Thinking of copy as the voice of your brand helps you make the right design choices and create unified emails tuned to their purpose. There’s more to an email than looking good and having high deliverability.
Words provide inspiration and design cues. They have a voice, your voice, that the design should amplify not drown out. Shape, texture and style must work in harmony with design. How you structure your message decides email architecture and focus, sets the flow and calls-to-action.
Image isn’t the same as images
What is a logo? It’s a succinct graphical representation of your brand, it isn’t your brand. Nor is it a corporate colour scheme or catchphrase. A brand is the public face of what you and your business are all about. And what people think of your business is ultimately what your brand is. They define and own it, not you. All you can do is guide opinion.
How? Through effective communication… getting across your ideas, what you do and what you stand for, who you are and by delivering on what you promise. Without this behind your logo you don’t have a brand, you have a nice icon.
Words create strong images
What you say and how you say it has a far deeper and longer lasting impact than your logo or corporate colour scheme. Think about how you’d be perceived if you sent emails that:
- Came across as shifty or outright dishonest
- Were strewn with sloppy grammatical and spelling errors
- Had a tone of voice entirely inappropriate for your audience
- Just desperately badgered the recipient to buy stuff
- Were bland and boring, lifeless and artificial
- Confused the reader with jargon or by being poorly-written
- Were all fluff and didn’t get your message across
- Completely changed tone and style between each one
You’d have to have a really bad logo or corporate colour scheme for it to matter anywhere near as much as this.
Graphic design is about visual communication not art. Successful brands are message-first, with graphics in support.
