How to make your personal emails work like a marketing channel

To excel in digital marketing today, you need to use multiple channels at the same time. You can’t only use social media marketing or only use SEO. If you want to succeed in promoting your brand, products and service, you need to use all the channels readily available, so why is personal email often left out?

Email is the most popular communication and marketing channel. You as a marketer can and should use email marketing (of course), but personal email correspondence of you and your colleagues are often an untapped marketing and sales channel.

Can personal emails be an efficient marketing channel?

How many emails do you send daily? Is it a couple, a dozen, or more?
An average office worker sends 40 business emails a day. Excluding vacations and weekends, that’s about 10,000 emails a year. Now multiply these emails by the number of employees in your company.

Think about every email you send to anyone as if it was an offline conversation. When you speak to somebody, they can see you, look into your eyes, judge you by your appearance. Now, what does it have to do with emails?

You can affect your email recipient, just like the offline one. With your tone of voice, appearance, and additional information. Here are our best tips on using personal emails as a marketing channel.

1. Use your complete name and company url

You wouldn’t introduce yourself as Mr./Mrs. Marketing Manager in real life. The same implies to email correspondence. If you are emailing somebody, use your real name in the email address and email client account.
When you use your real name, you take responsibility for the words written. It doesn’t mean much to you, but your recipients subconsciously trust you more.

As for marketing purposes, make sure your email address contains your company name. For example, [email protected] vs info@ or marketing@

2. Use a friendly but professional photo

First of all, make sure your email account has your photo added. In Gmail, for example, it will be displayed in every email you send.

To add or change your photo, click on your profile picture at Gmail homepage and then on a small camera icon.

Just like with the name, your photo makes the email more trustworthy. Your recipients feel a real human being contacting them and not some automation tool.

Research says that a human face put on any kind of content increases its credibility. Also, it makes people want to get engaged. So, if you want a reply to your email, a photo might make it more possible.

3. Link your content and use video

When you send an email about some specific topic or offer, make sure the recipient can check for more background information on your website. We don’t say you should add dozens of links to your email, but if it feels like one could be useful, do include it.

A smart move here would be to mention your blog posts when you speak about some particular topics. Also, it’s worth mentioning events you are either attending or organising, both offline events and use email to boost attendance to your webinars.

You shouldn’t make these links too pushy though. People don’t tend to react if you say something like “By the way, here is my tool. Check the price.” Helpful works.

In addition, adding links to video content can be helpful. It helps people get important information easier, promoting your personal and corporate brands.  A tip to make video content seem more professional / impactful, is to add an intro to your video. Tools like these online intro makers make it pretty easy.

Notice that not every piece of video content has to be fully outsourced. To get started, making some simple video screen-captured answers gets you closer to the recipient.

4. Mention your social media accounts

If you are active on social, mention the channels – professionals might be very active on Linkedin, depending on your company the main channels might be Youtube, Facebook, or any other. It is easy for the recipient of your emails to quickly have a look at your updates. Social help stay in touch with your active audience.

As for your personal emails, share the links to your social profiles. It can be useful for several reasons:

• You will grow the number of impressions on your posts and followers on your profiles.
• Recipients will be able to learn more about your company and yourself.
• Social media accounts add to your credibility, as people can check whether your company is real and ‘alive.’
• You show that you are actively promoting your brand, which will make a better impression of you and the company you represent.
• The best way to mention your social accounts in an email is by adding linked icons, of course.

5. Don’t use too graphical design in personal emails

You might think that using an designed and styled mail template with visual is a good idea. But we don’t recommend doing so in your personal emails, and here’s why:

First of all, it takes away the personal touch if your email body looks like a promotional / too styled. People react differently to styled emails, versus personal. And you want to make sure your message looks like a professional email on all accounts. As a recipient opens a message and finds it filled with sophisticated graphical elements, they refuse to consider it friendly.

However, an HTML email has one huge benefit. You can include hyperlinks, also to the pictures in it. For instance, the social media icons mentioned before.

Here is an example of an email signature by Yesmail. They use HTML to link to a useful resource.

A professional email signature can help to combine both the straightforwardness and the eye candy.

6. Do use a professional email signature

You want to make your emails friendly and simple while promoting content and social media accounts. So a professional email signature is what you need.

Placed in an email footer, your signature doesn’t interfere with the body of the email. It doesn’t make your email look too salesy. But with HTML you can add lots of things to your email, such as:

• Your personal photo
• Your name, position, and company
• Basic contact information (phone numbers, email addresses, and website)
• Calls to action in forms of links, buttons, or banners
• Social media icons
• Legal disclaimers and green messages

Also, make sure you use HTML code and not just one picture as an email signature. You can make one yourself, or use an email signature generator like Newoldstamp or MySignature.io.

Email signatures let you promote your personal brand, company, and even some specific content. With banners, you can link anything from your email while the body stays looking like plain text.

Use email signature banners to:

• Promote special offers
• Share your awards
• Share content updates
• Share ebooks, case studies or white papers
• Invite to events

Use additional call-to-action buttons to:

• Schedule a demo
• Get in touch
• Sign up or Subscribe to the newsletter

7. Always stay friendly and helpful

It might be obvious to most readers. But being friendly and cheerful with your recipients is as important as promotional banners and links. After all, we are talking about your personal email correspondence and all personal email demands even better email etiquette.

Invest in a nice image of you as a professional. Be helpful to recipients and always stick to the professional tone. Even if you throw a joke here and there. Such an approach will help you build trust and credibility.

Conclusion

Any personal email you send can be used for marketing your product or company. Emails are used the most to communicate in the business world. So, you should make sure yours are unique and exceptionally lovely. The checklist is as follows:

1. Use your real name and company in every email
2. Add a professional photo to your email account
3. Include links to your content in the email body if possible
4. Mention social media accounts (personal or corporate)
5. Write emails as simple text format
6. Use a professional email signature
7. Be kind to your recipients.

If you have more tips to make your personal emails perform better, don’t hesitate to share them in comments!