Every day, hundreds if not thousands of emails will pass out of your company network and into the big wide world. Curiously, many of these, despite the general marketing panache of the originating company, will be dreadfully constructed. They will employ horrific fonts, poor spelling, and contain very little that presents the organisation in a positive light from a brand reinforcement perspective. Appallingly, there will often be no company logo, no contact details, and nothing that reflects the current values or activities of the business.
What a colossal waste!
According to Tech Watch, there are now 1.3 billion email users worldwide, while in 2008 some 210 billion emails crossed the ether. That's one heck of a marketing opportunity that a lot of companies missed.
Exploiting every emailEmails are powerful because of their directness. They connect senior decision-makers, bypassing administrators and middlemen. As a chance to reinforce the company brand and drive home a short, sharp, timely and targeted message, the medium is unsurpassed. Take a more marketing-savvy scenario. Here, the email signature contains not only the sender’s full business card details and a formal legal disclaimer, but also reference to awards that have been won by the company, and a timely sales plug for an event they’re taking part in next week. A simple opportunity for positive brand exposure, deftly exploited.
Topping and tailing emails correctly is about a matter of brand equity and campaign management; it’s about nurturing leads and winning business.
So why has the average business seemingly given email formatting and presentation so little thought? Other forms of correspondence employed by the business, even down to the way phone calls are handled, are likely to have been carefully brand-stamped, so how has email slipped under the radar?
For many companies, it's simply that the issue and the opportunity have 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, has meant that it has largely escaped the notice of the marketing controllers as a means of extending the brand experience.
In other cases, 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 can find, only to crash the entire email system when he sends it for the 6,000 time…)?
The intentions may be good, but the execution is often misguided and potentially harmful.
Automate campaign bannersThankfully, all of these challenges can be addressed -- by taking 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 into line and is exploited to its full marketing potential.
Simply by introducing an additional central tool, a company can ensure that no email leaves the server until it has been stamped with the agreed sign-off. This could be a formal signature that has been customised for the user, a timely campaign banner, a legal disclaimer, or any combination of the above.
Now, someone in marketing can be put in charge of the fonts and colour schemes that are used for email construction. They can dictate that Word is used (thereby imposing a spell-check); and that the agreed, compressed logo and signature, as well as any formal disclaimer, are attached to every outgoing message. But, more than that, they can start to innovate, by adding timely campaign content to the bottom of every email that leaves the company -- banners that can be added in an instant, and changed throughout the day if needed.
There need be no concern, then, that out-of-date messaging (for example: 'Come and see us at the X show next Tuesday') continues to be sent out after the event, as you won't be relying on individual users to add or update the banner content. By controlling such activities centrally, the company is no longer leaving the email brand experience to chance. What's more, the timing of campaign banners can be programmed in advance, guaranteeing that they appear only for fixed times.
Similarly, rules can be set to ensure that each email contains only one copy of a person's signature or the company disclaimer, thus ensuring that ongoing email threads don’t become bloated with repeated information.
Not forgetting mobile emailWith central control, email content sent from mobiles and PDAs can be controlled too, provided they pass through the company's Exchange server.
The devil is in the detail, certainly. From the customer who can't easily locate your number to call you back, to the missed opportunity because a business partner hadn't realised you were exhibiting at the same event, dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's really does matter.
The market is too turbulent to leave shoddy email practices unchecked, especially when such a simple solution is at hand. Where human error is even close to being a factor in the world's experience of your brand, as is proven to be the case with email, automation and central control is the only sure-fire way to stamp out bad practice.
Andrew Millington is the managing director of Exclaimer.
