Email might just be the best way to build brand awareness, and yet, few people think of email and brand awareness together. Much of this has to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of what brand awareness is, and how it works to produce more sales.
When people think of brand awareness, they think it’s just about people being aware of your mere existence. It actually goes much further than that. Brand awareness is about staying top-of-mind more than anything else.
It is also about making sure people are familiar with what you offer. And I don’t mean that just in a general sense. Your products, services and offerings are ever-evolving. Hence, building familiarity and awareness about what you offer is an on-going process.
How to Use Email Marketing for Brand Awareness
One of the biggest secrets behind email marketing is that it allows you to gradually build a relationship with someone. It allows you to demonstrate authority, provide lots of value and build a sense of trust. These are all core principles of email marketing in general as well.
If all you do is apply the basics, plus educate subscribers about your services and products, you have it made. Brand awareness is pretty much a given if you apply the core principles of email marketing. Now I know you want more than a vague generalization, so let’s actually dive into the specifics to implementing this.
Funnel everyone into your email list
You might have noticed that successful companies funnel everyone into their email lists. This is done for some really good reasons. First, it is because email is the only way to “truly own a lead”. With every other channel, it is the platform that owns the lead, not you or your business.
For example, if you build out a social media presence, your fans aren’t actual leads that you own. The company can just decide to take them away from you at a moment’s notice. The same is true if you’re building a following using something like YouTube or Twitter.
You can wake up one day and find out that the algorithm has changed, completely. Your content is no longer shown to your followers or subscribers. And there’s nothing you do about it. With email you can decide who receives what kind of messaging from you, and when. And email is literally the only channel where you can do this.
The other major reason successful businesses try to funnel everyone into their email list?
Email allows you to work a lead wherever they’re at. Thanks to personalization and segmentation it can work with people anywhere on that customer journey.
For example, assume someone has a new business. They’re looking into your kind of service out of curiosity. Odds are that they’re unlikely to need a service like yours this week, this month, or even this year. But they know that as their business grows, they’ll eventually need something like what you provide.
With email you can send them just the type of “early-interest” content that’s just right for them. And you can use just the right frequency necessary to maintain awareness until they’re ready. And when the time comes, guess who they think of first? Eventually they’ll get to the stage where their business is ready to leverage a service or product like yours. Odds are, they will go to you directly. At least if you’ve done a consistent job of building on that awareness.
This is almost impossible with other channels. It’s not possible to personalize and segment like you can with email. When you post a video, tweet or post, it goes to everyone. This is regardless of where they are at in their customer journey. Only email allows you to build custom journeys based on where a lead is at. But more on that when we get to personalization and segmentation.
Study email marketing
Much of what you do to build brand awareness is the same thing as “great email marketing” in general. For example, if you study email marketing, you learn that engagement is your main metric of success. If you’re getting people to open your emails and click your links, you’re doing a great job.
By creating high-engagement rates, you kickstart the habit-formation process, engage in a relationship building process, and also make sure to keep your brand top-of-mind. And remember, much of brand awareness is about staying top of mind.
Now, engagement is just one example of a core email marketing principle that applies to building brand awareness. In general, I would say that mastering the basics will make you an expert at creating brand awareness. So how do you study and master email marketing?
Well, the good news is that we produce a lot of great educational guides just like this one. To make sure you get these, just grab yourself a forever-free Emercury account. It’s probably the most generous free-email-plan out there. And on top of that, we send you these free educational guides right as we produce them.
Produce valuable, educational, engaging content
If you want “the one thing to focus on” in order to do good email marketing, this is it. If you ever feel overwhelmed with mastering or implementing email marketing, I have a tip for you. Just like with everything else out there, it’s about prioritizing the stuff that matters most.
And when it comes to email marketing, if you want to really simplify it, just think “send a bunch of valuable content”. You can never go wrong with that. Now, I’m not saying to never go beyond just this goal. Obviously one can oversimplify. You do want to focus on implementing the other steps in this guide as well.
However, if you did nothing else except send valuable content frequently enough, a lot of the other stuff falls into place. You will automatically get decent engagement, build authority and a sense of trust with your audience. That in turn will keep you top-of-mind and build that brand awareness.
Understand frequency and timing
Frequency issues are some of the most common issues I see with the email marketers. Most tend to vary between spurts of sending too many emails, and then months of no communication. This is a horrible practice for many reasons, and it will hurt your relationship with the email providers.
It is important to adopt a regular, steady frequency and get your subscribers accustomed to it. This is a point we have to make a lot in email marketing, even in general. However, when it comes to building brand awareness, it is even more important.
In a way the term “building brand awareness” might be misleading. It’s not just something you build once, and you’re done. It’s actually an ongoing process. You’re constantly working to stay top-of-mind with the subscriber. And email frequency has a lot to do with that.
