Brand Building Goes (Way) Beyond Marketing: Make EVERY Employee A Brand Builder

Let’s be real…in 2023, most marketing teams are at max capacity. And on the odd chance that they’re not running on fumes or frantically training new-hires to wear 100 hats, they might have figured out what most teams struggle to realize: Brand building is more than just marketing’s responsibility.

‍In fact, some of the most successful brands of today boast marketing teams who know to capitalize on this very fact.

As buyers change and adapt in the face of new marketing tactics, technology, and channels, building brand awareness and creating engaging customer experiences continues to challenge marketing teams. Expanding reach and attracting high quality leads - two crucial considerations for any brand - might be at the bottom of your team’s to-do list simply because you know how much time, energy, and money it’s going to cost. But since the cost of acquiring a new lead is exponentially higher than the cost to nurture existing relationships, what if we looked here first?

Brand Building Belongs to Everyone

If you’ve already determined that your marketing team is tapped, it’s time to look elsewhere for new growth opportunities. But who else can step in to assist with brand building with minimal lift? Turns out…everyone can. 

Every single department of your organization has an opportunity to build your brand in a unique way. More specifically, if they leverage email to communicate, they’re able to reach your ideal audience - directly or indirectly - and make an impact. 

To understand this better, let’s start by observing a list of who your organization’s employees are already communicating with: 

• Cold, warm, and hot leads
• Event attendees, registrants, or waitlist members
• Hiring candidates and potential ambassadors
• Potential customers, partners, or members
• Vendors, industry contacts, and competitors
• Service providers and third-party contacts

A closer look at these communications will likely reveal a number of exchanges involving your marketing, sales, customer success, HR, product, and partnership teams. 

Day in and day out, these teams are engaging in conversations that have the potential to do more for your brand. In fact, baked into each exchange is the opportunity to promote the initiatives that impact your bottom line. Content, events, sponsorships, you name it - there’s room to shine a spotlight on these impactful channels throughout conversations in a subtle-yet-effective way.

Going Deeper: Strengthening Existing Relationships

On a mission to stand out in a crowded landscape? Your brand needs to connect with your audience on a deeper level. 

How? Building solid, comprehensive relationships over time and continuing to provide personalized value through one-on-one communication. 

What, like it’s hard? 

One of the most impactful channels for relationship building is 1:1 email. And since you’re already using this channel to communicate with vital contacts, it conveniently serves as the perfect channel to increase brand presence, amplify your campaigns, and turn conversions into revenue. 

Committing to contact upkeep isn’t a massive lift because your team is already doing it as a part of their day to day function. It might look like SDRs emailing their hot leads to follow up on a conversation or could look like your customer success representative troubleshooting a customer issue via email. In either case, these touchpoints are key part of their job in building and maintaining high quality relationships across email. Imagine if the email from your SDR includes a beautiful ad banner that links to the playbook of the recent webinar your prospect attended. Since you're already in visualization mode, picture the email your customer success team includes an ad banner that links to your company knowledge base. Do you see the potential for magic here?

You've been sitting on a gold-mine and you didn't even know it.

Empowering Non-Marketing Employees

Since we’ve already established that the responsibility of brand building falls onto ALL departments (not just marketing), high-growth marketing and brand teams can leverage a technology solution to take advantage of email as a conversion-ready channel. How? By actioning the examples we listed above. The marketing team has an incredible opportunity to launch relevant and impactful marketing campaigns across employee email signatures.  

The result of this is a fully-aligned, branded organization with an extended reach, delivering value to customers and benefiting from increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and more revenue. 

What’s A Brand Builder, Anyway?

People do business with those they know and trust, which is why the engine of your brand is actually your employees. Serving as a trustworthy, familiar entity, your organization’s people have the power to impact the bottom line. 

Brand builders stand out as these trustworthy, approachable contacts who simultaneously help extend the reach of a brand’s messaging and content. These relationships - especially among key players and leaders within your organization - are the fuel that powers a brand to go further, faster. 

