The Internet and Market changes have driven radical innovations to the global business environment over the last ten years. Companies leverage these innovations to build sustainable competitive advantage by enhancing their brands, customer service, sales, marketing, and core operations. Branded email is one of the ways that companies globally are building top of mind positioning with customers and strategic business partners.

Globally, companies are faced with the need to effectively and professionally communicate with their clients and partners via email. Such communications provide a valuable opportunity for it to market products and services – at very low cost compared to other communication channels. As a result of this, companies are leveraging corporate e-mail communications as key marketing and brand-building channel.

The Case for Branded E-mail.

• Branding – Maintains consistency with branding strategy and visual identity.
• Impressiveness – Enhances the professional appearance of communications by branding the hundreds, or thousands, of messages a company sends daily.
• Interactivity – Recipients can click on template links to reach online destinations.
• Results – Drives qualified visitors to relevant pages on a corporate web site that therefore increases return on investment (ROI).
• Measurability – Tracking and reporting measures the impact. A branded email system can include simple web-based reporting of key metrics, such as clicks and v-card downloads.
• Ease of use – If outsourced, a basic template can be ready to deploy in days. Additional features include customized logos, a drop-down menu of optional elements the sender can include, and other tools available companywide.
• Compactness – A basic template adds less than 1K to messages.
• Innovation – For companies whose brand and image are linked with tech-savvy, style, or design, a branded email template sends the message the sender really does “get it.”
• Quality assurance – You’re in control of your brand. A centralized, web-based admin system hosts the template.
• Prudence – Like paper letterhead, cost is measured in fractions of a cent per message. Price models are generally per employee. Volume discounts can apply based on the number of licenses.

Key Drivers.

The key drivers for developing a branded e-mail corporate program based are as follows:

• To generate new business
• To create strong online branding and enhanced corporate positioning
• To complement established business development initiatives.
• To reduce the cost of transmitting promotional information and completing transactions with customers/prospects.
• To create new types of collaborative communications that can be used to create value-added services and products for customers/prospects.
• To enhance customer retention and brand recall.

About the Writer:
Moses Kemibaro is an internet marketing professional and founder of Dotsavvy Limited (www.dotsavvyafrica.com). He can be reached on moses@moseskemibaro.com