Email marketing walks a fine line of effectiveness, but that doesn’t mean that it’s ineffective. In fact, mass emails can actually be a great tool for helping you establish, build, and maintain a strong brand recognition for your company. Everyone visits their email inbox at least once a day – which is good news for your company because it means that loyal customers are bound to see your name pop up in their inboxes regularly.
Brand recognition is all about building a strong relationship with your customers. Whether or not they open every email remains to be seen, but the more people see your brand’s name, the more likely it is that they’ll remember it. Here are 4 things you can do to make sure that they do:
Think of your mass emails as a sort of podcast given by the same people every week. They should have a specific tone and topic.
Give your emails a brand-specific tone and voice
Loyal customers are probably loyal because of a little thing called consistency. Deep down, people love the security of feeling like they know what to expect – so a big part of building your brand recognition through mass emails is making sure that they are receiving consistent emails that make them feel secure about their choice to join your mailing list. And one of the best ways to do that is by developing a brand-specific tone and voice for the body of your email.
Every good brand has a specific, but easily recognizable personality. Some choose to remain aloof, but friendly; others are deliberately rude to you. Regardless, people always know what to expect when they walk into your establishment or receive an email from you. It’s your job to make sure that you’re meeting those expectations. The body of every single one of the mass emails you send out should reflect your brand’s personality.
Stick to a consistent style of language, and your customers will feel like they know you. Just remember that whatever you choose, it should reflect your company’s core values. Many brands stick to using more colloquial language because it can reach a wider audience, but if your most loyal customers belong to a very niche group, you may not need to worry about reaching a wider audience. After all, the goal of brand recognition is to keep loyal customers, not necessarily outreach.
Loyalty breeds loyalty, so show your customers you care about them by simply including their names in your greeting.
Address you customers by their names
One of the biggest complaints people have about mass emails is that they seem so impersonal. How can you make someone feel like you’re actually speaking to them, rather than just sending out the same email to everyone who’s opted to join your mailing list? Obviously, you can’t actually personalize every single email you send out; no one has enough time and resources for that. But you can address your customers by name.
People feel good when you call them by their names. Regardless of whether they read your emails and recognize them for exactly what they are – mass emails – there is something undeniably satisfying about seeing their name in the greeting. And believe it or not, it’s actually really easy to do this using GMass. To set up your mailing list to address your customers by name, start off by keeping a record of all of your customers’ information in Google Sheets.
Use separate columns for things like their email addresses, their names, their mailing addresses, and so on. It’s also a good idea to keep separate columns for their first and last names. When you’re ready to send out your emails, then, all you need to do is import specific columns into your email, including the email address one into your address bar and the first name one into the greeting. From there, everything should match up.
Greeting your customers is just another part of every business transaction.
Send a welcome email to every new subscriber
Part of building a strong brand is to make people like you – and one of the best ways to make people like your brand is to treat them with courtesies that they may not necessarily be expecting but which they’ll appreciate nonetheless. A welcome email is one of those courtesies that shows them you are the kind of company that will appreciate your customers just as much as they’ll appreciate your services.
It’s good to have a welcome email pre-drafted that you can send out automatically to every new person who subscribes to receive emails from your brand. Like every other email you send out, your welcome email should reflect the voice that your company is trying to put out into the world, but you should also take a moment to thank your new subscriber for joining you and your company in your mission. That is, after all, the key to a person’s heart.
People love to feel like they are appreciated – and there is no better way to show appreciation than to thank someone and welcome them aboard. The more loved and appreciated your customers feel, the more likely they are to love and appreciate you back. And that means that they’re going to remember your company’s name, which is exactly what you need for good brand recognition.
Scheduling when you’ll send out your mass emails saves you a whole lot of stress.
Make a consistent schedule for sending mass emails
When we say consistency is a key part of building a strong brand recognition, that doesn’t just apply to tone and voice that you write into your emails. You’ll also need to set up a consistent schedule for when you’ll send out your mass emails. The goal should be to send emails regularly enough that people will see your name and begin to recognize it, but not so often that they feel like they’re under attack.
The more emails someone receives, the more likely they are to grow annoyed and unsubscribe from your mailing list. No one wants to have to sift through several of the mass emails you’ve sent out to find something that they really need to open. At the same time, though, you want to send emails frequently enough that people still see your name floating around in their inboxes on a regular basis.
To do this, then, we suggest sending out 3-5 emails per month. That way, you can be sure that you are neither bombarding them with your emails nor sending too few – and it also means that you won’t be sending an inconsistent number of emails from month to month. Your customers won’t have to worry about whether they’ll ever hear from you again one month, only to receive fifteen emails from you in the next. They’ll appreciate the consistency, and so will you.
Mass emails can be a really simple, but effective way to start building your brand awareness. After all, nearly everyone has an email account these days – and most people check it regularly. If your customers can see your brand’s name regularly in their inboxes, that is going to be the most effective way for you to build some recognition for your brand.