Branded Email is the new Black

You know how it is, every season designers come out with trends and grey [or pink, or blue, or...] is the new black. That is, it’s THE colour to be seen in. Well in marketing, BRANDED EMAIL is the new black. And I just couldn’t resist mixing the ‘darling’ culture with ‘marketing technology’:

This is the ‘new’ activity to add to your marketing mix – the ability to add marketing messages to your everyday email without your company/client users needing to do anything.  It’s very powerful, centrally controlled, very easy to implement, very flexible, means everyone sending email becomes a marketer and overcomes a lot of the challenges with email marketing today.

I say ‘new’ in quotes, because I came across branded email about 5 years ago. At that time it was called something else, which escapes me, mainly because it hadn’t really arrived and had lots of different names and descriptions depending on who was supplying the technology. At that time, it was very clunky and cumbersome and was nowhere near as transparent to the user as it is today and worse, it only worked with a few email setups and only then if you reconfigured your whole IT infrastructure [OK, I exaggerate - but you get the drift].

But this year, branded email has really come of age and I truly believe it will become the next ‘big thing’ in marketing promotion – especially in the post economic downturn era where sales are king and marketing budgets are tight.

Basically, branded email adds a graphical banner to your emails. Get excited. The banner is added to emails that are sent from ‘the company’. That is all and every email that your company sends so everyone gets to hear about you, your products, your services, your events, your promotions.

• Marketing (or your agency) create the email banners.
• The user creates an email as normal and sends it.
• When it arrives at the recipient inbox they see the email that was created but it also includes a marketing message.
• The message can be anything the company wants, e.g.
• ‘See us at xxx show’,
• ‘Please note we have a new telephone number’,
• ‘XYZ product has just been updated to version 99, click to download’ etc.

I think you probably get the drift. But the most important factors here are that the user does nothing. The company promotes its current brand messages – from every user. The company (marketing, IT, HR, CEO, MD) gets to choose what messages are sent and by whom. When the messages are sent e.g. if you are running an event then you can time banners to start and end displaying at a specific time. You can override banners so that  only specific banners show at specific times. You can exclude senders or indeed receivers. Basically it does what you want how you want it – which is pretty much a first in marketing terms – OK exaggerating again, but you know how many times you have bought ‘that product’ only to find that you have to change the way you work or live to get it working for you. Well this isn’t one of those.

CLICK TO ENLARGE. Create email, banner automatically inserted from library. Job done.

So why is this so important?

Because it’s a way of managing that hidden marketing resource – your customers, your prospects and your suppliers. Everyone but everyone in marketing and sales knows that referral marketing is the most powerful form of promotion and sales. Branded email is referral [and reminder] marketing.

• You send your email to your contacts.
• They open it because they trust you and are doing business with you so want to open and read it.
• They see your email, but they also see your marketing message in the form of a banner.
• They may click through or they may refer it to a colleague or friend or a business contact.When they click you are notified – so even if you don’t want to pounce straight away, you can mention in conversation details of what they clicked on.
• They might see a message you have and do a mental click of the fingers to remind themselves that you provide that service or product.So you don’t lose that additional opportunity.

How many times have you chastised yourself or your sales team when a long term customer buys a product or service from one of your competitors because they ‘didn’t know you supplied it’. Let’s face it we’re all guilty of that – we talk to prospects about our offerings, we mention at the beginning of the relationship our full portfolio, then focus on what we are supplying relying on branding and marketing to remind them of the bigger picture. But in all truth everyone needs direct reminding about what you provide – and this does it without the embarrassment of having to talk to a client who says ‘Thanks but don’t pressurise me…’.

Branded email takes each of your messages and cuts them into bite sized nuggets, and inserts into successive emails. You and your users do nothing. The messages are created and rotated for you. Marketing controls who actually sends messages, when the messages are sent and who should and shouldn’t receive them.

You have got to take a look.

I’m biased, a convert and I love it. I love it because of all the reasons above but I love it the most because one of the biggest challenges our clients always face is databases. Sourcing them, managing them and keeping them up to date.

Your company has a targeted, regularly cleaned, unused database in everybody’s address book. This releases the database and its contacts and puts them to good use. Marketing don’t even have to manage the data because it’s managed by everyone individually in their email address books.

And the most wonderful thing about this?

The contacts in your address book all know they are going to receive messages from you. So your email domain name is accepted by them, white-listed, de-spammed, un-junk-mailed – however you want to reference it – and your message always gets through. So delivery rates are 100%, click thrus are tracked and promotion is up.

So does it work?

A recent survey using this method showed that click-thru rates averaged between 6%-20% compared with email marketing click thru rates of 1%-5%.

Check it out here. I’m a believer and a convert – but you probably got that

5 reasons why you need to ramp up online marketing

Moving online has happened for most businesses and is seen as a standard piece of the business plan. But in the last couple of years many companies have started to question the value of an online presence, not because they think it isn’t viable, but to ensure they are maximizing their presence and have a coherent strategy. The massive rise of Twitter and usage of all the social media routes to market has bought a wider awareness to marketing. Once the domain of the marketing department, social media has expanded the marketing remit to just about everybody who needs to promote their business.

But the recent ‘cold snap’ has accelerated this even further with companies facing a normal slow start to the year seeing their workforces unable to travel to work and business grinding to a virtual halt. Online presence and marketing of the company has jumped quickly to the top of the to do list as an activity that really needs to be in place. Those companies that were already utilising their web presence fully were geared up to keep business moving, while those that had a web presence that was effectively just an information portal, realised that they weren’t getting full ROI from their online activities.

So the cold weather is a sharp reminder that online marketing in all forms – email, social media, web marketing, advertising etc – needs to be in place and effective otherwise it ends up just being a ‘me too’ activity that a company feels it must do to be ‘included’.

There are 5 main reasons why your business should be online and active:

1. With more and more people online, the internet is the best place to ‘be seen’. When busy people are looking for a product, they go to a search engine like Google and type in what they’re looking for. Quicker, easier and more convenient. And the current generation of management, your audience, have always done it this way, so you need to be attractive to today’s business decision makers.  
2. On the internet, your business is running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week even while you’re fast asleep. This is key to ensuring that you are available to a worldwide audience.
3. Running a website is much cheaper. Content Managed Systems put you in control of website content and enable you to react to market changes and promote items quickly. But make sure you evaluate your CMS choice to match your business, see my previous blog on CMS selection.
4. Advertising and promoting online is hassle-free and much cheaper too. Email marketing is still an efficient medium to target messages and cost effective for any size audience. With self managed email portals you are also in control of professional communication.
5. Social media is the way forward for marketing campaigns, you need to be there, but you need to use the right tools for the job. Twitter is good for some promotion approaches but you really need evaluate the different social media  routes to market in relation to your audience profile. (download Twitter guide here)

 These are some of the key reasons to be online, but the your main reason is to be prepared so that your business doesn’t suffer when we get the next cold snap – besides, don’t you want to be at home with the kids or your neighbours building snowmen or testing skis while your business is still running?

Oh, and I nearly forgot, we (Insight) recently launched a combined web CMS and email marketing solution that costs just £150 a month and puts you firmly in control of your online presence. You have to visit this page to view the Dylan cue card video featuring online markeitng