Branding at the touch of a button

All companies want to enhance their brand, and incorporate it into all their customer "touchpoints". Yet this doesn't have to be a costly or difficult exercise. There are simple things your company can do to brand itself strongly - as simply and cheaply as sending an email!

barnesadvertising is an Auckland-based, full service agency working with highly brand conscious companies in the FMCG and consumer durables space.  Brand recognition and traction is fundamental. Its owner, Daniel Barnes, was working on upgrading the agency's internet presence. The intranet system and new agency website were under control, but he was struggling with how to standardise the agency's email branding.

Email has grown very fast but without any planning or methodology.  Think about it - how many emails do you send every day? Compare that to the number of old fashioned letters you send. Yet which has got the impressive design, the full colour printing and the fancy textured paper? As such the look and feel of an average email is way behind the other forms of communication a company employs on a far more frequent basis. It's basically a bit of a mess!

Yet most companies have no problem using this mess to communicate daily with their key business partners! Do the maths. Let's say you've got six employees send around 40 emails to clients, contacts and suppliers on a day to day basis.  That makes 240 emails a day, totalling more than a thousand during a working week.  Extrapolated over the year, you're missing more than 60,000 potential advertising or brand assertion opportunities!

As a sponsor of the Workchoice Trust, Daniel noticed the success of the Trust¹s implementation of mailPrimer.  The emails he received from the Trust were not only impressive in presenting the sponsors brand logos but had links to all associated organisation's sites.

The company responsible for Workchoice's email look was Calcium Software. With its email marketing tool, mailPrimer, which gives companies brand exposure through day to day email as well as provide links back to the company website.  Market research conducted in partnership with the Direct Marketing Association showed that an average company conducts more than 40% of its communication with key stakeholders by email.  Yet in most cases, these emails carry nothing more than a plain text signature.

Within months of deploying mailPrimer, email communication has taken on a new lease of life.  The barnesadvertising brand is present on each email communication representing the agency¹s core values.  Their "light box" image, used from business cards to the actual box in reception, is now the key image on the email too.  

Although the implementation of mailPrimer is straightforward, barnesadvertising did pose a new challenge for the Calcium team.  Like all advertising agencies, barnesadvertising uses Macs rather than PCs.  This meant that refinements had to be made to the template and the delivery mechanism to ensure the barnesadvertising brand would look the same on any IT platform.  The technology is securely hosted offsite so there is no actual installation required on desktops nor disruption to staff.  Ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting remains Calcium¹s responsibility, so it is totally hassle-free.

"The feedback from our clients has been immensely positive" says Daniel.  "It's a simple, effective brand vehicle. Quite a few are now looking at mailPrimer themselves".