BrandQuantum - NEWS by BrandQuantum

Employer branding made easy with BrandMail

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 14:13:15 -0500

Employer Branding is growing in importance across the globe, particularly as companies are scrambling to attract and retain the best talent. With remote working being made a reality, in many instances, companies are competing for skills from a global talent pool and offering attractive packages that make it hard for companies to compete. However, companies that have a strong employer brand are likely to win the war for talent in the long run as they offer great employee experiences and create brand ambassadors out of their staff.

To deliver your brand internally, email which is a widely used business tool for internal and external communication can be used to effectively deliver a consistent brand that resonates with employees and contributes to the brand experience. Here are some tips to incorporate your brand into employee emails.

Tip 1: Email signatures are important

Email signatures can be an effective branding tool, building trust amongst recipients. So why wouldn’t you include this valuable piece of branding in your employee branding? Including professionally branded email signatures on internal emails reinforces the brand amongst employees, creating a sense of pride and belonging to the brand. By using an email signature management tool, emails delivered across the company will be on brand and carry the correct email signature every time.

Tip 2: Use email banners to drive employer branding

Email banners provide a platform to highlight the latest campaigns the company is running and to showcase the company’s successes. As an important audience to your company, emails sent internally to your employees should include these banners as much as emails to your customers should. While email banners aid in building the brand it also empowers employees with knowledge about campaigns that the company is running so that they are better equipped to assist customers with queries and can even proactively share information about the latest campaigns with customers.

Tip 3: Rate your employee experiences and satisfaction levels regularly

It is important to measure the pulse of your organisation from the inside as much as it is to measure customer satisfaction levels. Use the BrandMail Rate My Service tools to measure your employee morale, engagement levels and employee experiences throughout the year and determine what is working well and identify areas for improvement.

Tip 4: Use your digital business card as a branding tool

Digital business cards provide a great opportunity to reinforce your brand and to let your employees experience your brand. With BrandMail’s BrandMe page, employee photos can be included along with the brand elements such as the logo, creating an affiliation to the brand for every employee across the company. Further, these digital business cards enable employees to see other employees’ information such as contact details, designation and qualifications, creating a sense of community and pride amongst employees and helping to increase brand awareness and create brand ambassadors for the company. Each BrandMe page carries a unique QR code, making it easy to share and download the information carried in the digital business card.

It is important that your employees trust your brand and are loyal to your brand. As such, while employer branding requires extensive planning and ongoing initiatives to build the brand, email provides a cost-effective tool that can be added to the mix to improve employer branding amongst employees, helping to drive employee retention rates and create brand ambassadors that engage your customers in every interaction. By using an email signature management tool, emails delivered across the company will be on brand and carry the correct email signature, banners, surveys and digital business card every time to enhance your employee experience.

Tips to freshen up your brand this spring

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 08:55:21 -0500

The Southern Hemisphere is enjoying the site of new buds and brightly coloured blossoms as the first signs of spring emerge. This signals the time to spring clean, declutter and reorganise. Use this season to breathe new life into your brand, update your brand elements and discard outdated branded materials. See our tips below to help you through the process of freshening up your brand:

Tip1: Check your letterheads

Outdated letterheads can often float around an organisation without being noticed. Yet in a desperate attempt to send an urgent letter out, these letterheads often end up resurfacing, found in old emails or discovered on individual desktops before appearing in your customer’s hands or inbox.

To prevent letterheads from being sent out with the logo or previous address and telephone number or worse yet, with the former director’s details and no sign of the new director’s details, go through your shared folders and files and remove all these old letterheads.

It is also valuable to check that the current letterhead has the correct logo, make sure it is in the right position on the page and prints out correctly, and check and recheck the contact details and director’s information. Once you are happy with the letterhead, share it with the organisation to ensure that all staff have access to the latest version of the company letterhead and other divisional letterheads.

Tip 2: Revive your email signatures

Approximately 333.2 billion emails are sent daily. These are not all necessarily sent from your company but you wouldn’t want your email to get lost in the crowd. While email signatures carry valuable contact information that recipients may appreciate, they also provide an ideal branding platform to show off your brand. Email signatures also need to be given a fresh new look to continue to grab your recipient’s attention and reinforce your brand in every email correspondence your employees have with your customers. Once you’ve refreshed your company email signature, remember to share it across the organisation and ensure that every staff member is using the same version of the email signature to drive brand consistency.

Tip 3: Clean up your PowerPoint slide decks

PowerPoint decks have an uncanny ability to increase in slide numbers over time. Every employee that has worked on the company presentation slides, has added their own personal touch and flair to provide relevant and up-to-date information to the audience. Often these decks start to carry too much information and the pertinent points get lost. Not to mention that pretty pictures that don’t resemble the brand and strange fonts get added to give the presentation more visual appeal.

