Your email CI
Letterheads, business cards, invoices, fax cover sheets, pamphlets and brochures, advertisements, even the corporate website – all are intensely scrutinised to ensure they comply with and enhance the company's hard-earned "brand".
Yet the primary communication vehicle for business – email – has been largely excluded from CI efforts
"Email has become the predominant form of business to business communication, even surpassing the telephone as the preferred method of communication," says Deidre Dawson, director at Technology Concepts, an Internet driven solutions and technology innovations company.
She believes the lack of corporate branding on email can be attributed to technological constraints: graphic-intensive corporate letterheads could only be transmitted electronically in the form of an oversized attachment – and subject to all the constraints associated with attachments such as firewall rejection and their propensity to devour precious network bandwidth.
Now Technology Concepts has developed a solution which overcomes these problems and makes it possible for companies to extend their branding to every available inch of communication real estate – including emails – quickly and cost-effectively.
Called Dynamic Email, it consists of two parts: an email letterhead for written communication; and the insertion of 'banner' adverts into the email stationery.
"Dynamic Email provides a company with professionally designed email stationery, which not only serves as the digital letterhead but is also personalised with each employee's contact information," Dawson explains.
The design can either be in line with the company's corporate identity or with its digital/online designs, thereby reinforcing other marketing activities and elevating brand awareness.
"Think of the top of mind awareness that can be achieved when a client repeatedly receives professional emails from a supplier/ business partner with company branding and all relevant contact information. 'Marketing 101' states that repetition marketing is one of the most important ingredients for successful branding," she adds.
Banner Advertising
The second element of Dynamic Email is to make use of email as a powerful form of one-on-one communication to market and advertise products and services to a targeted base thanks to the insertion of banner adverts into the email stationery.
The insertion of the ads across all employees' everyday outgoing emails is centrally controlled by the company's marketing department, by way of a user-friendly scheduling system.
"The banner ads can incorporate 'click thru's' to detailed information hosted on company web sites, or they can simply and cost effectively be used to complement marketing drives/promotions such as competitions, special offers, product announcements, customer successes, exciting changes to a website and so on," Dawson says.
All day-to-day emails are sent out with the scheduled message automatically inserted into the stationery template. Should the recipient of the email revisit the message at a later stage, the company's current banner will be accessed. This means that a recipient will never see outdated specials or company messages.
"Effectively, Dynamic Email allows companies to send a unified message with every email originating within the organisation's Microsoft Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook programs.
"The Dynamic Email Administration system allows marketing messages to be centrally controlled, ensuring powerful, streamlined and co-ordinated communication of a message with every email that is sent from the company," concludes Dawson.
