Self-made millionaire and Personal Branding™ guru, Jason Hartman, sees today’s four tips - quality, consistency, competency and reliability - as essential to your brand’s personality. Here, we explore them with relevance to the online arena and help you answer: What is the personality of your brand? Is your e-newsletter delivering on its promise?

These follow our first three tips on brand alignment, unique style and attention to detail. To revisit those tips, click here.

Quality
What is quality communication or service? And how does this relate to your e-newsletter?

Imagine entering your favourite café. You’re greeted warmly by your first name, some friendly conversation and your regular order of a long black. That is quality service.

In your e-newsletter this same service can be provided by personalisation. Greet your reader by his first name, format the content so his favourite topics come first and make offers that match his interests and needs. It’s warm, it’s personal and it’s relevant. This is quality.

Do you do this with your e-newsletter?

Consistency
What does consistency of service provide for your business?

Let's say your favourite café is part of a quality franchise. Upon entering another café in the chain, you’ll be greeted with the same décor and service. You’ll know what to expect on the menu and where the counter is. You’ll be served your long black in the same way.

If your service is consistently above par, customers come to expect it. And each time you fulfil their expectations your brand values are reinforced.

An e-newsletter’s consistency comes from its visual presentation, ease-of-use and content quality. Changing it every second issue erodes your brand, and your company will appear scatty. Content should also follow a regular format and style. Readers are turned off if they get inconsistent quality.

Sure, you can refresh the way your newsletter looks occasionally. But first, establish a sense of consistency. Readers should know where to find regular information such as articles, resources, subscription management and where to forward your newsletter to a friend. Using a template will help.

Whenever you change your template, make sure you tell the reader why, and how this will benefit them. The best way to do this is to survey your readers before doing any layout changes, then let them know when to expect an upgraded version of your newsletter.

Eureka has gone through a face-lift after establishing its tile for over a year. Have a look and compare the difference here. We started by asking readers what would improve Eureka, analysed the results, and presented this new version last issue. A common request was more variety of content. I think you’d agree the new version provides that while continuing to provide the same high quality you expect.

Competency
Competency is where most companies fall short with their e-newsletter. According to Quris survey, about 60 per cent of email readers have severed relationships with their suppliers after experiencing bad email practice.

A bad experience from the reader's viewpoint comes from bad email delivery systems. For instance receiving a 3MB PDF that crashes their computers, subscription management that’s clunky or even non-existent, no choice between text and HTML versions or personalisation attempts that miss the mark.

How about my own experience. I receive a regular spam mail that calls me "None". I presume that’s because they don't know my name or just don’t really care what my name is. It gets worse. "Dear None”, they write, “Are you feeling like a hairy gorilla?" Well, not only have they got my name wrong, they also don’t know that I am not hairy at all!

Like most readers, I react angrily to such mistakes. Have you suffered any bad email experiences? How do you feel towards the sender? Does your newsletter pass this competency test?

Implementing the following can help: small file size, professional delivery software, provision of both text and html formats, automated un-subscription functions and foolproof personalisation. The list goes on but these are among the most important considerations.

Reliability
This simply means doing what you said you’d do. Presumably you have a good opt-in practice. Your newsletter promises to deliver information that is valuable to your readers. At opt-in you promised regular delivery.

If you fail to deliver information that you promised, or skip an issue or two due to heavy workload, this flags your unreliability. Unfortunately all bad experiences are contributed to your brand.

Stick to your promise and deliver on it. It is timely content that your readers want so make sure the information you provide is accurate, reliable and on schedule.

In Summary
Quality, consistency, competency and reliability are all important considerations when brand building. Your e-newsletter is an important part of this exercise. Use it wisely to enhance, not damage, your brand personality by deliver consistently on your brand promise.

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