E-mails underutilised in marketing

Johannesburg, 31 Aug 2009

E-mail as a branding tool is grossly underutilised, despite the high volumes of mails entering and exiting company networks each day, stresses Dries Morris, operations director at Securicom.

“Companies spend huge sums of money on advertising, developing their corporate image and printing all manner of marketing collateral, but they leave their most common form of business communication bland and unbranded. Most business e-mails are sent as plain black-and-white text messages without any branding or electronic letterhead,” says Morris.

He believes e-mail represents a powerful opportunity for companies to market their brand and their business.

“It's a fast, easy and cheap way to keep customers, suppliers and even employees up to speed on the latest products, services and developments, while at the same time strengthening the company brand,” explains Morris.

“When we talk about e-mail branding we're not just referring to the application of logos and signatures to outgoing company mail. Nor are we talking about those mass-distributed HTML newsletters that land in your inbox brandishing corporate logos, colours and news.

“We are talking about targeted e-mail branding campaigns that enhance a company's corporate image, give impetus to marketing programmes, engage recipients with impactful messages, drive traffic to company Web sites, and deliver updates on products and services that are relevant and current,” he notes.

Morris says branding e-mails can turn each and every outgoing mail into a purposeful and meaningful point of interaction. These should be integrated as a target-driven measurable as part a company's brand management strategy, he adds.

According to Morris, previous e-mail branding solutions were expensive, difficult to use and required the solution to be installed on every PC in the company. Newer solutions, however, are server-based and easy for anyone in the organisation to use.

“There is no reason or excuse for companies to continue wasting the opportunity to maximise the marketing power of each and every e-mail that leaves their network,” concludes Morris.