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Companies Ignore Email's Potential to Enhance or Damage Brand Awareness
According to a report from Mailround,
an email branding and marketing specialist firm, 100% of the world's most
valuable brands surveyed are missing an important marketing opportunity by
leaving their emails unbranded and not utilizing the medium's unique
potential for interactivity. The research analyzed responses to email and
postal approaches to both personnel and customer service departments of 75
of the 100 most valuable brands in the world as determined by Interbrand in
2001 (www.interbrand.com).
The research uncovered a gaping marketing and communication opportunity.
Despite massive investment in brand consistency and awareness, companies are
ignoring the most popular and cost effective means of corporate
communication - email.
Each department, (personnel and customer service), received one email
enquiry and one postal enquiry. Not one of the 87 employee emails received
by Mailround from the world's top brands exhibited any form of branding. The
only email to include a corporate logo was an HTML automatic reply, which
was followed up by an unbranded response. In contrast only one of the 76
postal responses received did not arrive on branded stationary.
Yet these figures are in stark contrast to the actual method of response
most often used by the leading brands. Companies were nearly twice as likely
to respond to email enquiries than requests for information by post. Of the
letters to customer services departments 43% went unanswered, compared to
only 25% of the emails.
However, those companies who did reply to Mailround's enquiries tended to do
so promptly. All of the responses received from the customer services email
enquiries arrived within a working week, 51% responded on the same day.
Eldar Tuvey, Managing Director of Mailround, comments; "These results reveal
that email is still seen as an informal method of communication, which is
not only inadvisable but also potentially damaging to a company, now that
email has become the de facto tool for business communication. Companies
would not dream of sending out letters which are unbranded, why should
emails be any different?"
"Companies with employees that regularly use email are also missing a
communication and marketing trick (especially as these top companies are
also the biggest advertising spenders, with well over $7.8bn being spent on
big-budget campaigns by them in the US alone*). The research proves that
email can and is being used as an effective communication tool by many
brands, but emails are an unrivalled medium for external marketing and
communication if you look beyond the body text. Companies send out tens of
thousands of emails a month. They can be as uniformly branded as print
media, and yet they have the added potential for holding interactive
marketing messages and reinforcing key elements of the brand."
Surprisingly, dot.com and technology companies performed slightly less ably
than the traditional brands surveyed - 23% of tech based companies did not
reply to customer services emails, compared to 25% of traditional companies.
* source: Advertising Age Megabrands survey 2000
Discuss This Article on the Marketing Today Message Boards
Peter De Legge is an
eBusiness strategy and Marketing
Consultant with over 10 years of Marketing/Marketing Communications
experience, primarily in the business to business arena. To learn more about his services, visit his Web site at http://www.businessmarketing.net.
© Copyright 2001, Peter De Legge. All
rights reserved.
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