Guest Post
Think of the emails from your favorite brand. Do you recall certain attributes of their emails that you instantly connect with? The GIFs or high-resolution images they use or maybe their unique style of writing the email? Every brand has a personality and it’s this personality that makes subscribers recognize and connect with the brand, developing a stronger bond with every communication.
Today, when businesses use more than one medium to market their products/services, it’s important to maintain a consistent brand personality across all the channels including email marketing. Maintaining a consistent personality reinforces familiarity, effectively increasing brand awareness and popularity. Now, let’s deep dive into the factors that define your brand personality and how you should maintain it in your emails.
How to identify and define your brand personality
Just like people have certain characteristics that define their personality, there are certain characteristics that define a brand.
Start off by asking yourself these three questions:
1. What are the adjectives that best define your brand’s character?
2. What tone best relates to your core base?
3. What do you want your prospects to perceive your brand as?
Answers to these questions will help you figure out an approach to develop a brand personality. It will also define how your prospects will interact with your brand.
Brand Personality
These 5 personalities, as developed by Jennifer Aaker, General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, can be used to describe almost any brand.
When it comes to cultivating your brand personality in email newsletters to develop familiarity, here are the two major factors that help you set the stage: Email Tone and Template Design.
Email Tone
The tone of your email newsletter depends on your audience and the objective of that particular campaign. So, your brand can be lively, passionate, professional, quirky or whatever it is that defines you and is likely to be accepted and appreciated by your subscribers, and the tone of your email should be woven around it.
Although you can make subtle shifts in the tone to suit specific needs of a newsletter, the overall tone should always revolve around the brand personality you have defined.
Check out this email from Jeni’s. They maintain a very friendly tone in all their emails, just like they’ve done in this email.
Template Design
Once you have set a tone for your brand’s emails, it’s time to focus on designing your email templates around the brand personality.
Here are the key visual elements that can help you maintain your brand personality in email newsletters:
Colors
Colors possess the power to express your brand’s personality. Moreover, we are visual beings and it’s the visual component we remember most about a brand. That’s the reason colors are so important in order to maintain a brand personality. Depending upon your personality traits and your subscriber base, you can choose colors for your emails (also including those from your brand logo to maintain consistency). It’s a good practice to use these colors across backgrounds, text, images, etc. in every email template you create.
Take a look at these two emails from Uncommongoods. The teal color, which is one of the colors in their brand logo has been used in the header, CTAs and borders of the images. The color is consistently used across both the templates.
Typography
What gives a personality push to your email copy is the typography you use to present it. It affects the way your email is perceived, and you need to use it wisely. The typography used for an apparel brand would not be the same as that used for a B2B business. Your brand personality will play a major role in deciding the kind of typography you want to use in your emails and consistent use of this typography (which includes the font type, font color, size, line spacing etc.) will reflect your brand personality.
Web safe fonts are the most preferred by email designers because they will show in every email client, but custom fonts are not supported by some email clients and these clients display the fallback mentioned in the code. It’s thus important to make sure the fallback too is in line with your brand personality.
To know what typography brands are using to create and maintain their brand personality, check out this LOOKBOOK.
Images/Animation
In most of the cases, information conveyed through images and animation is easier to consume than that conveyed through plain text. But choosing the right images can be a daunting task. The image/animation should grab attention, be relevant to the email copy and most importantly go with your brand personality. Moreover, images trigger emotions, which tie up subscribers emotionally to your brand.
Check out this email from Airbnb. They are known to showcase high resolution images in their emails. In fact, the amazing imagery they use in their emails is a crucial part of their brand personality.
Source: Really Good Emails
Minimalist design
The concept of minimalist emails involves stripping away the fluff to highlight what needs to be highlighted. For example, if your brand personality revolves around sophistication and competence, like that of Apple, you can create a minimalist email just like they do- more white space that creates a sense of organization.
Wrapping up
With proliferation of digital technologies, it is now easy to build meaningful relationships with your email subscribers and customers. And one of the ways to build such a long-lasting bond is by maintaining a consistent brand personality in email newsletters that your subscribers relate to and would want to engage with. Keeping the above components in mind, you can certainly create an identity of your own. Have any more ideas to help maintain brand personality in email newsletters? Drop us a note and let us know!
Guest Author:
Kevin, the Head of Marketing at EmailMonks – one of the fastest growing Email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting email newsletter samples, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes ’email marketing’. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices at his blog.
Now that you understand brand personality in email newsletters, download your copy of the white paper below for more on email templates that engage, delight and deliver!
The post How to Maintain Brand Personality in Your Email Newsletters appeared first on LiveIntent Blog.