Why Email Branding ‘Alchemy’?

In their ceaseless search for shiny new marketing channels to promote their clients, many marketing agencies are overlooking a truly ‘golden’ oldie – their clients’ everyday employee email.

Because when it comes to achieving effective engagement, email branding can transform dull everyday employee emails – through the power of professional email signatures and interactive banner campaigns – into 24-carat marketing gold.

After all, every email your clients’ employees send is a personal communication that represents a golden opportunity for brand-building, up-selling, cross-selling and more – converting email contacts into customers.

Here’s our 5 golden rules. Let the email branding alchemy begin…

1. Brand all emails

Well-designed email signatures and interactive banners with clickable links are brilliant ways to combine creative, consistent branding and marketing campaign messaging into a trusted mode of communication – to a captive and willing audience.

And design makes all the difference. So to get the perfectly polished professional look that your clients expect, keep your campaign creative in line with our best email signature and banner design guidelines and your design will shine!

2. Personalise all emails

It’s difficult to craft truly personalised messages in ‘batch & blast’ email marketing campaigns for the simple reason that they aren’t personal. That’s why employee emails are so valuable – they’re written one at a time to a single person.

Over 95% of these emails are opened, compared with a low proportion of direct marketing emails. Branded communication in personalised emails consistently results in click-through rates 5-7 times higher than traditional digital marketing campaigns.

3. Target all emails

Maximise the marketing power of employee emails by creating a range of messages and links that can be used depending on the target recipient’s previous inquiries, purchases and demographic profile.

Segment your clients’ email contacts and precision-target every segment or individual – alert them to new products and promotional offers, invite them to events and keep them up to date with all your clients’ news. And also be sure to link to social media channels to encourage customers to engage with your clients’ brands on their own social networks.

4. Make all emails clickable

Beware! Your email alchemy will never work if you ignore this nugget of wisdom: Always include a clear call-to-action! A clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) is the golden key to click-through and conversion.

But – as with all alchemy – there’s room for experiment. We’ve experimented with shapes, sizes, colours and copy in a quest for the CTA that captures the most clicks. Click here to find out more.

5. Look and learn

Use employee emails to test advertising, branding and messaging on a small engaged sample before rolling out a mass marketing campaign for your clients.

Of course, to get this precious information you need an email branding solution with excellent reporting and analytics capabilities. And with real-time click alerts you can immediately see exactly which messages engage recipients and make them respond. It’s a great way to understand exactly what your clients’ customers want.

Expert email branding – from professional email signature software to full campaign services – can fully leverage the power of employee emails for your clients.

So to turn your clients’ emails into marketing gold, talk to the expert email branding alchemists. Find out how Rocketseed can help your agency generate more leads and drive mores sales for your clients. Download the eBook “Extend the Life of Your Marketing Campaigns” here

Robyn Woods-Child |  Managing Director

Connect with Robyn on LinkedIn

Like a treasure hunt, marketers are constantly looking for the hidden-treasure box that contains the secret towards increased-outreach for their clients business. Every marketer’s dream is to find that channel that can make their business more visible, stand-out from the competition, and generate high-quality leads.

They say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Indeed, the solution that most marketers are looking for lies in a communication-channel that they use every day, without realising it. The secret recipe lies in your emails.

Emails are the steak that is waiting to be grilled

Similar to a barbecue where hungry guests are eagerly waiting for the steak to be prepared, emails represent an exciting raw opportunity that needs to be slightly-tweaked to become a marketing powerhouse.

On average, every business send 120 emails per day. Think about that for a second. Those are 120 opportunities for you to spread your message and increase your brand awareness to customers.

What if we could slightly-tweak your emails to become conveyor belts for your company’s message? Would that put some sizzle in your steak?

Email branding is the map to the Treasure Island

Because your business already uses emails to interact with customers on a daily-basis, branding your emails is the secret strategy that can breathe life into your marketing campaigns. The use of attractive email banners, signatures and newsletters turns your emails from a simple business communication channel to a marketing powerhouse.

