Every email is an opportunity to reinforce your brand and relay your latest news, press or events to an accepting audience.
Email stationery enhances everyday business emails by adding unobtrusive HTML and Plain Text components.There are a number of considerations to be made:
1.Your Regulatory Environment
Your first point of call is to contact your legal department, they will have a clear understanding of the regulatory environment of your business.
Things that might be affected by your regulatory environment:
- Location, length, notification of data storage
- Is the content private, personal or business
2. Regionalised email laws
Two note worthy laws are the "CAN SPAM" act of North America and the European Union data protection act.
It is important to note that the law of the recipients country takes preference.
More can be found here: http://www.spamlaws.com
The above mentioned laws specifically relate to the sending of "unsolicited commercial emails" a.k.a spam.
When branding business emails, there seems to be only the UK companies act (updated 2007), that states all business communication must include company registration, place of registration and registered offices. This is also a requirement of the US CAN SPAM act
3. Standardising corporate brand and identity
I received an email from a friend who works for the Metropolitan Police and was completely left speechless by her signature, a tiny waving cat and lurid coloured name and telephone number.This seems to be quite a common phenomena when the business is unable to provide an email branding solution.
The answer is to have a system in place (software or hardware) that allows you to manage one central template without having to log into multiple systems, or heaven forbid multiple end user machines.
4. Disclaimers, Confidentiality, Privacy Statements
Contrary to popular belief, disclaimers carry no legal weight. It's merely added to attempt to limit liability and is as of yet has not been proven in a court of law to be successful.This does not mean you should ignore disclaimers. Its better to have it and not need it, than not have it and suddenly it becomes legally acceptable.
Confidentiality statements in its nature is slightly different and if used correctly can be a successful deterrent to unauthorised distribution of your content.
Confidentiality disclaimer should be the first content the recipient reads. There is no point in having it at the end of an email after the recipient has read the content of the email.
5. Personalised Business cards (contact details)
Sure I can look at the email address and try to figure out the persons name and website, But why should I?
Their competitor had all their details where I could find them, and guese what? I went with the competitor
So please do add the following to your email branding:
- Name & surname
- Telephone number and / or Mobile
- Website address
- Company address
6. Marketing Messages
Whether its telling the companies story, boasting about your latest press coverage or inviting recipients to your latest event.
Its important to show the recipients of your business emails that your company is out there and active.
As long as you keep it unobtrusive and relevant, it will be an invaluable and easy scalable solution.
Whether its telling the companies story, boasting about your latest press coverage or inviting recipients to your latest event.
Its important to show the recipients of your business emails that your company is out there and active.
As long as you keep it unobtrusive and relevant, it will be an invaluable and easy scalable solution.
7. Disclaimer Breeding
As mentioned in point four, disclaimers carry no real legal weight and asking someone to scroll through pages and pages of disclaimers to follow an email chain is just not going to help with their mood. We have all been there, we have all shared the pain.
Ensure your email branding system allows for the attachment of only one disclaimer per email chain. If it cant do it, try another system.
8. Group based stationery
Think about having separate email stationery for different business groups or regions. The marketing department will not necessarily be sending out the same contextual messages as the support department or management.
Ideally you should have a system in place that allows you to take advantage of existing business groups set up. For example Microsoft Active Directory.
9. Opt-out messages
Now I hear your ask, "Opt-out messages in business emails?", yes however I'm not talking about opting out of communication as in "eblast / newsletter opt-outs" but rather opting out of receiving your branded business emails.This can be as simple as providing a template that has no images and just the basic of HTML to ensure a consistent brand look and feel.
Put the decision in the hands of the recipients by including a, "To no longer receive images in emails from us please click here", mechanism and then insuring their wishes are upheld.
phew.. ok almost done...
10. HTML and Plain Text
Ensure that you design both a plain text as well as HTML version of your email stationery.
All email travel the internet as multipart messages, three of those parts are HTML, Plain text and attachments.
By creating both versions, you ensure that if someone only views your email in plain text, they still receive contact details and disclaimers.
11. Embedding images
For me this is probably the most important point when deciding to brand business emails. Ensure your business email images are embedded.
The benefit is that you will not get a big security warning about privacy when opening up business email (see image). These warnings indicate that one or more images are linked and stored on an external server.
By downloading these images, the sender not only has full visibility of when the email was opened but also of the recipients IP address, System information (operating system, browser, email client) and a whole bunch of other information. Hence the big yellow security warning.
Conclusion
As you can see there are many considerations to take in to account when doing email branding. There is never been a better time. Email is at the height of its power, its been adopted, embraced and integrated into not only business but into our everyday lives.For impartiality sake I make no suggestions as to which service or software to use. Just drop "Business email branding" into google and you will get a long list of decent services.
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