9 Tips to Give Your Email Program a Personality of Its Own

How do they do this? Well, by consistently sending engaging and unique emails that have a personality of their own. In fact, this consistency works so well that subscribers actually look forward to emails from such brands.

Giving your emails a personality helps to make your brand identifiable, something that’s crucial in the age of crowded inboxes. Subscribers start to befriend the personality and feel more loyal towards your brand.

There are two major components of your email that give it a personality:

1. Email content
2. Email design

Here are some tips that will help you give your emails a personality and keep your customers opening them time and time again.

Email content

Your email content needs to be captivating and at the same time relevant and personalized for your subscribers. Here are some factors that you should consider while working out the content for your email campaigns:

1. Create relevant and intriguing subject lines

Your subject line is the introduction to your email campaign. It ought to be crisp and evoke the interest of the recipient and compel them to open your email.   

2. Use personalization where you can

While first name personalization is an old tactic, it still works and is still one of the best ways to grab your subscriber’s attention. With the subscriber’s name in the subject line and email body, you make your message seem more personal. With technological advancements in personalization, marketers are now tailoring emails to make them relevant to each of their subscribers. This email from Airbnb is an excellent example:

3. Find your brand’s tone

When we’re talking about giving personality to emails, the tone of your email plays a vital role. The tone should be woven around the type of business, the campaign and your audience. Accordingly, you can keep it formal, funny, or humorous and witty. But it must be unique and consistent in all your campaigns (as far as possible). It should also be consistent with the tone you use in your advertising and other marketing channels.

Check out this email from Casper. The brand uses a cool, friendly tone to connect with subscribers in most of their emails.

While you can always make subtle changes in the tone to suit the needs of a specific campaign, overall, it should revolve around the brand personality.

4. Be the happy helper

If a consumer has subscribed to your emails, they certainly expect something from you. Be helpful. While one person might be looking for information, another might be directly looking for one of your products, which is likely to solve a problem they’re facing. You as a brand must remind them that you’re always ready to help. The more you understand what your customers need, the better your marketing will perform. Check out the helpful tone in this email from Bonobos.

Email design

Once you’re done with sorting out the content that goes into your emails and the tone of your brand, it’s time to focus on the design elements of your email because visuals have always been known to have a great impact on people. Here are some key design elements that will help give your email a unique personality:

1. Maintain a template consistency

Customizing your email template to fit your branding guidelines is a nice way to ensure your brand gets noticed. You can always choose to tweak elements according to the need of every campaign but the template should always have some recognizable elements that your subscribers instantly notice.

For example, you’ll see a striking template resemblance in these three emails from Grammarly:

2. Use colors that boost your brand personality

For brands, colors express its personality. As humans, we’re wired to remember visual components more than anything else. That is why colors matter when it comes to creating and maintaining brand personality. You can choose the colors for your email based on your audience. These colors can be used as backgrounds, in images or even for the text in your email.

Take a look at how Duolingo has used similar colors in both their emails.

3. Stand out with unique typography

Your email copy has been written for a specific purpose. The right typography can boost your chances of fulfilling this purpose. Wise selection, based on the type of your business and what your subscribers expect from you, can go a long way in building your brand. The consistent use of a particular font, font colors, size of the font and even the character and line spacing slowly builds your brand personality.

4. Draw on high resolution images 

It’s easier to convey a message through images, isn’t it? In emails, too, it’s good practice to add relevant images in your email body to engage your subscribers. But remember that subscribers expect high resolution images that grab attention. It’s also important that these images match your brand personality. In the above featured email from Airbnb (in point 1), they showcase terrific images of scenic destinations from the places their subscriber is planning to visit. 

5. Dare to go minimalist

Minimalist design is all about a clutter-free, focused outlook. In emails it’s about highlighting the main reason behind the campaign. Check out these emails from Spotify. The minimalist design ensures that the purpose of the campaign is highlighted first.

Wrapping up

Maintaining a consistent brand personality in your email campaigns is a great way to increase your brand recall. By creating this personality through the email content and design, you become a brand that subscribers remember for a long period of time and connect with.