Branded emails allow you to personalise your message to potential leads, generate and nurture new leads, and finally convert them to loyal customers.

Rocketseed is the key to the treasure box

Now that you found where the treasure is located (email branding), you need the key to open the box. Rocketseed software provides an easy and efficient solution for branding your emails and delivering them to your recipients in the right format. The software converts every email into a marketing tool by attaching a banner and a signature within every email that you send.  It is a minimum input but maximum impact strategy for extending the life and reach of your marketing campaigns. With Rocketseed, you can achieve personalised, high quality branded email messages through a simple and efficient setup process.

And the marketing agency can provide that key

Are your clients looking for greater ROI on their marketing efforts? Your agency can offer them the ultimate solution for boosting visibility, brand awareness and converting more leads into customers.

Download the Extend the life of your campaigns eBook here to find out how!

Robyn Woods-Child |  Managing Director

Connect with Robyn on LinkedIn

CAMPAIGN achieves engagement from ‘Send’ to ‘Sale’

As corporations become more and more aware of the importance of email signatures and email disclaimers, so they’re now also realising the huge opportunity their everyday email presents as a marketing channel that delivers real engagement and ROI.

Because that’s what our clients tell us they need…real engagement; high-quality lead gen; sales conversion; without stretching their or stressing them out.

That’s why we’ve developed Rocketseed CAMPAIGN.

What is CAMPAIGN and how did it evolve?

The name really says it all – Rocketseed CAMPAIGN offers the most engaging way to run a complete marketing campaign through everyday business email, from ‘SEND’ to ‘SALE’.

But it hasn’t just ‘happened’, it represents a long evolutionary process of our ‘email branding’ that goes back to 2004 when the CAN-SPAM act was coming in, Mark Zuckerberg and pals were busy coding Facebook, MailChimp was 3 years old, and the final episode of Friends hit our screens. Even then, Rocketseed – ahead of its time – had introduced campaignable branding elements into email signatures but, back then, running an intelligent and dynamic marketing campaign through normal business email delivering exceptional engagement was a concept that your average CMO, CTO or sales team simply weren’t able to grasp.

In their defence, that was RocketSeed v1 – our GUI was tricky, there was some coding required, campaign programming, rotational time slots needed to be allocated, planning was required and a multitude of banners needed to be driven…a lot for someone to take on! So we pivoted and customers primarily focused on running banners without utilising our core strength which was tracker tags, integrations and sender and recipient rules all focused on driving results for our customers.

What do we do differently now? And what does it mean for you?

If we didn’t ‘get it’ then, we certainly do now! We realised that we were overwhelming customers with options…goes with the old advertising adage ‘throw you one ball and you’ll catch it, throw you five and you won’t’. So, we simplified things, researched our customers and changed our offering.

As a result we now have 4 simple options for customers that do exactly what they say on the tin. Signature Basic and Signature Plus deliver for the business that’s looking to create stunningly designed and intelligently dynamic email signatures for their staff that they can centrally control and easily apply for Outlook, Office 365 or Gsuite.

Launching ‘Campaign’

And now we’re extremely excited to launch our new flagship products –
CAMPAIGN BASIC and CAMPAIGN PLUS. These also include the signature component but are totally focused on driving real results for your business. In fact, we’re so confident about them that if after 3 months you aren’t satisfied we’ll give you your money back!*

CAMPAIGN ‘BASIC’ and CAMPAIGN ‘PLUS’ – What’s the difference?

Given the deeper integration between marketing and IT (they still argue but kiss and make up much quicker),
CAMPAIGN BASIC focuses on allowing those two departments to create campaigns and run them through their everyday email (fully exploiting its 99% open rate) thereby creating a basic integrated marketing channel, precision targeted to  up-sell and cross-sell.

CAMPAIGN PLUS is effectively the ‘sales supercharger’ for your everyday email – powered by Rocketseed. You will have seen the links through this piece to different areas of the website highlighting what we do but this is the crème de le crème when it comes to squeezing all you can out of your business email.

