EN-CA
The most successful brands have adopted a set of human-like personality traits to help them build stronger bonds with customers, convey values, and differentiate from competitors. By infusing their brand personality into marketing and sales, they earn customer loyalty and grow their business.
In the contact center, brand personality often shapes outbound marketing scripts. But what about email? After all, it’s still the primary channel for business communications, and its reign appears far from over. The number of emails sent and received per day is expected to grow at a rate of 4.6 percent to nearly 258 billion in 2020, according to the Radicati Group.
Clearly, email can be a powerful conduit for expressing brand personality, but are you using it to its fullest potential? One often overlooked feature is the email signature. By ensuring your brand personality is infused into contact center email signatures, you can take advantage of volume and create a unique opportunity to engage customers.
Consider these four ideas for helping contact center agents craft the kind of email signatures that will shape consumer perceptions of your brand.
Know your target audience
One of the first items to consider when designing your email signature is your primary target audience. Are you a casual company catering mainly to Millennials and Gen Xers? Or are you a professional firm targeting a more traditional audience?
By answering these questions, you can make wise decisions about what to include in your signature. A photo might be an appropriate addition if you’d like to convey a warmer tone. And font and color choices also have an impact on the opinion a customer forms about your brand. For example, bright colors and adventurous fonts may scream “fun and casual,” while traditional colors and a simple font may radiate “professional and trustworthy.” The key takeaway is that every design element will send a message about your brand and who you are as a company.
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Convey what makes you different
Every brand is unique. It’s what differentiates us from our competition. Yet in business, we often hesitate to show our human side. In today’s markets, though, customers value authenticity highly. So, allow contact center agents to infuse a little bit of themselves into their email signatures.
Show off brand values
While it’s important to keep your signature short, incorporating links to your brand’s values, mission, and vision is an excellent way to help customers learn more about your personality. In addition, technology can help you show – rather than tell – how you live your brand values. For example, if you take pride in the personalized customer experience you deliver, allow each agent to include a direct link to their phone number, making it easy for customers to connect with a simple click of a button.
Engage socially
If your brand enjoys a big presence on social media, be sure to include links to the channels you use the most, such as the company blog, Twitter or Facebook page. Customers can join the discussion and really sample a taste of your brand’s personality.
With contact center agents on board, your brand will have hundreds or perhaps thousands of opportunities every day to show off your brand personality. All it takes is a little bit of tweaking to the humble email signature.
