How to Create Brand Consistency in Your Email Marketing

When you think of some of the most successful brands in the world, what comes to mind? Companies like Apple or McDonald’s are known for being some of the most popular and profitable companies in their industries, but beyond that, they're also known for being incredibly consistent in their branding.

As an email marketer, one of your main goals is to create a consistent brand experience for your subscribers. Doing so increases brand awareness, which in the long-term helps your customers become more comfortable with purchasing your products and services. But if you’re just getting started or you’ve noticed your email marketing needs a bit of revamp, the process of creating brand consistency with your email templates can be a learning experience.

That’s why in this article, we’ll show you how to bridge any gaps in your branded email marketing as well as a few practical tips on how to improve your email marketing program overall.

Why is brand consistency important?

Creates trust with customers

When a customer sees a consistent brand, they know what to expect. It shows them that your company is professional and that you care about how you come across to your audience.

Email marketing is one of the most common ways businesses communicate with their customers—whether it’s through a welcome email, a newsletter, or a simple order confirmation. Making your campaigns as cohesive as possible with the rest of your brand instills faith in your subscribers, making them more likely to convert and to stick around.

Keeps everyone on the same page

You’ve likely been in this scenario before: You’re smoothly chugging along at work when you happen to come across a marketing asset that should’ve been scrubbed from the face of the Earth years ago, only to find out it’s still being used and presented to customers. A situation like this can be chalked up to a lack of internal communication, but it’s also what happens when brand consistency isn’t prioritized.

When there is a standard guideline to your brand available for your staff to follow, your business can then streamline marketing processes, communicate on updates effectively, and avoid careless mistakes.

Makes your brand more memorable

Brand consistency is important because it helps your business become more memorable. When people see your logo or your ads, the hope is that they instantly recognize your brand because they’ve become more familiar with it over time. That's the power of branding.

Every time your emails land in your customers’ inboxes, you want them to not only convert but to provide good old brand awareness. As your subscribers see your emails more frequently, they will come to form a connection with your brand. A large part of making this connection as positive and fruitful as possible is ensuring that your emails are consistently up to standard and recognizable.

How Can You Create Brand Consistency in Your Email Templates?

Create graphic standard guidelines

Establishing a branding standard allows your email designers and developers to have a consistent frame of reference, keeping them on brand as they work on various email campaigns.

To get started, create a multi-page document, Figma board or presentation that details all of your current branding standards. This should include information about your various logos and how they are to be used, your standard fonts, colors, placements, and any other visual assets. If you already have something like this, then consider creating a design system specifically for email.. In this system, you can include elements such as sample templates, layout details, template lengths, and color themes, based on your established guidelines. 

Take a look at the images below to get an idea:

Build an arsenal of email templates

Now that you’ve established your standard guidelines for your email marketing, it’s time to create your own library of templates. This doesn’t have to be complicated–in fact, one purpose of doing this is to simplify processes and save time for your email designers and developers. 

When you have a bank of templates ready-to-go, you can easily plug in your email copy or make simple design changes for any new email instead of creating brand new templates for every new campaign. It’s not only efficient, but it keeps your brand consistent throughout all of your emails, making your business more recognizable to your target audience. 

If you’re not sure where to start or if you’re looking for some more inspiration, Scalero has a collection of free email templates that are ready-to-use and work for various types of email marketing campaigns.

Set the right mood for your audience

The mood of your email marketing can be reflected in a number of different aspects, including the body copy, subject lines, images, and colors. Think of it as a feeling or attitude that you want your customers to associate your business with.

Take a moment to think about some of your current campaigns and ask yourself, what mood do you feel when looking at and reading through your marketing emails? For example, do your email templates give off a playful vibe, or do they feel more serious? And what specifically about your templates do you think is conveying this feeling? More importantly, what mood do you actually want your emails to give off to your customers? 

You’ll want to make sure that your intention and your customers’ perception matches to avoid any confusion. For instance, if you come across as casual in the welcome newsletter and then formal in a follow up nurture email, the sudden shift may throw people off. 

To help narrow things down, start with thinking about the personality, values, and goals of your company itself. When everything is aligned, it creates a more consistent experience for your customers and team members.

Keep your email design responsive 

You already know just how much we use phones to do everything from scroll through social media, keep up to date on the latest news, and stay connected with friends and family. But most people also spend plenty of time checking their emails on their phones, too. According to Campaign Monitor, at least 50% of all emails opens happen on mobile devices. This means that your emails need to look just as great on mobile devices as they do on desktop. 

To keep design consistency, you can create separate email templates for different devices, but an easier and more effective solution would be to make your email templates’ design responsive. Responsive email design is created to automatically adapt to any screen size. The benefit of responsive email design is avoiding any formatting that can make your email templates look awkward or even unreadable while keeping the look and feel consistent across the board. Most email creation platforms like Mailchimp or Hubspot have responsive templates, but if you’d like to create your own templates from scratch, you can learn more about how to do so with MJML.

Update your email templates regularly

As your brand evolves, your email marketing should too. Your email campaigns should not only reflect the big-picture changes that your brand is making, such as evolution in strategy or 

There’s no rule on how often you should update your email branding—it honestly depends on how often the brand itself is growing. The goal is to make sure there’s cohesiveness between where your brand is and what is being conveyed to your customers.

One way to keep your emails up to date is by doing an email marketing audit every now and then. This process involves going through your email marketing program to not only see what needs to be updated, but to also get a better idea of what can be improved. Doing this consistently ensures that you don’t have any outdated or incorrect information being relayed to your audience, which can cause frustration and confusion for both your customers and your team. To learn more about how to start your email marketing audit, check out our blog post with step-by-step details.

Brand consistency is what differentiates good marketing from great marketing. Regardless of size or industry, a business needs cohesiveness across the board, especially when communicating directly with customers. If you’re still looking for more help with creating consistent email templates, let Scalero help you. Our team can design and code custom email templates just for your brand and help you seamlessly integrate them into your email marketing program. Reach out to get started!