E-mail has become one of the most common forms of professional and personal communication. It's affordable, convenient, and, if used correctly, an excellent branding tool. Many private and public organizations are now using e-mail newsletters to grow their brands and spread their messages. To maximize e-mail's value as a branding tool, you need to focus on consistency for your content, voice, design and deliverability.
Select a template. Your design template should be a reflection of your brand. Are you trying to create a high-tech image, which would lend itself to more images and a slicker design? Or are you trying to be personal and conversational, which would favor a design that is more text-heavy and less polished? If you use too much HTML code or too many images in your e-mail, it may become caught in spam filters. Work with your e-mail vendor to find the right balance.
Decide on a voice. As a form of correspondence, e-mail is somewhat personal in nature. Your readers need to feel like they know you. You can't be folksy and conversational one day and technical and scientific the next. This creates brand confusion.
Work with a vendor who will protect your reputation. If you hire a vendor to send your e-mails and manage your lists, make sure that vendor has an aggressive program for protecting your online reputation. All e-mails should have easy links or buttons for unsubcribing or reporting the e-mail as spam, if the reader didn't wish to receive it. Make sure the vendor is "whitelisted" with the major Internet Service Providers (such as Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc.). This means the ISP knows the vendor is not a spammer and will not block delivery of the vendor's e-mails. Your vendor should also be able to make recommendations about when to send your e-mails, how best to format them to avoid junk mail boxes, and other things you can do to increase deliverability.
Define your niche. To build a strong brand, you need to have legitimacy with your readers. What are you an expert on? What can you write about with enough authority that readers will come to you for advice or information? You may feel passionate about a topic, such as national politics, but if you can't create legitimacy and offer a compelling reason why readers should care about your opinions, you will struggle to build a strong brand.
Know your readers and build your list accordingly. You will harm your brand if you fail to deliver the type of content your readers want and expect. With any opt-in e-mail list, readers have subscribed because they expect--or were even promised--a certain type of quality content. The more you stray from what you promised your readers, the weaker your brand becomes.
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