Spend some time going through the slides and determine what information is important and what information can be deleted without losing valuable insight. Check the font, font colour and font size across all the slides to ensure brand consistency and remove any images that do not align with the brand. Once the deck is up-to-date, give employees access to the latest versions of the slide decks and remove any former versions that are saved in share drives or folders.

Tip 4: Declutter your templates and documents

Templates and documents can often get tampered with and changed throughout the year. Spend some time going through the sales decks, proposal templates, contracts and other marketing materials and documents to ensure that they are aligned to the brand. Check brand elements from the logo to the font and make sure the font type, colour and sizes are correctly used across all templates and documents.

In addition to checking the brand elements, look for any outdated versions of the company templates and documents and remove them from share folders to prevent employees from accessing and using them in future.Maintaining branded materials is a time-intensive process but it is necessary to ensure brand consistency in all customer correspondence and should be done regularly.

With BrandOffice company documents, templates, presentations and spreadsheets can be compiled, modified and saved centrally before sharing them across the organisation to be accessed via the BrandMail Ribbon in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. With BrandOffice, only the most up-to-date templates and content is available to employees, and it includes added security features such as content locking for specific content parts while expiry dates, audit logs and content owners ensure governance and compliance.

BrandMail helps companies to deliver consistently branded emails across email platforms carrying tamperproof email signatures that link to fully customisable digital business cards. BrandMail allows brand teams to centrally manage the complete email template, including body font, colour, size and colour theme across multiple brands and shared mailboxes.

By using an email signature and document management tool, branding teams can manage their brands centrally and empower employees to deliver a consistent brand, improve customer experiences and help improve brand recognition and build brand trust.

THE CUSTOMER.NET | Upskilling & Upscaling Your Martech Stack

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 07:08:38 -0500

Article first published on thecustomer.net on 14 September 2021, written by Paula Sartini

Marketing technology (martech) is growing in popularity, and there is no shortage of statistics to support the benefits that technology can bring to the marketing arena. However, while many software offerings and tools tout to help marketing teams achieve their goals and objectives, they can also add to the complexity of the day-to-day. To start, there are more than 8,000 martech offerings available on offer for marketers to choose from.

All of this choice can be a daunting and even complex task. Particularly as there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Each offering provides a solution to meet a specific need and not knowing what you need can cost money without the benefits. This is further challenged by the need to implement solutions that will meet customer’s changing needs and expectations.

It is for this reason that marketers are looking to add more tools to the martech stack as they try to keep up with the changing martech landscape. This is supported by the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) and BDO research which found that 76% of marketers want to add more tools to their marketing stack. However, before marketers add more tools to their stack, they need to reassess their needs and then implement a solution that will help them achieve their objectives.

The challenge of upskilling

Before selecting a martech solution, marketers need to understand what the upskilling requirements will be to be able to use the solution.

While automation, for example, is believed to free up employee time so that they can focus on pressing matters and strategies, many solutions can add to the complexity of the task, particularly if it requires time to learn how to use the solution, understand the data and keep the technology up to date.

For technology to be effective and make a difference, it needs to be easy to use and seamlessly integrate into the solutions users are accustomed to using daily. Many technologies require an upfront time investment in learning how to use the solution and to train other staff on how to use the solution. This can add extra pressure on teams as they focus time and energy on learning how to use the technology and keeping up to date on new updates and changes to the technology which can detracts from workloads.

The challenge of over automation

Automation can help to minimise time spent on repetitive tasks, engage customers via bots, keep customers updated on news and product offerings via email campaigns and more. It is for this reason that 63% of marketers plan to increase their marketing automation budget in the next year. However, as consumer behaviour and sentiment can change, messaging must be authentic and relevant and marketers cannot rely solely on automation to get it right.

Marketers need to manage the process of personalised engagement to ensure that customers are not being inundated with irrelevant messaging and campaigns but rather, are receiving the right message at the right time. This process requires human intervention, creativity and technology to work together to create the right results.

The challenge of changing customer expectations

As the marketing landscape changes and new technologies are introduced to meet changing customer’s needs, marketers must remember the core of marketing which is about building relationships with the audience. This must be the key factor driving technology purchasing decisions as marketers seek to free up time to pay attention to building relationships with customers.

Building relationships with customers continues to be about focusing on the human touch and emotional connection rather than the products or solutions your company sells. Technology cannot create these connections with your customers, but it can empower companies to make their customers feel special by freeing up staff to provide the human touch by engaging with customers and using data wisely to inform them of relevant offers that they would be interested in.

