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
