception of your brand is built over time and based on every interaction they have with you. Therefore, you need to ensure that every touchpoint demonstrates a consistent brand message. This is true for all your marketing and branding undertakings, including email marketing.
When it comes to your email marketing campaign, there are a variety of elements involved – ranging from copy to color palettes, logos to call to actions (CTAs). Altogether, you need your email marketing to be consistent in topic, visual look and feel, language and tone, and delivery schedule. Each of these elements must be thoughtfully considered and designed with your brand strategy in mind. Applying consistency to your email marketing will significantly help solidify your brand with your customers and encourage them to engage with the content.
For example, images can be a fantastic communicator of your brand and consequently need to be chosen carefully. When deciding on the format and layout of images and what those images are, you want to consider how your audience interacts with your brand and how images can improve the dialogue.
2. Focus on personalizing emails
Once you have created a consistent formula for your emails, you then want to start focusing on ways in which you can personalize them. After all, customers receive an abundance of emails every day, making it crucial that you find ways to make yours stand out from the rest of them. According to a top branding consultancy, personalization is the best way to make your messaging feel different from the rest of the noise.
This, of course, means including names in your emails, but it also goes a lot deeper than that. It involves you segmenting your email list and dividing them up into groups that you feel would benefit from specific types of content. By incorporating this process into your email marketing strategy, you can concentrate on personalizing each message you send out to correlate with the prospects and priorities of the specific reading groups.
To dive deeper into personalization, you also want to utilize intent signal data, which will enable you to monitor your targets’ online activity. This is a fantastic way to ascertain what challenges they are facing, how they examine those difficulties, and how they speak of them. These insights can prove to be invaluable when it comes to crafting personalized email content that speaks directly to the people you are trying to reach.
3. Prioritize value
Even the most consistent, personalized email marketing strategy isn’t going to work if the content itself isn’t filled with value. For recipients to open the email and read the materials, they need to know that it is going to be worth their time. Therefore, the more value you provide in your communication, the more likely they are to actually open it.
In order to incorporate value into your emails, you need to make sure you are concentrating on the customer (through personalization and segmentation) by asking yourself how you can produce content that they will benefit from. In many cases, this means creating educational content and providing them with opportunities to get involved. Educational content can range from step-by-step articles to FAQs and can cover your own products or services, as well as the overall industry.
4. Incorporate A/B testing
Email marketing should be viewed as a long-term relationship with your subscribers. Therefore, throughout this journey, you are likely going to have many updates and pivots in your strategy. While this is natural and normal, these shifts should only occur after tracking analytics, as this is the easiest way to monitor how your campaigns are doing. The more data-driven your approach to email marketing, the more efficient and profitable it will be.
To maximize how many people open your emails, you want to A/B test as much as possible. This will enable you to assess which headlines, formats, and topics have the most appeal to your audience. From there, you can continue to evaluate the elements of your high-performing emails. When you find something that is working, look to expand upon it to improve your email campaigns continually.
Additionally, ensure you are using A/B testing for your CTAs. Just as with the other elements of each email message, you want to be tracking the click-through rates for CTAs to assess what positioning, tone, colors, etc., works and what doesn’t lead people to click. Over time, you will be able to hone in on the most effective strategies, which, in turn, will aid you in enhancing your overall email marketing strategy.
What do you think are the most critical elements of successful email marketing campaigns? Are you incorporating any of these branding strategies into your email marketing this year? Why or why not?
Let us know your thoughts and any other related insights in the comment below!
AUTHOR BIO
Hasan Fadlallah is a Serial Entrepreneur – Founder & CEO of Brand Lounge, the region’s leading and award-winning branding consultancy, whose role is to help organizations align their business behind an idea that will deliver success time and again. Equipped with over 20 years of professional consulting experience, today he advises businesses throughout the Gulf and Africa on brand development and in 2014 was recognized by the World Brand Congress who awarded him the prestigious Brand Leadership award in Brand Excellence.