How to Increase Brand Awareness with Email Marketing in 2022

Email marketing has been proven to bring in more ROI than social media or any other marketing medium, and its versatility and targeting abilities make it an essential part of any marketing campaign. This is mainly because email marketing allows brands, businesses and companies to communicate directly with their customers or leads, and promote content – not just products – to bring value to their customers and enrich their brand. 

So, how exactly can you use email marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness?

First off, let’s clarify how email marketing is useful for brand awareness. Besides its impressive ROI and the longevity beyond just a simple sale, email is a fantastic way to reach customers on a regular basis. Since leads have provided their email address of their own accord, it means that they’re interested in your brand and have consented to receive your content.

Email marketing campaigns can help to build your brand and boost brand awareness by keeping you top of mind, especially if you use it in tandem with other tactics like social media, SEO or behavioral targeting tools which will allow you to create content around user behavior.

Achieving brand awareness isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth including in your digital marketing plan. The great thing about email marketing for brand awareness is that it’s cost-effective – however, much like any endeavor, it can be expensive if you don’t know how to achieve your goals and KPIs. 

So, how can you create effective email marketing campaigns that do your brand justice and maintain your customers’ interest? Additionally, how can you do this while simultaneously managing other digital marketing channels and keeping your brand top of mind for existing leads? Here are 5 ways to increase brand awareness using email marketing, as well as best practises for your email campaigns… 

You can’t create a killer email marketing campaign without a great email newsletter tool. It’s important to choose a newsletter platform that’s intuitive, runs smoothly, and sports a robust email editor that will allow marketers to create stunning emails with little-to-no design knowledge – such as MailChimp, SendGrid and Campaign Monitor. 

A great email tool will walk you through all stages of email marketing – from creating your lead-gen machines like landing pages and subscription forms to email signature management and segmented, personalized email marketing campaigns that will resonate with your recipients.

Creating a customized email template library can also be helpful for saving time and keeping your comms and branding consistent. Not everyone has the time and capacity to create email newsletters from scratch, and so these email templates should be fully customizable and subject to personalization. 

Your email marketing tool should offer personalization options for one simple reason: standing out in a full inbox is hard, and people’s inboxes are packed. Brands need to stay top-of-mind by attracting the right kind of attention to their content and, ultimately, their products and services

According to Oberlo, emails with a personalized email subject line generate 50% higher open rates than non-personalized subject lines. For example, Metallica employed personalization in their email marketing campaign, segmenting their emails according to location and utilizing an emoji to catch fans’ attention. 

Personalized content can help you show just the right thing, to the right people, at the right time, and create opportunities that will create a memorable experience for your prospects and help to increase your brand awareness. 

Consistency doesn’t just mean sending out emails at the same time every day – although this can play an important role. It also means maintaining consistent tone of voice, messaging, and visual branding in your email campaigns. 

Your tone of voice should be consistent with who you are as a brand, but this doesn’t mean it needs to be unchanging.  The first step in defining your tone of voice is to decide your brand’s personality. Is it going to be bubbly and carefree? Serious and sophisticated? A happy medium or something entirely different?

To determine those factors, you will need to create buyer personas to deepen your understanding of who is purchasing your products.

Building your brand’s tone around your audience’s values will allow you to develop a deeper level of personalization to generate emotional responses to your email marketing messages. Maintaining a consistent tone of voice will also help you build a clear brand identity, so that your audience will learn to recognize your email campaigns straight up. 

Your tone of voice should also remain the same across all of your marketing platforms, especially if different audience segments use different platforms to stay in touch with your brand. A prominent and consistent voice that is present through your social media marketing, website and email campaigns is what will allow prospects to recognize your brand through predictable patterns.

Here’s a quick checklist to ensure your email marketing campaigns are optimized for brand awareness: 

If you’re confused about your color scheme, style, and branding as a whole, you can always create surveys to get your customers’ feedback. Quiz-making tools like this one can help you with that. Taking your prospects’ opinions into account and co-creating your brand’s image with them could make a world of difference.

