Have you ever played Pictionary?
Imagine you’re in your living room playing Pictionary with your friends, and you want to draw an email from your brand for them to guess.
Now think, how will you design this email so that it perfectly represents your brand and can be easily recognized by your friends?
Some ideas started to pop into your mind, right? Great! In a nutshell, this is what email branding is all about.
And if you have started to contemplate different ways of branding your emails to stand out in a crowded inbox and have them recognized by your recipients, then here’s some good news.
Below, you’ll find 9 promising tips for branding emails to make them easily recognizable by your subscribers.
But before hoping to do that, let’s understand the technicalities of email branding.
What Is Email Branding?
Email branding refers to using visual or textual elements (such as images, fonts, or social icons) and information in your email to represent your brand.
Benefits of Email Branding That Will Amaze You
Humans are emotional creatures. And you can build and sustain an emotional connection with your subscribers by email branding.
60% of companies believe that it’s important to maintain a strong and consistent brand while generating leads and communicating with existing customers.
Email branding increases your subscriber’s loyalty by growing recognition. As a result, the performance of your emails and sales also increases drastically.
Surprisingly, 86% of customers say that authenticity is essential for deciding which brands they like and support and email branding ensures the authenticity of a brand.
Moreover, the mere exposure effect in psychology says that people develop a preference for familiar things. And consistent branding increases familiarity among customers, and as a result, likeability and engagement also increase.
And you’ll be amazed to know that email branding also improves your sender's reputation resulting in improved email deliverability rates.
The advantages of branding emails are pretty astonishing, aren’t they? Now let’s talk about how you can brand your emails successfully.
9 Design Tips for Branding Emails Successfully
59% of shoppers prefer to purchase a new product from a brand familiar to them, and this familiarity can be achieved by remarkable branding.
So, we’ve listed 9 actionable tips to help you brand your emails and increase your customer’s trust and revenue.
1. Add your logo
Your logo is your virtual representative, so don’t forget to add this in your emails.
But, even though it’s super important, avoid adding a logo so large that it covers up most of the email’s space.
Always add it at the top of your email so that it’s the first thing that catches your recipient’s eye. Also, ensure that the colors of your logo stand out against your email’s background color and that the size and dimensions of your logos are almost always consistent.
2. Select a color palette for your brand
Have you ever picked clothes for a friend? And while you pick out a cute piece of clothing for them, you suddenly feel like, “Nah, this color doesn’t go with his/her personality.”
Picking up a color palette to represent your brand works the same way. Think for a while, does your brand represent ruggedness, excitement, sophistication, or what?
Then choose those colors to represent your brand in your email. For example, Redbull is a product that excites its customers, and all of its marketers keep this in mind by including the red color (color of excitement) in their emails and other advertisements.
Similarly, Apple represents sophistication, and all emails from Apple use colors that embody the same colors of black or metallic grey.
Just ensure that your selected colors should represent your brand. Also, remember to use the chosen color palette consistently as colors increase recognition.
However, you can use different colors for certain campaigns such as for Black Friday emails if you want to do something unusual for a certain campaign.
3. Use similar fonts in emails
The importance of fonts in brand recognition is really underestimated.
Don’t try to be too fancy with fonts; it becomes pretty repulsive. Try to keep things simple and only use 1 or 2 fonts per email.
We recommend you to use the same font as you have on your brand’s website as it shows consistency and will enable your subscribers to recognize you easily.
You can use different fonts for headings and subheadings if you want to play around. But again, don’t forget to keep things simple and readable.
In case of certain campaigns, you can be more creative with fonts too. For instance, if you’re sending a Halloween email, you can use a font that denotes spookiness; otherwise, keep the font style consistent.
Just remember one thing, your selected font style should ensure that your email copy is easily readable.
Speaking of using consistent font styles, Grammarly uses a uniform font style for all their emails, which makes them easily identifiable.
4. Have a consistent style for images
Another way to have a distinct brand identity is by having a consistent image style.
A human brain processes an image in only 13 milliseconds, and you can use those 13 milliseconds to create an impression on your recipients.
Just to be clear, we don’t mean you should embed similar images to your emails, just their style should be similar.
Select a standard size for each image. For instance, your feature image should be a specific size, and the secondary images should be a certain size. Once decided, use these selected sizes for all your emails.
Also, decide on an image resolution that fits your brand style and ensure that all the images you embed to your email have that resolution.
Lastly, if a certain style makes your images stand out, it can enable you to create your unique impression. For instance, some brands embed images with round borders while some with sharp ones. It’s a very subtle detail but can make your emails have a distinct identity.
5. Add company-centric images or videos
Another fruitful way of branding your emails is by adding images or videos in your emails that feature your brand or company in different ways.
For instance, you can embed pictures of your employees in your brand’s anniversary emails, or you can embed videos of your team members planting trees, etc.
This way, you will increase the credibility and validity of your brand. And the more credible you are, the more likely your customers are to purchase from you.
6. Have a consistent tone
“It’s not about what you said, it’s about how you said it.” Do these words ring a bell? The situation is quite similar in terms of your email copy.
Your email copy and subject lines are your advocates and spokesperson; make sure they have a distinct tone.
For instance, an email from Chubbies always lights up our mood because their writing style is so lively. So have a unique tone to make your brand easily recognizable.
Try to be natural and conversational, and use the same tone for all your emails. You shouldn't switch between humans and AI tools to write your emails. It’s a big no-no.
Just have a unique style and consistent style. BarkBox is famous for sending emails in a very casual tone, this makes their emails easily recognizable. Here’s one example of their casually written email.
