A detailed guide to creating a brand identity with custom email templates
Building a brand identity has always been integral to growing a business. In the past, companies used to take decades to establish themselves through rigorous door-to-door marketing and by selling high-quality products. Nowadays, you can build your brand by increasing your social media presence and through online marketing. Within these multiple channels, email marketing has one of the highest ROI with 3200%. But what is a brand identity, and why is it so important?
What is the importance of brand identity?
Visual elements of a brand, such as a logo, colors, and designs that distinguish the brand from its competitors, are known as brand identity. For example, the logo of Pepsi has a relatively simple design that only uses three colors- red, white, and blue. Over the years, Pepsi has built such a strong brand identity that they immediately think about Pepsi whenever people see these three colors.
Nowadays, apart from the visual elements, you can also give a tone or a voice to your brand. Wendy’s Twitter account was the first to break the monotony of the corporate tweets and post more personalized tweets and start online banter with its competitors. Similar brand identity can also be created through a well-strategized email marketing campaign.
How does email branding work?
The strategies for branding can also be applied in your email marketing campaigns. You can create a recognizable custom email template by using-
Voice
The voice of your email should be instantly recognizable. You can achieve this by creating your email copy in a particular way. If you have various people working on different email copies for your upcoming campaign, you can issue a guideline to maintain a similar writing style and tonality. Then you need to decide the voice of your email, whether you want it to be professional or personal.
Email branding ditches the direct sales pitches and focuses on fostering an emotional connection with the subscribers. You can then capitalize on their emotional responses to generate leads and create higher engagement.
Colors
Having a consistent color palette across all your email marketing campaigns will help you build your brand recognition. Starbucks uses their signature green color or a lighter variant of that color in all their emails. They also use only 2 or 3 colors in their emails, which prevents their readers from getting overwhelmed. An additional benefit is that green is considered to be one of the best colors to attract the consumer’s attention.
Custom font
Using custom fonts for your email templates is another great way of creating a unique brand identity. Now, this can be tricky, as there are only a handful of web-safe fonts. Therefore, before you venture out to the unsafe territory, you should check whether you can achieve the desired aesthetics with fonts from the Serif and Sans Serif family. If you are adamant about using a custom font, ensure that you have at least a couple of fallback fonts to maintain the integrity of your template.
Joss & Main uses a fair bit of custom fonts in its custom email template. For the general copy, they use generic fonts, while the heading and subheading are done with custom fonts. This is done to draw the user’s attention towards the actionable claims. The numbering of the subheading is also done with hollowed-out custom fonts. The fonts have been combined with colors of lighter tones to make the email stand out.
Images
You can also make the reader engage more with the email by using soothing imagery. The images that you are using in your email campaigns should have a consistent style. Also, the imagery must align with your mission statement to send out a unified message. In addition, you can also use GIFs to get a similar effect.
Headspace uses both images and GIFs in their emails to promote their services. The images have warm colors, and the animated characters have rounded-out corners to make the email look more inviting and appealing. Their email exudes peace and tranquility that properly aligns with their mission statement.
Mission statement
When your subscribers open your email, they should be able to know what your company stands for. The attention span of people is decreasing every year. Therefore, the faster you can establish your brand with your mission statement, the longer you will keep their attention.
Right in an opening couple of lines of their emails, Shutterstock establishes that they provide images for people to use in their projects and presentations. Shutterstock’s email template also conforms to the colors of the festive season as they are using this email template during the holiday season.
Slogans
In recent years, slogans or taglines have become synonymous with brand identity. It would help if you came up with something unique which is also representative of the service and products that you are marketing. If you are unable to come up with something creative yourself, you can always hire an experienced copywriter to create one for you.
I’m lovin’ it. Need I say anything more?
Conclusion about brand design and custom email templates
Even if you are starting your business and are lacking the necessary resources to mount a full-scale campaign, you can rely on smaller email marketing campaigns to build your brand. It would be best if you remembered that you cannot build a brand identity for your business overnight. You will need to consistently follow the above-mentioned techniques for an extended period to build your brand slowly. Most importantly, it would help if you refrained from doing anything controversial to garner attention; it is only going to affect your brand negatively.
After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.
YouTube: Designing a Complete Brand Identity with Sydney Michuda
Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, which specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to email conversion, and Mailchimp templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, and jazz. He breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his email marketing blog.
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by Marty O’Neill. The email designs presented in the body of the article are owned by the respective companies they were created by.
Source: DMA Report
