Centralising first impressions

Millington: Brand management should encompass central control of email

Every day, hundreds if not thousands of emails will leave your network for the big wide world. Many will be poorly written and designed.

They will employ horrific fonts, poor spelling, and contain little that presents the organisation in a positive light from a brand reinforcement perspective.

There will often be no company logo, no contact details, and nothing that reflects the current values or activities of the business.

According to Tech Watch, about 210 billion emails were sent in 2008. That’s a marketing opportunity a lot of companies missed.

As a tool to reinforce company brand and drive home a short, sharp, timely and targeted message, email is unsurpassed.

In a more marketing-savvy scenario, the email signature may contain not only the sender’s full business card details and a formal legal disclaimer, but also note awards, and plug an event they’re participating in next week. A simple opportunity for positive brand exposure, deftly exploited.

Topping and tailing emails correctly is about brand equity and campaign management. It’s about nurturing leads and winning business.

Yet the average business has seemingly given email formatting and presentation little thought. Other forms of correspondence, even the way phone calls are handled, may have been carefully brand-stamped.

For many, the opportunity has never occurred to them. Perhaps that’s because of the way email has developed. Email’s informality, which can work so well for enhancing relationships and maintaining dialogue, means it has largely escaped the notice of the marketing controllers as a way of extending the brand experience.

Sometimes, there is an assumption that it’s just too difficult to get every employee to cut and paste a simple marketing message and make it consistent.

Beware the artistically challenged! Even where companies have attempted to take some control over their email output, the approach has typically been all wrong.

Take the Top-50 law firm that automatically adds a lengthy disclaimer to every email as it leaves the company network – even if this is a one-word reply as part of an ongoing thread. This is added repeatedly during the dialogue, generating huge, unwieldy, multi-page emails.

Or the hideous blue font or yellow background that someone has imposed in the name of ‘differentiation’. Do you really want your business’s brand perception to be compromised by the fruits of the artistically challenged?

That includes the go-it-alone, do-good MD who attaches the biggest logo file he or she can find, only to crash the entire email system when he sends it for the 6,000th time.
The intentions may be good, but the execution is often misguided and potentially harmful.

Instead take central control of email sign-offs. This ensures that every outgoing message, no matter who is sending it or how non-conformist the device, is brought in line and exploited to its full marketing potential.

An additional central tool to one’s email client can ensure no email leaves the server without an agreed sign-off. This could be a formal signature customised for the user, a timely campaign banner, a legal disclaimer, or any combination of the above.

Someone with the skills can be put in charge of the applications, fonts and colour schemes for email communications.

They can also start to add timely campaign content to the bottom of every email that leaves the company – banners can be added in an instant, and changed throughout the day if needed.

By controlling such activities centrally you can guarantee that certain elements appear only at fixed times. Rules can be set to ensure that each email contains only one copy of a person’s signature or the company disclaimer – ensuring email threads don’t become bloated with repeated information.

Email content sent from mobile devices can be controlled too, provided they pass through the company’s mail server.

Andrew Millington is managing director at Exclaimer