As employees turn into brand builders, they help your organization maximize a strong brand strategy and leverage relationships to do so, all without overextending themselves or burning out. It really can be that easy, and we’re eager to show you how.

Amplify Your Reach With Employee Email: Here’s How

Taking a strategic approach to brand building through email means capitalizing on the single most overlooked real estate in this space: email signatures. 

According to the Radicati Group, the average employee sends around 40 emails every single day, adding up to nearly 10,000 emails per year, per employee. At a 100-person company, this means that email presents nearly 1,000,000+ impressions, all serving as opportunities to build your brand and engage your audience. 

Are you leveraging your best content to increase the impact of these impressions?

Branded email signatures and email ad campaigns allows you to shine a spotlight on your freshest content - like upcoming events, available downloads, or latest news - through intentional campaigns nestled comfortably within an employee signature. 

Through the power of repetition, email signature marketing allows you to ensure that your organization’s contacts build an awareness of your latest offerings and events, and increase the likelihood that they’ll engage. Known as the frequency illusion, this tactic helps build a sense of brand loyalty among your target audience and contacts. Leveraging tactics like these can help employees form genuine and impactful connections with their networks, all while increasing brand exposure. 

Imagine how beneficial it would be to your organization if your upcoming events, recent launches, or newest offerings were consistently showcased throughout email signatures in a way that positioned them as enticing and convenient? Better yet, showcasing these offerings within messages from your employees gives interested audiences a direct contact to reach out to with questions, interest, or requests. 

Capitalize On Your Most Powerful Channel

Enter: the email ad banner. As the Notorious B.I.G. once said…if you don’t know, now you know. 

Email ad banners are the single most powerful communication channel available to brands in 2023. And if you aren’t using them already, we’re about to leave you feeling inspired to start. Like, yesterday.

Email ad banners - the skinny ad blocks often tucked neatly into email signatures - are better than your traditional display ad or retargeted ad. Fueled by relationships, email ad banners allow you to present attractive and engaging content to the people who already are open to building a relationship with your brand. Through these banners, your teams are able to deliver useful, targeted, branded content to your prospects, customers, partners, and beyond. As an added bonus, larger teams can benefit from a larger reach thanks to the number of emails sent.

While many people assume powerful ads come with hefty price tags, email signature marketing is actually shockingly accessible for most brands. And unlike pricey ad campaigns that can’t guarantee your message will reach your ideal target audiences, email signature marketing ensures that your messages are seen by warm leads who are already familiar with your brand. With competitively low costs, and an unbeatable ROI, you really can’t go wrong with email signature marketing. 

Spark Ideas & Get Inspired

The proof is in the pudding. So you don’t have to take our word for it when we tell you that email signature marketing works. You can simply take a peek at one of our happy customer case studies that showcases the powerful results of email ad banner campaigns. Click here to learn more about how we helped Outreach.io leverage email signatures to increase event ticket sales by 10%, driving thousands of dollars in revenue. 

By tapping into event-specific tactics in an effort to boost event attendance and email engagement, we bring clients in event-based industries real, lasting results through effective brand building.

Brand Building Through Employee Email Signatures

Now that you’ve realized the opportunities that await bold brands willing to harness the power of email signature marketing across their organization, you’re ready to dive in head first. In order to create an effective process between brand builders and their networks, you’ll need to equip them with the tools they need to succeed. 

Opensense exists to help you empower your employees to step into the role of brand builders through easy, accessible methods, especially email signature ad banners. By creating informative, colorful, engaging campaigns, you can provide your teams with turnkey solutions that integrate directly into their emails. With practically no additional lift on their part, your employees are then able to go about their day-to-day work and interact with contacts as usual, but now, they’ll be furthering your reach. 

By taking the guesswork out of your email marketing efforts, we can help you achieve results on a larger scale and with better results. 

Curious about what Opensense can do for you and your organization? Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can help you and your teams do more for less.