And the best part? We do it all for you.

In many ways, it’s the CAMPAIGN service that makes it so special. Simply give us your brief and we take care of everything – from set-up, creative design and campaign planning to marketing automation integration and results reporting.

So Rocketseed will set up and run complete campaigns for me?

Our creatives ensure that every email your business sends is literally ‘designed to do business’, and CAMPAIGN clients are also assigned a dedicated account manager to ensure their campaign stays on track, and they’re always on-hand – think of them as an extension to your marketing team (if you’re lucky enough to have one) purely focused on achieving results from your email.

We’ll automatically build a subscriber list for you, will apply tracker tagging (meaning content gets automatically served based on a customer’s engagement patterns – think ‘machine learning’ but based on a database application) and we’ll run targeted campaigns on your behalf based on recipient and sender domains, and integrate with your marketing automation (such as Salesforce), responsively guiding recipients through their customer journey.

Sounds deep? It is.

When it comes to results, CAMPAIGN measures all key email marketing metrics, from click-through to conversion – all precisely attributed – reports them regularly and sends real-time alerts to your sales team.

A complete campaign – designed to do business

Rocketseed CAMPAIGN really does give you a complete marketing campaign – engaging through everyday email from ‘Send’ to ‘Sale’.

Now it’s time for you to give it a try!

Damian Hamp-Adams  |  CEO

Connect with Damian on LinkedIn here

They say looks aren’t everything, but when it comes to email, it looks surprisingly like they might be.

Why do I say this? Am I shallow and superficial when it comes to email signatures or think that an email banner’s beauty is only screen-deep?

It’s actually because the most popular page on our website is Email Design Guidelines and so, always eager to please, we’re making this Autumn season all about style – style that stands out, sets your brand apart and …most importantly… sells.  Even if your everyday email hasn’t been hit by the ugly stick it could still be a bit…well… everyday. And that could be costing you engagement.

So whether it’s stylish new look signatures, some bright new branded banners or a whole email campaign make-over, we’ll be giving you everything you need to make your ‘everyday’ email absolutely fabulous – not to mention seriously sales-driving.

Because whether your brand personality is smart and sophisticated or frivolous and fun, you need to get noticed on every email. And because it’s not like designing for print or the web, there’s a specific set of effective email branding design skills that we’ll be sharing – how to take your measurements, how to ‘get your colours done’, how to accessorise and how to bring your new look together so it just ‘clicks’

No second chances to make a first impression

Never is this more true than with email branding. With a small space and a few seconds before the scrolling starts, this isn’t shrinking violet time (but there’s also no need to go the full Lady Gaga). You don’t want to upstage the content of your email but you need to get noticed and a boldly-branded top banner gives you that immediate (and interactive) impact.

Is less really more?

What size is really your size? There’s no need to go large or get into a squeeze – a banner should be viewable but not obstructive on any email preview pane or smartphone. We recommend a max width of 650 pixels and height of between 90 and 120 pixels to get it just right for size.

What’s In, What’s out

Even with a full suite of features and functionality, there’s only so much you can fit in an email banner or signature so, rather than looking too ‘busy’ (which actually lessens impact) try to keep things deceptively simple. Keep copy clear and concise, images strong and not too detailed, and your logo in proportion – just ask yourself, “Does my brand look big in this?”

And don’t be shallow … use shadows and overlaps to give your designs some 3-D depth.

Buttons, tabs and links – the ultimate ‘go to’ accessories

These really make email branding technology work. Buttons, tabs and image-map links can take the recipient wherever you’d like them to go – from landing pages and social media to documents, videos, newsletter sign-up or even the app store. In fact, having more than one link on your banners can also significantly improve their click-through success.

Tired of the same old ‘look’? Restyle, rotate and refresh

We all know that consistency is key when it comes to branding, but even the best advertising artwork becomes stale eventually so it’s important to keep your email banners fresh by running message and design variations in your campaign rotation. It’ll keep your audience alert to your brand and stop them going ‘banner blind’. And, of course, you can A/B test your design variations to see which gets the most clicks.

