How many times have you written an email that sounds disgruntled when you read it, but it means nothing close to it? Meanings and intentions can easily get mixed up when communicating with your audience through an email.
Rectifying and aligning your brand voice can not only help you avoid such situations but establish your personal brand too. Wondering how the right positioning of your email marketing strategy can turn it into a branding tool? Here’s how!
What is personal branding?
Personal branding is a set of tactics that help in building trust and credibility, and move beyond a mere recognizable logo. Establishing a personal brand can add an edge over your competitors and give you an excellent opportunity to convey your story to your audience.
On the flip side, most companies cannot thrive without a personal branding strategy, causing stifled growth right after the business has taken off.
How to develop your personal brand through emails?
Developing your personal brand through emails is easier said than done. However, the right personal branding strategies can set you up for success without breaking a sweat! Here’s more:
Make a great first impression.
Don’t let your subscribers forget you! Introduce yourself first. Don’t try to sell your products rather strike up a natural conversation. This is because customers can connect well with people rather than with a business. Ensure an adequate degree of openness by telling them what they can expect from future conversations.
Your subscribers are more likely to engage with you if you make an unforgettable first impression. This can be done with an inspiring story or by communicating your brand vision. Your first impression must be a mix of values, personality, skills and voice. However, ensure a consistent style, tone and language.
Needless to say, a blast email series will not even get you close to the desired level of personalization.
Audit the personal brand equity
Conduct an audit of where you are now and where you envision your brand to be in the future. Consider the resources, stages, capital, communications and strategies required in this process. This audit will help you shift to your envisioned brand proposition.
Consider your target customers’ opinions about your brand. Outline your social connections and your current status with your target groups. That will help you gauge where you stand in your preferred social setting. Market research is yet another important component to see if your self-assessment aligns with your current image.
Look for feedback from your target audience to bridge gaps. Take a look at the feedback from previous customers who have had negative experiences with your brand. This can help you get honest feedback. You can also assess a brand that has done the work and has made it to the top! Check out their social skillsets, credentials, and traits. What are the attributes from their side that can help your portfolio?
Construct a brand narrative
What story does your brand wish to convey, and how? Here’s where the brand narrative comes in. Your narrative cannot be a jumbled-up description; rather, it must be built on the stories you wish to communicate to your audience. Your brand narrative must be authentic, positive, and unique, which will help you stand out!
It is also key to note that the brand narrative cannot exist in isolation. It must run parallel with the brand tonality. Bridging these gaps makes the brand narrative memorable, persuasive, and resonating.
Communicate the brand story
Ever wondered why communicating the brand’s story, mission, and vision is important? Communicating your brand story helps you strike a chord with the audience. Needless to say, this communication can be done through multiple relevant verticals.
Social interactions can also move your brand communications a step forward. A relevant social media plan can communicate the brand story more vividly. It also serves the purpose of increasing discoverability and awareness.
Effective brand communication can be done by leveraging content verticals such as videos, blogs, podcasts, press releases, and others in your email. Further ratings, recommendations, likes, comments, shares, and retweets are some other golden nuggets that you can add to your emails. While communicating your brand story, ask yourself:
- Is it relatable?
- How recognizable is it?
- How often do people see it?
You can use emails to share your brand story with influencers, online communities, portals, or promotors who can give your brand a boost. This approach can establish authority, expertise, and positive and strong relationships.
Re-evaluate and make adjustments
Nothing is perfect! And that’s why continuous evaluations are imperative to achieving your desired results. Track and analyze results; in simpler terms, gauge what’s working and what’s not! Make adjustments to your messaging, email frequency, timing, and audience segments as and when required. After all, you wouldn’t want to be left behind!
Segment and define your target audience
Build your email list with people you are sure will be interested in your brand story. Understand their goals, challenges, pain points, buying patterns, and preferences. This will not only show that you care for them but also ensure that these emails speak to them.
Additionally, you must also offer a solution that matches their budget, timelines, and expectations. Gauge their customer journey to send personalized communications to each reader. This ensures that no stone is left unturned when the email marketing funnel is set up.
You can look for common interests, character traits, preferences, and buying patterns that can help you out in the future. Consider how you can connect passions, interests, and goals. These efforts have a significant benefit in terms of skyrocketing revenue. As per a study by Campaign Monitor, marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue through segmented campaigns. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?