In addition to choosing the right email newsletter tool for your brand, it can also be helpful to streamline your process using automation. While this will save you a lot of time and effort when it comes to executing your email marketing campaigns, this isn’t the only benefit of using automation tools. 

Marketing automation can also boost brand awareness and increase revenue by sending out email content triggered directly by your users’ actions.

Some of the most common automated email marketing campaigns are:

While it seems complicated, marketing automation is fairly simple. You can simply set the parameters which trigger the automation, create your email’s content, and the tool will take it from there.

While the word automation alone can make people think of a more “robotic” delivery of content, this isn’t the case. Since the campaign stems from a user’s action, your users will be expecting to see your email in their inbox. It can help to imagine each customer action to be a question, and each automated email to be a response to the user’s question. Marketing automation essentially creates an open dialogue to which the user can respond.

Let’s take Buzzfeed, for example. Upon signing up, the user has the option of picking the content they’d like to receive, allowing the brand to segment content automatically. What’s more, the brand lets users know about the frequency of the newsletters, as well as the fact that their content is shareable – creating a golden opportunity for more brand exposure. Immediately, the user receives an automated welcome email. 

By opting in to receive trending topics, content or products, the user is sure to peruse your brand and everything you’ve got to offer. It also presents the perfect opportunity for brand storytelling, one of the most beneficial email marketing trends for driving revenue and forming a connection with your audience. 

The same goes for all automated emails. They help build brand awareness by creating email marketing campaigns that combine your brand’s tone with your users’ actions, creating a more personal, human experience. 

User Generated Content (UGC) is a great way to use your previous customers’ experiences to get future customers excited about your brand. While customer testimonials are great for creating brand awareness, using UGC goes a little deeper than that. It can help your audience create an emotional bond with your brand, and gives social proof that your brand is high-quality and trustworthy. 

Everyone loves advocating for their favorite brands online, so creating a social media campaign asking users to share their favorite photos or videos using your brand or products can be a great way to compile UGC to use in your email marketing campaigns. You can then create an email full of UGC and shareable content, and encourage users to share it on their social media platforms. This will get your marketing message in front of more people. 

What’s more, by encouraging people to suggest your content to their peers, you’ll get a larger pool of interested prospects who fall under the categories created by your customer personas. It’s a little like introducing a friend to another friend – if you share the same interests and have heard nothing but great things, your friend circle can only get larger.

If all our email marketing tools and techniques aim to use your users’ interests to fuel more referrals and interactions, putting your audience first only makes sense. However, before investing in an email builder or marketing tools, there are some things to keep in mind.

Creating an extensive email list of engaged leads to boost your brand awareness is a lengthy process, and lead generation tools may not do the job if you’re not targeting prospects correctly.

It can pay to add prospects to your email list by using a double opt-in process. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it also shows that people who make the effort to verify their email addresses are interested in your content. Asking a user’s permission is paramount when building your list, but it’s nothing if you can’t create valuable content that will resonate with your audience on a one-on-one basis.

Relevant content is what boosts your brand authority, and authority is what boosts your brand’s awareness as a whole. Authority will make people turn to your brand for guidance in your niche, much like Apple for electronics or Nike for athletic apparel.

Ask your users what content they’d love to see and take notice of the posts they interact with on various platforms. Utilize all content types and formats in your email newsletter campaigns, and don’t forget to repurpose content from different channels when you’re stuck. Featuring blog posts and videos in your emails is a great way to make your content more interesting and engaging, but understanding the content types that convert best with your audience, the actions they take, and the reasons behind those actions, is key to creating emails that convert. 

Boosting brand awareness using email marketing campaigns isn’t rocket science. But, there are still various marketing techniques you can implement to ensure you’re executing the perfect email marketing campaign for your brand. 

Always refer to your data to determine the content that your audience interacts with most, and always create email content that showcases not what your brand can do for them, but how your brand can add value to their lives. And of course, never forget to A/B test every step of the way!

Téa Liarokapi is a Senior Content Writer for Moosend, an email marketing and marketing automation platform, and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas – and cats – to play with.