7. Add your social media links
Another useful way of branding your email is by adding social media links to them.
This way, your subscribers can see you across different platforms, and they’ll be sure that you’re a credible source. This further increases their trust in your brand and their chances of engaging with your email.
8. Select email templates of a similar style
If you’re opting for ready-made email templates, make sure that their style is similar.
We’d recommend you get all your templates from a single source to have a similar style.
A piece of advice: get your predesigned email templates from Unlayer. They all have unique and distinct designs but are equally gorgeous. This way, every time your recipient sees a jaw-dropping email design, they will know it’s from you.
9. Flaunt your uniqueness
No matter big or small, don’t shy away from adding your brand’s slogan or unique elements.
Slogans can become really catchy if used consistently. On the other hand, a single icon can become your unique identity. For example, Nike’s swoosh alone speaks volumes for its brand identity.
Nike may have taken years to become recognizable but don’t forget every master was once a beginner. So choose an element that goes with your brand and flaunt it in all your emails.
Now that you know which design elements can help you brand your emails, let’s talk about what else you can do to have a noticeable identity.
Branding Practices That Make Your Emails More Likeable
In addition to the design tips mentioned above, you can also implement the following best practices to ensure that your emails have a unique brand identity.
Set and reinforce your principles
Each brand has its own set of principles, and you should exhibit these principles in your emails.
For instance, some brands love to support inclusivity and accessibility. So, they should consistently ensure that their emails are accessible to everyone by adding alt-text for images or designing emails for recipients with visual impairment.
Similarly, some brands give options to their readers to opt out of campaigns that might hurt their emotions in any way. Such as asking people to opt out from receiving Father’s Day email reminders.
Through these practices, you show your brand's empathetic side, and your recipients will have a very positive image of your brand.
Add personal touches
Be personal in your emails so that it gives off a humane touch.
Add your success stories, tell your customers why you value them so much, ask them about their feedback, etc.
These small gestures will help your customers interact more with your brand and increase their faith in you.
Send personalized emails
You can segment or divide your subscriber list based on their characteristics, such as demographics, purchase history, etc., to send triggered emails.
Important thing is that you need to do this consistently.
This way, your customers will establish that your brand sends them highly personalized emails, and they will get habitual of receiving them.
Set a frequency for your emails
Set a frequency for sending emails to your customers. For instance, you can send 1 email every month or every Tuesday.
This way, your customers will get used to receiving your emails after a certain time, and chances are that they might look forward to receiving your emails.
Don’t forget to innovate with every email
Remember, the goal here is to stay consistent and not boring. So don’t stop experimenting and adding new things to your plate.
But remember to introduce 1 new idea or design feature per email so that your readers are still able to recognize you through your emails.
Some Golden Advice for Your Team
Branding emails do not demand consistency in email only but also in the team members who create them.
Here’s some advice for you and your team that might come in handy when working on email branding.
Align your email’s goal with your brand’s goal
Your team should design emails while keeping in mind that your brand’s goals align with the goals of your email.
For instance, your brand's goals can be increasing revenue, building trust, or both. So, you can design your emails with prominent and well-placed Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons to increase sales. On the other hand, you can grow trust by asking for reviews and sharing personal content.
Mutually understand your brand’s design guidelines
You should have a set of branding guidelines that are created with the help of your designers, copywriters, and head of marketing (or whoever you think is necessary for the process).
These guidelines can include the following questions;
What are the must-have elements that your branded emails should have?
What are the agreed-upon variations in the design of the logo or color palette?
What should be the tone of your emails?
What should be the size/resolution of the images in your emails?
What should be the size and placement of the logo in your emails?
How many social media buttons can you add to your email, and where to add them?
Now, this is just a sample guideline. You can create one according to your brand. These guidelines will increase your team's efficiency and the performance of your emails once implemented. You can use approval software to manage your workflow and ensure alignment with brand guidelines.
Top 3 Branding Emails to Take Inspiration From
Now that you know everything about email branding, it’s time for your to take inspiration from emails who mastered the art of branding.
Apple
Today, Apple is a name that needs no introduction. And they’ve achieved this position through consistent branding practices and obvious innovations in their products.
Apple’s brand personality represents sophistication, and all their emails have a very sophisticated style.
Look at the color scheme, the simple header, and their renowned logo placed right at the top. Even if someone shows you this email out of the blue, you’d be able to recognize its sender, Apple before even reading what it says.
Dunkin’ Donuts
Again an email whose sender you can easily guess by just looking at it.
Dunkin’ Donuts almost always uses the same font in their email that is used in their name. Also, they branded this Mother’s Day email with a cute little donut (their product) in the middle of their email.
Not to mention the pink and orange colors in the email scream the name of its sender as well.
Overall, they have a very consistent email branding style as they use this pink color a lot in their emails, and they feature 1 of their product in each email.
Magic Spoon
Magic Spoon has done a remarkable job at email branding over the years.
All their emails have this peppy theme, and almost all their emails will have a hint of the purple color. Also, they have this unique style of writing the crux of their email in the email header with 3 or 4 simple words.
If you also receive emails from them, you’ll know how consistent they have been with their email branding practices.
Takeaways
Well, email branding may seem like a piece of cake to you now after knowing these quick, actionable tips.
But it can only be successful if you put in a lot of dedication, do a lot of brainstorming, and most importantly, have consistency.
So, all you should do is get your thinking hats on, implement the tips mentioned above in your future campaigns and jot down some points for your branding guidelines. And after a few practices, you’ll be able to create high-performing branded emails.
Found this article insightful? Then you should also check out these blogs to gather more tips on creating outstanding emails.