Get the response you want – with a clicking obvious CTA

No call-to-action, no clicks. Simple. So make your CTA clear, concise and compellingly clickable. We’ll be looking at the psychology of clicking in detail this season – from shapes and sizes to colour and copy – but for now, just make sure your CTA makes them ‘click here’.

You can’t beat bespoke

Everyone loves a time saving template but sometimes your promotion needs that really perfect fit. For truly bespoke email branding Rocketseed’s designers will work to your brief to create exactly the email branding you’re looking for.  We can also train your own designers in the creative tricks and technical tips of the email branding art so that you can develop future designs in-house.

So, are looks really everything?

Email branding, however brilliantly designed, isn’t there just to be admired – it’s truly strategic in its marketing power. From positioning to promotion, your designs are really all about your business objectives, your audience and the all-important call-to-action.

Design trends may come and go but engagement never goes out of fashion.

So keep your ‘eye for style’ on Rocketseed this season. There’ll be detailed design advice, case studies, email ‘makeovers’ and, of course, we’re always ready to design you a bespoke email banner or an email signature that suits your brand to perfection.

So, to email in style this season, you know who you need…

Jenny Bassett  |  Account Manager

Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn here

B2B marketing has always thrown up its own set of patience-testing challenges. From reaching the right-decision makers to nurturing prospects through an often long and complex sales process, these challenges need to be met through the right choice of marketing channel.

While you’re deliberating whether your target will be more receptive to traditional or technology driven approaches, spare a thought for the channel that’s most likely in front of their eyes for most of the day – their everyday email.  Because eyes that may have long since become blind to the batch and blast of bulkmail are still very open to personalised one to one everyday email.

Which is why ‘email branding’ creatively branding your daily one to one business email with bespoke, interactive, trackable marketing banners and signatures – is a channel ideally suited to tackling the challenges facing B2B marketers.

But isn’t email a bit…boring?  Just because it’s not the latest AI or the shiniest new social channel, its effectiveness shouldn’t be overlooked.  Remember, it’s a channel you already own and which every employee uses every day, making it a particularly cost-conscious, smart way to market B2B.

While B2B prospects might ignore a bulk email campaign, they’ll always open an everyday email from a personal contact. What’s more, when it comes to click-through rates, email branding delivers four times more than bulk mailing, achieving 12% versus 2.7%.

B2B marketing is about personal interaction

It may be B2B but it’s all about people. When you extend your marketing mix to include email branding, you are reaching out to people you have a real relationship with – personal contacts. You can amend the email banners they see based on a conversation you had that morning.   It’s relevant, it’s immediate and it moves the relationship forward.

B2B campaigns need to persuade all parties in a complex decision process

Even on an email with the same content, email branding allows different recipients to be targeted with different banners, personalised to them and linked to the supporting information they need, so whilst the finance director receives a banner stressing ROI, the IT director receives one on system compatibility.

B2B campaigns need sales and marketing close together

Introducing email branding across your organisation can help achieve closer sales and marketing alignment with central control, enabling the sales team to retain control of their personal contacts, while the marketing team sees brand consistency and nurture-campaign content delivered with every email.

B2B campaigns need to harness the power of opinion-formers

Email branding banners are the perfect place to highlight an endorsing quote from an industry expert, link to a glowing review in a trade journal, or feature a client testimonial that directs them to a case study success story. In fact anything that makes their research easier and positively positions your brand.

B2B campaigns place importance on your company brand.

Whilst your campaign might be for your latest product or service, it’s your company brand that can give your customer the reassurance they need to purchase. Not only does branding every email consistently create a strong, unified brand image, it shows you’re in control which together can translate into that most important emotional connection – trust.

When it comes to B2B marketing, Rocketseed email branding is up to the challenge. To find out more about how Rocketseed email branding can get you up close and personal to your customers…

Jenny Bassett  |  Account Manager

Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn here

We’ve got a big announcement to make and we’re thrilled about it. And, as a Rocketseed customer (or future prospect), it’s good news for you too.

