How to protect your brand identity over corporate email

Did you know that an estimated 333 billion emails were sent and received every day in 2022? This makes email the number one communication channel used by businesses across the world. Which is why it’s essential to understand how those emails impact your brand identity. 

Strong corporate branding is critical to long-term business success. But if you’ve ever been through the painful process of creating company branding, you know it can be a time consuming and costly business. It takes time and money to understand which of your core values resonate with your target customers. This often involves a lot of trial and error to convey those values authentically and consistently across every aspect of your business. 

So, getting your branding right matters. A great brand identity means increased brand recognition and reputation, which ultimately leads to greater loyalty and a higher customer lifetime value (CLV). And once you’ve established a successful company brand, you work hard to protect it by circulating detailed branding guidelines, applying for trademarks, and offering levels of customer service that reflect the brand identity you’ve built. 

But what about all those business emails flying back and forth every day? Are they promoting your hard-won brand identity, or could they actually be undermining it? 

How corporate email affects brand reputation 

People want to do business with brands they can rely on. According to a customer engagement survey from Salesforce.com, 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. It doesn’t matter how much you shout about the quality of your products and services; if your business emails are telling a different story, your brand reputation will suffer. 

Every email your organization sends is as critical to your brand reputation as a correctly rendered logo. In fact, there’s a key component of those emails that plays a vital role in building your brand reputation: your email signatures. 

Leaving email signature branding to individuals and disparate departments inevitably results in, at best, missed opportunities and inconsistency and, at worst, gradual degradation of your brand reputation.  

Without adequate control, here’s what can happen with corporate email signatures: 

• Employees, unaware of the overall brand strategy, might adapt their email signatures to suit their own individual needs or that of their department.  

• Branding guidelines gather dust as the wrong fonts are used, brand colors are applied incorrectly, and out-of-date logos persist long after they’ve been replaced.  

• Contact details and web links change, events and announcements pass, but the email signature stays the same.  

Even if staff are great at following branding guidelines, there’s so much more your email signatures could be doing, all day, every day, to enhance your brand, communicate core values, prompt engagement, gather customer data, and build trust. 

Consistently formatted email signatures with accurate contact details create a sense of authority and reliability more powerfully than any sales messaging. 

Unleashing the power of brand identity in your corporate emails 

We all appreciate emails that get to the point quickly and deliver us information we actually want. Give your audiences relevant information within an email signature rather than burying it within the message body itself. It’ll mean you can load any email with useful material without frustrating the recipient.  

Prompts to access live deals or discounts, announcements about keynote speakers, recent award wins, recent blog posts, links to application forms – all these can be presented consistently and concisely in a beautifully branded email signature. Plus, the sender doesn’t need to spend time figuring out which events or deals to promote, what words to use, or how to weave a sales pitch into the message they’re sending. The information will be easily accessible in the email signature, and the recipient can engage with it on their own terms. 

Exclaimer pro tips on creating perfectly branded email signatures every time 

You might find managing email signatures across your organization a frustrating and time-consuming task. But it really doesn’t need to be.  Even when you’re working across multiple regions, languages, and devices, have numerous marketing campaigns running, and a host of different messages to convey.  

Here are our top tips on how to nail consistent branding in your email signatures with ease: 

1. Centrally control your corporate email signatures using email signature management software like Exclaimer’s.

   
   

2. Design the perfect email signature template that can easily be adapted by country, department, or campaign. 

   
   

3. Get the help of a graphic designer to get banners designed in-line with your corporate branding. 

   
   

4. Create different templates for various departments with tailored content for each. 

With Exclaimer, your brand identity and messaging can be controlled centrally by the marketing team. IT only needs to be involved in the setup, so email signatures work in line with your strategic marketing plan, containing perfectly branded and up-to-date content. 

Make your email signature branding work smarter  

Choose the most powerful email signature software for establishing your corporate identity and marketing your brand effectively to diverse stakeholders.

Learn more about Exclaimer or register for a free demo today.