BUSINESS BRIEF | The challenge of martech and automation

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 06:56:19 -0500

Article first published on bbrief.co.za on 30 September 2021, written by Paula Sartini

The challenge of upskilling

Before selecting a martech solution, marketers need to understand what the upskilling requirements will be to be able to use the solution.

The challenge of over automation

The challenge of changing customer expectations

BLOG | The challenge of martech and automation

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 05:58:14 -0500

To start, there are more than 8 000 martech offerings available on offer for marketers to choose from. All of this choice can be a daunting and even complex task. Particularly as there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Each offering provides a solution to meet a specific need and not knowing what you need can cost money without the benefits. This is further challenged by the need to implement solutions that will meet customer’s changing needs and expectations.

The challenge of upskilling

Before selecting a martech solution, marketers need to understand what the upskilling requirements will be to be able to use the solution. While automation, for example, is believed to free up employee time so that they can focus on pressing matters and strategies, many solutions can add to the complexity of the task, particularly if it requires time to learn how to use the solution, understand the data and keep the technology up to date.

The challenge of over automation

Automation can help to minimise time spent on repetitive tasks, engage customers via bots, keep customers updated on news and product offerings via email campaigns and more. It is for this reason that 63% of marketers plan to increase their marketing automation budget in the next year. However, as consumer behaviour and sentiment can change, messaging must be authentic and relevant, and marketers cannot rely solely on automation to get it right. However, as consumer behaviour and sentiment can change, messaging must be authentic and relevant, and marketers cannot rely solely on automation to get it right.

Marketing is about providing great value at every customer touchpoint and email campaigns and customer engagement needs to manage the process, it cannot be outsourced to an automation solution to understand your customer’s needs. Marketers need to manage the process of personalised engagement to ensure that customers are not being inundated with irrelevant messaging and campaigns but rather, are receiving the right message at the right time. This process requires human intervention, creativity, and technology to work together to create the right results.

The challenge of changing customer expectations

While there are a lot of innovative technology solutions available to marketers today, before feeling pressured into using solutions for the sake of using them, marketers need to go back to their roots. They need to have a great strategy, know their customers and understand how to establish emotional connections with their customers. Once they have this in place, the technologies implemented should help them to achieve this by freeing up time to enhance customer interactions and focusing on the marketing strategy.

BrandMail awarded 15 top ranking badges in the G2 Fall Report 2021

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 06:39:30 -0500

BrandMail, a software solution developed by BrandQuantum to deliver brand consistency across all email communication, recently received 15 badges in the G2 Fall Report 2021. Most notably BrandMail received badges for Easiest Admin, Best Meets Requirements, Easiest to Use, Easiest to Do Business With, High Performer and Users Most Likely to Recommend. G2 badges are awarded based on authentic peer reviews that are authorised by G2.

“We are delighted to be awarded these badges as a result of our customer’s experience using BrandMail,” says Paula Sartini, founder and CEO at BrandQuantum International. “We have developed our solutions with the user in mind and strive to help companies to overcome their brand consistency challenges. By being awarded these badges in the G2 Fall Report we are reminded that we are simplifying our customer’s lives by removing the challenge of brand consistency, and ultimately helping them to build brand trust.”

BrandMail seamlessly integrates into Microsoft Outlook to empower every employee across the organisation to deliver consistently branded emails which include tamperproof email signatures, banners and surveys to pre-developed and approved email content that can easily be inserted into emails from the Outlook toolbar.

BrandMail has been designed with security at the core to help companies to keep personal data secure and adheres to the POPI Act and GDPR requirements.

BIZCOMMUNITY | The challenge of martech and automation

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 06:27:29 -0500

Article first published on bizcommunity.com on 20 September 2021, written by Paula Sartini

To start, there are more than 8,000 martech offerings available on offer for marketers to choose from. All of these choices can be a daunting and even complex task. Particularly as there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Each offering provides a solution to meet a specific need and not knowing what you need can cost money without the benefits. This is further challenged by the need to implement solutions that will meet customer’s changing needs and expectations.

The challenge of upskilling

The challenge of over automation

Marketing is about providing great value at every customer touchpoint and email campaigns and customer engagement needs to manage the process, it cannot be outsourced to an automation solution to understand your customer’s needs. Marketers need to manage the process of personalised engagement to ensure that customers are not being inundated with irrelevant messaging and campaigns but rather, are receiving the right message at the right time. This process requires human intervention, creativity and technology to work together to create the right results.

The challenge of changing customer expectations