Here are some email branding best practices to get you moving in the right direction. And they all revolve around a consistent user experience, one that builds a solid trusting relationship with your subscribers.
- Design Consistency — The images you use, the colors, the graphics and logos, all of that should match your business and what subscribers expect to see. The design elements within your email should be immediately recognizable, and thus immediately trustworthy.
- Language Consistency — Your email copy, CTA copy, subject line, and pre-header should all be consistent with the language that you’ve used in the past (on landing pages, in other emails, and in marketing campaigns). Whether your brand is professional, playful, or outright irreverent, be consistent. Think of your business’s brand as an individual person with a clear and recognizable voice. Your subscribers unknowingly expect to hear that voice when reading emails from your business.
- Landing Page Consistency — A common mistake that email marketers make is unintentionally creating an inconsistency between the email they sent and the landing page which that email drives traffic to. This sometimes happens because different copywriters wrote the landing page and email (use the same copywriter when possible) or because there was a big time gap in between when each element was written. Whatever the reason, your landing page and email campaign should have CTA consistency and language consistency. They should almost behave like a single page would, with the email acting as the preface or introduction and the landing page acting as the body and conclusion of the same article.
- Pain Point Consistency — What is your target market’s primary pain point? As a marketer, it can feel repetitive, writing about and marketing to the same pain day-in and day-out. To be sure, though, it doesn’t feel the same way for your audience. They are experiencing the pain you’re discussing, one that you’re capable of solving, and when your emails and branding materials knowledgeably discuss that pain, you show your audience that you fully understand what they’re going through, which builds trust and increases conversion.
- Data Collection — Data is king, and that’s true just as much in email branding as it is when segmenting your list or creating a new product. In the beginning, it’s not uncommon to create a brand identity for your business, realize that that brand identity doesn’t jive with your target market, and then make some big shifts toward a new, more profitable identity (AirBnB, Dropbox, and Mastercard have done this successfully). For that reason, send consistent surveys, collect behavioral data, and study conversion rates to understand how your target market thinks of your business. When you understand how people think about your business, you can adapt to build more trust and grow stronger relationships with your audience.
- Omni-Channel Consistency — In the end, branding is all about cross-channel consistency. When people read your emails, when they visit your website, when they browse your social media pages, or when they buy your products, they should always feel like they’re interacting with the same trustworthy business. The logos and images should be the same, the language, the colors, the emotions, it should all feel the same to your target market.
- Here’s a helpful article that discusses mastering omni-channel branding.
Note: It’s good to A/B test all of these elements when sending emails to determine what design, copy, and CTA (for instance) performs the best, but all variations of your test should still match your overall brand identity so as to not emotionally whiplash your audience.