Customer journey
Personalization becomes way easier when you understand your customer’s journey. Consider the daily choices of your customers. How can you shape your operations to solve your customers’ problems? How can you create smooth and superior experiences for your customers?
The above questions can give you additional insights into the direction of the emails.
Know your goals
Begin by defining the purpose of your emails. Create an audit about who needs to read your emails and the difference it can make. Knowing your goals (short-term and long-term) will help you craft your communication and strategy accordingly. You will need a vision and a mission to gauge your goals. Here are some points to consider:
- What value does your brand embody when offering solutions?
- The significance of the message for your audience
- Considering past decisions, actions and experiences can help you paint a realistic picture
Create compelling content
Emphasize creating a campaign that aligns with the customer’s needs. The campaign must also comprehensively answer the audience’s questions. Strike the right balance between educating and entertaining your audience. Furthermore, tell your audience what to do. Ensure that the content aligns with the brand tone or narrative.
Nothing like personalization
As per Statista, the open rates for emails with personalized messages grew to 18.8%, compared to 13.1% in 2016 without personalization. Now that’s what I call a significant jump. Building a personal brand requires one-to-one communication. Brands must communicate with their customers as they would with someone in person.
Moreover, when personalized, your brand personality flashes in your customer’s minds every time your message lands in their inbox. Besides being relevant, you can also find commonalities between your brand and your target audience.
Do more than just promote
Add value with domain-specific knowledge resources. For example, brands that sell bed linens should write about the types of fabrics and the upsides of picking specific fabrics or mixing the right colors or designs with your interiors. Or else your customers will only see you as a brand that is concerned about sales.
Maintain visual consistency
Ensure consistency and uniformity with all your marketing elements to spread brand awareness. This includes brand elements such as colors, banners, fonts, typography, pop-ups, tonality, and others. Visual consistency can also be ensured by adding a relevant video or a GIF to your emails. However, you must also ensure that you don’t overload your emails with graphics or visual elements. Maintaining consistency will also extend to the frequency and timing of your emails.
Engage with education and entertainment
Your audience could be interested in knowing what’s new in the industry. Education positions you as an expert in the domain. Therefore, it’s best to keep your audience posted about current trends, best practices, industry news, tips and tricks, and more. Gauge what you do best and educate your audience on what they would like to learn from you. Besides that, add a dash of entertainment to ensure that too much education doesn’t overwhelm your audience.
Study the metrics
Building your brand is a continuous effort! You must regularly check your email marketing strategy’s health and performance to evaluate if you are on the right track. As a crucial parameter, you must gauge your email performance, list health, and unsubscribe requests.
Studying the metrics gets much easier with automation. Automated email marketing tools showcase comprehensive results as a big picture. It also helps you manage your campaigns without the risks of manual error and work overload.
The Future of Personal Branding
With the current pace at which brands are growing, personal branding is a global phenomenon. As technology and social media evolve, so will personal branding. The growth and prevalence of AI are far from slowing down; rather, personal branding is expected to see an increase in reliance on automation and AI.
AI-powered tools and bots can help with content creation, managing and handling social media handles, and personalized customer engagements. Visual and video content are the quickest and most feasible ways to spread and consume content. This makes the growth of visual and video content inevitable in the future. This is due to enhanced production and editing tools.
This growth is expected to be a drastic boost, with new options on the horizon such as AR, filters, and other effects. Establishing your brand through emails can be exciting; let’s make it that way!
What we have to say
It will take time and effort, but it is worth the effort. The change in the market is inevitable. If you don’t have a personal branding strategy, your next product will only be another product in the heap of existing ones on the market. Emails have outgrown their simple purpose of communicating a message. And that’s why there is a lot that can be achieved with this mode of communication.
As the face of personal branding continues to change, organizations globally are reinventing the way it can be established through emails. Establishing your personal brand through emails while juggling multiple balls in your business can be overwhelming! Rather than using emails just as a sales and communication tool, why not use them for branding?
I believe presenting your brand to the world should be exciting; why not make it that way? Take a look at the big picture with engagement tracking and detailed campaign reports with Icegram Express and supercharge your personal branding through emails.
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