Microsoft has formally issued Rocketseed its certification for Windows Server!

It’s only fair that in true Oscar-night style, we thank everyone who made it possible, namely Janine Beard, Nasier Jaffer, Oliver Howe, Charles Oertel and the rest of the development team whose skill, hard work and patience have paid off with this certification.

So, what does it mean for you? Why is it important?

Well, perhaps Microsoft’s own blog puts it best “Technology consumers have come to rely on the Certified for Windows Server 2012 R2 logo (or badge) as a symbol of quality and best in class management of Windows Server datacenter apps.” And, of course, you’ll now be seeing this logo on all our marketing collateral (keep an eye out for it)

But it’s more than that…

Once again, Microsoft says it best – “Investing in certification translates to increased customer satisfaction”. That’s what we’re always looking for, and that’s why we’ve been committed to achieving this certification.

When it comes to any business offering SaaS or with a product involving IT and email, the key to user satisfaction, especially for enterprise clients, is security and peace of mind in terms of the Microsoft environment.

As Janine Beard, MD of Rocketseed Development, explains: “This certification proves that our product has passed all of the tests required by MS to ensure that it works correctly within their environment without any adverse results to their suite of products.  It further shows that the developed application adheres to their security standards and poses no security risks when installed.”

Without doubt, one of the key benefits here is client attitude towards R4E (Rocketseed For Exchange).  The application being MS approved means that the R4E plugin can now be installed into a client’s MS Environment with their IT administrators completely secure in the knowledge that it works harmoniously with server setups without impacting any of the software or posing any additional risks.

In a rapidly changing industry, you need high-quality applications you can trust for deployment in your private/public/hybrid clouds and IT professionals need apps they can trust to ensure their workloads are operating as planned. It’s exactly this trust that MS certification brings to Rocketseed.

In summary, being approved through this certification program offers compatibility with an upgraded test suite reflecting the platform improvements.

To end on a high note from Microsoft – “This program includes a number of certifications that include hundreds of tests and best practices with an emphasis on deployment, management, reliability, and security”.

That’s where the patience came in …it literally was 100’s of tests.

It was all worth it. See for yourself.

Damian Hamp-Adams  |  CEO

Connect with Damian on LinkedIn here

Well, according to Seth Godin, marketing guru.

What he’s really saying is that potential customers aren’t buying into the rhetoric anymore. They are looking for authenticity – something you get from a one-to-one conversation with a personal contact – it’s the trust that comes with the relationship.

There is a wealth of information available out there, over and above your official company collateral – from review sites to candid user videos to minute-by-minute social media feeds – all with something to say about your products and services and with the credibility of independence. Somehow you’ve got to break through the noise and get your message heard. Email branding does just that with the personal nature of the message and allows you to be agile – able to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person.

Let’s Get Practical

Getting started on anything new can be a bit daunting so we’ve put together our top 5 tips for running a successful email branding campaign.

1: Set your email branding goals

Are you hoping to achieve greater brand consistency? Do you want to elicit immediate customer feedback? Or perhaps get a market indicator on a forthcoming product? Whatever your goals, it’s important to define them upfront and decide the metrics. The results will not only prove your success, but give you valuable insight and guidance for future campaigns.

2: Audit your content

Evaluate your content in terms of your goals – look at what you’ve already got and determine what can be reused, which pieces have the relevance to help you deliver on your objectives. Does the content support the right stage of the customer journey? Where are the gaps? Where are you taking them to next?

3: Build a plan – The Customer Journey

Are you using email branding as part of an integrated campaign or a stand-alone medium? Either way, a banner lends itself to short headlines and simple design for maximum impact. Because it’s so easy to customise and execute, plan a series of banners to underpin a wider marketing effort or as a standalone campaign. It keeps the message fresh and relevant.