Now, I wish I could tell you what the right frequency for your list is, but it totally depends. These are generalized guides, so I can just give generalized advice. If you want to have a more specific discussion, consider booking a free demo where we can discuss how you can grow your business with the help of the Emercury platform and email marketing.
Now, if I do have to give generalized advice, I’d recommend keeping two things in mind. The first is to realize that consistency is more important than anything else. As long as you stay consistent on a schedule, you’ll do well, even if the frequency or timing isn’t yet ideal.
The second thing is to keep testing and iterating. You will learn what frequency works best for the different segments by seeing what works. Again, I wish I could get more specific, but that’s only possible if we get into a one-on-one conversation. So consider booking a free demo while I still am able to do these.
Do send product and service updates
I find it interesting that I often have to coach marketers that it’s ok to send product and service updates to a list. The reason why they need to be told this? Ironically, a lot of email marketing advice oversells the idea of making your list all about super-valuable content.
Yes, it is true you should prioritize valuable content. However, that doesn’t mean your list should only be about giving valuable advice to your audience. You’re allowed (and should) talk about your product, brand and services. And you should send updates to your list anytime you have something exciting to share with them.
Now, obviously, you do need to balance things out. Fortunately, with personalization you can send more updates to “fans”, and less frequent updates to those who aren’t at that level yet. So if you segment things correctly, you can adopt two different strategies.
With “fans” you can share product, service and brand updates a lot more frequently. You might even share every little product change and update separately. Whereas with other segments you would try to keep it to the more exciting major news.
Alternatively, you can batch all updates into a larger update email. You might send some segments a monthly update, and other segments might only get the highlights for the entire quarter all at once.
Segment and personalize
I’ve dropped hints about this throughout this guide, but personalization is extremely important. In fact, it adds a multiplier effect to everything else mentioned in this guide.
When you personalize your communication and segment your list, expect to see dramatic increases in engagement. That in turn will multiply the benefits you get from your email marketing as a whole.
Now, the main thing to remember about personalization is: “Don’t get overwhelmed”. We do have some pretty exciting and advanced ways to do personalization nowadays. However, you’re not required to do things the hard way. It’s ok to start off simple and focus on an “80-20” approach to personalization.
You can gradually adopt the more exciting and fun advanced levels of personalization To start, you just need to implement at least some level of segmentation. And then, just utilize smart-personalization for the content itself. That right there will get you most of the benefits without getting you overwhelmed.
Adopt a relationship-building mindset
The best kind of “brand awareness” is where the customer has a sense of a connection with your brand. In fact, again, I think the term “brand awareness” can be a little misleading. It implies it’s just about people being “aware” of your brand.
It’s actually more about feeling a sense of connection with your brand. It involves communication and mutual understanding. They should have a feeling that you understand them, their needs and are there to meet them. Does this sound like building a relationship? That’s because it is.
Now, this is a bit more obvious when someone is a raving fan of a business. If you hear how a brand evangelist talks about their favorite brand, you’ll get a very clear picture of this.
They will tell their friends about experiences and communication they had with that brand. Or they might share how much value they’ve gotten from a brand’s free advice, and how exciting some product and service updates are.
If you listen to someone like this, it becomes very clear that it’s very similar to how we tell stories about relationships with other humans. They might as well be talking about their favorite mentor or authority figure.
Now, it is a lot easier to understand the “relationship dynamics” when you’re looking at a raving fan. However, many marketers fail to realize that you’re building up to that level. So everything that you do in effective email marketing is a form of relationship-building.
Your ultimate goal is to create a sense of connection and trust to your brand. The kind of connection they might have with an authority or mentor figure in their life. Brand awareness isn’t just about them “knowing you exist”. It’s about them looking up to your brand and feeling that you’re there to make their life better.
Track and iterate
I’ve left the most powerful secret for last. If you want to get really good at building your brand through email, you have to track and measure. The good news is that tracking and analyzing results in email is much simpler than with other channels. In essence, the most important thing to look at is your engagement. It will tell you everything you need to know.
Additionally, when you use something like Emercury, the best engagement metrics are tracked for you automatically. This includes email opens, email clicks, email forwards and unsubscribes.
As you go ahead and implement the different tactics in this guide, keep an eye on your metrics. For example, let’s say you’re trying to master segments. Perhaps you’ll create separate segments for “hot leads” and “cold leads” and then do email marketing differently for each one.
Notice what happens. Is it improving your engagement metrics? If it isn’t, try to tweak your segments, explore, learn and iterate until results improve. And once you do get an improved result, think if there’s anything else to improve. When you get a new idea, use iterate on your segmentation systems, and look at your metrics again. This is basically an ongoing iterative process: adjust, look at metrics, then try something else.
Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies, including email segmentation. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.