If you’re trying to grow and maintain a loyal customer base, brand marketing is essential. Your company branding is its identity. While your products may serve a customer’s needs, your brand is what allows you to cultivate relationships with your audience by appealing to their lifestyle and tastes. The importance of branding is clear: it helps you attract even more customers and boosts the likelihood that current ones will make future purchases.
Although there are many forms of digital branding and marketing a company can adopt, email marketing should always be part of the strategy. Despite being a traditional marketing tactic, email remains one of the most effective, even among millennials.
You can leverage email for your business branding to improve your overall strategy and marketing efforts. Here’s how:
Use Company Branding to Boost Loyalty
A brand isn’t just a combination of marketing content designed to evoke a certain personality. As popular examples like Apple have demonstrated, strong brand strategy and brand storytelling can help you create a group of loyal followers. Although they may not belong to the company, they still feel as though they’re somehow connected to what you are doing. Experts like Seth Godin describe this concept as a “tribe” that customers feel they are a part of.
Email newsletters are one of the most effective forms of digital branding and marketing when it comes to translating your brand into a tribe. That’s because email marketing reaches each individual customer in their inbox.
On top of that, they had to sign up for your email list to receive messages from you. Thus, they may be privy to information and offers that customers who encounter your brand marketing in other ways (social media, search engine results) might not be.
That’s why it’s often a good idea to segment and personalize your email lists. The more you can make a customer feel like you respect them as an individual, the more likely they are to feel a personal connection with your brand. You can also target customers with product branding efforts and relevant promotions more effectively when you segment your lists.
However, promotional deals aren’t the only types of emails you should send. Business branding involves establishing a set of values both you and your base support. About 20% of your emails in any given campaign should speak to those values. You can send editorials or incorporate videos into your email that feature important people sharing opinions that reflect your brand’s key principles or inspirational messages that correspond with your values. You can even follow Red Bull’s example by sending useful content that matches your customer’s lifestyle and interests.
By focusing branding and marketing efforts on creating a tribe, you’re more likely to create a loyal customer base.
Business and Product Branding Enhances the Customer Journey
When developing a brand marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that very few people make personal connections with a brand right away. The importance of company and product branding corresponds to the importance of the customer journey. You need to guide a customer through various steps, from their initial encounter with your business to the point where they are dedicated and loyal to it.
That’s another reason email can enhance your branding and marketing tactics. Email campaigns are useful because you can consistently rely on your messages reaching your audience. That’s not always the case with social media ads or other forms of digital branding.
This allows you to design a campaign based on the customer journey. The first email will welcome new subscribers, while the next five or so should focus on the problem you can solve for them.
The following five (these numbers will vary depending on your needs and industry vertical) will establish why your product offers the ideal solution,. Finally, the remaining emails can improve your product branding by showing how it has already benefited people like your target customer. This type of digital branding strategy makes it easier to add members to your tribe.
You can only achieve this attention to detail surrounding the customer journey through email. While you shouldn’t discount other digital branding and marketing tactics, you should also remember that email is one of the best ways to establish your company’s identity. By reaching customers directly, you can share your values, celebrate their lifestyle, and boost overall loyalty. The potential benefits of doing so are practically countless.