Just like Rome, you cannot create your brand identity in a day. It takes companies decades to establish their brand identity and create a loyal customer base via various channels. One such channel that helps to establish your brand identity in the long run, is email marketing. Why email marketing? It is cost-effective with an ROI of 3200%. Custom email templates play a crucial role here.
Here’s a guide on how you can use custom templates to create your brand identity.
Table of Contents
Creating Your Brand Identity With Custom Email Templates
Voice
You can create a unique brand voice by writing your email copies in a certain way. A unique voice in your template will make your emails instantly recognizable.
dBrand has managed to create a brand voice that separates them from its competitors. As you can see from the email copy, their voice is commanding, straightforward, and quite unforgiving. Moreover, they maintain the same brand voice over all the social media platforms.
Colors
A strict color palette for all your email templates also helps you while creating a brand identity. Spotify uses green, black, and white colors in most of its email templates. Its announcement emails use their trademark green color stingily. They have used the color only to highlight the important elements of the email, such as the cancel membership hyperlink and the CTA button.
Custom Font
By using custom fonts in your template, you can create a unique brand identity. However, there are only a few web-safe fonts. Therefore, your priority should be to stage your email aesthetics with the available fonts. If you are still dissatisfied with the results, only then should you use custom fonts in your template along with fallback fonts.
Maintaining Your Brand Identity
Creating a brand identity is easy, but maintaining it is another ball game altogether. After you have managed to create a notable brand identity, create guidelines to replicate the results. The guidelines help your designers, coders, and your copywriters to be consistent while creating the templates. Guidelines also come in handy if you are outsourcing your email marketing campaigns. Now, don’t be afraid to experiment with a new brand voice once in a while. After all, brand identity is all about setting yourself apart from your competitors.
You should also reuse your design traits and go-to images to make your audience more familiar with your brand. Headspace consistently uses various figures with rounded corners. You will rarely notice a sharp corner in their email templates. It is because rounded corners seem less threatening as compared to sharp edges and have a soothing effect on your eyes. The aesthetics of their email templates also align with their line of business.
What Are Some Common Mistakes To Avoid While Creating Your Brand Identity With Custom Emails Template?
Not A/B Testing Your Brand Voice
The chances of creating a perfect brand voice on the first try are minuscule. Most email marketers believe that they know what their customer wants. However, the truth is far from it. Before you find the perfect brand voice, you need to send multiple email copies to different segments of people for the same promotional email. Then you need to select the copy that performs better than the rest.
Faulty Custom Fonts
Some people might get carried away while creating custom fonts for their email templates. Indeed, a unique font will make your email stand out. However, if the custom font interferes with the readability of your emails, then the entire designing exercise becomes redundant. Hence, try to use simple readable fonts with a brilliant email copy to create your brand identity.
Faulty Images
While trying to use an image, most marketers will insert the image in the custom template as an attachment. Such images will not render in your subscriber’s email client if they have turned off their auto download option. To avoid this, you should also try to embed the image using HTML code. Another best practice to follow while using an image is to avoid writing text blocks on the image. Instead, you should use HTML codes to create text blocks that appear over the image.
Conclusion
Email templates are an essential part of your brand identity. Yes, the intention behind every marketing email is to bring in more customers and increase traffic, but these emails need not sound like that. An effective custom email template will subtly nudge the subscribers to visit your business while building your brand identity.
Author: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.