4: Integrate, integrate, integrate

Using all the functionality of the customisable, interactive and trackable banners and email signatures is the key to success. Ensure that your systems such as CRM, marketing automation and analytics engine are all integrated with the email branding tool. That way, you get the maximum information from your results for the minimum effort.

5: Review and test

Email branding is a perfect way to get feedback on which messages are resonating with your audience, in real-time. Automated reports can be delivered to your inbox. Banners can be applied using a keyword in the subject line. It lends itself well to testing messages prior to a full campaign launch perhaps segmenting by department or domain name. With on the fly reviewing you won’t only have the agility to get the best results but also a way to gather important market data that may affect the success of future campaigns.

Learn more about email branding in our new ebook.  It shows you how to ‘get personal’ with your email branding, with targeted, tailored brand messaging on every email you send to your personal contacts.  Always opened, and engaging, its beats ‘batch and blast’ bulk mail hands-down.

Tracey Adams  |  Account Director

Connect with Tracey on LinkedIn here

Getting your employees on board and on brand is imperative and not just an exercise in ticking internal comms boxes. It’s about empowering them to become brand ambassadors.

It’s as simple as it sounds

Think about it – lots of emails are sent externally, but your employees communicate with each other using email multiple times a day – especially in medium to large sized companies. Each email sent employee-to-employee presents an opportunity to share your internal comms news, company announcements, marketing updates, HR policies and more.

6 reasons to brand internal company emails:

1. Nurture employee satisfaction by inviting them to take part in polls, forums and social events, whilst tracking exactly who is taking part!
2. Promote brand values with consistent email banners and signatures.
3. Deliver essential HR and other company-wide announcements via document download direct from your email banner, whilst tracking who has engaged with the message.
4. Connect staff who work in different time zones and locations with email banner messages that directly reach each work desk.
5. Keep employees involved and up to date as soon as relevant news is released to get staff involved, engaged and enthused.
6. Discover which company announcements resonate with staff (and which don’t) via fully trackable banners and click alerts.

We’re here to help

Providing knowledge and harnessing a sense of involvement will help your employees uphold your company’s brand values, be able to articulate what your goals are and remain inspired to drive the business forward. And if your employees feel valued, involved and loyal, we bet your customers will too! To get started, please contact us and our Parrot Digital Team will be in touch.

Tracey Adams | Account Director

Connect with Tracey on LinkedIn here

“Ooh look! My sexy new email campaign,” said no-one, ever. We might not be talking about it but we are doing it. According to the DMA* 92% of us still use email as ‘the bedrock’ of our marketing programmes. But somehow it’s lost its pizazz in favour of the new kids on the shiny social media block. How can we make email fashionable again?

Great results are always in style and email campaigns still generate higher responses than their trendier social sisters. By chasing better response rates, content quality and relevance are falling as some companies abandon email best practise. A recent article in Marketing Week suggests that people opt in to marketing communications from 80% of the brands they interact with regularly but only read 20% of the emails they receive.

With its low price tag, bulk personalisation ability and easy transition to mobile, email marketing has long been the new black. However, over-frequency has fatigued our audiences and bulk email blindness has set in. Customers begin not to ‘see’ messages coming in, hence lower open and click through rates. We’ve persevered, tried to find ways to cut through the competition and given our marketing emails a coat of many colours. But what about our everyday email? Frankly, our daily business communication remains positively naked!

Nude is rude as far as some top UK brands are concerned. The Ritz, Leyton Orient FC and the British Red Cross are dressing up their everyday business email and are getting better results by displaying perfectly branded, interactive messages with every communication. And let’s face it, building brand awareness never goes out of fashion. With the right resources it’s an area where Social Media is made-to-measure, though another finding from the DMA report suggests that email budgets are a bit more ready-to-wear. Whether you’ve got deep pockets or not, the opportunities to clothe your naked, everyday business emails are too good to miss. Email branding is the new way to improve brand awareness and get heads turning.

Click here for more information on how to have the best dressed emails in business!

Direct Marketing Association Study