Building Brand Credibility with Email Authentication

Building brand credibility is hard. Especially when you’re just starting out—it can be tough to find the right strategies that really work. It’s a lot easier to open an email if you know the sender’s name and it’s a lot easier to trust someone if they seem familiar. The same goes for your brand.

Brand credibility is essential in gaining new customers and building loyal client relationships. 

What is Brand Credibility?

Brand credibility definition: 

The credibility of your brand is how much people trust you. If your brand is credible, people are more likely to think what you say is true, to believe that you’re going to deliver on promises, and to believe that the products you sell will do what they say they will.

Brand credibility is important because it helps customers make buying decisions and choose between products. If your brand is credible, then it’s more likely that customers will choose your product over a competitor’s product.

Brand credibility example:

When you’re in the market for a new pair of headphones and you’re trying to decide between Beats by Dre and a pair from Bose, what are you going to base your decision on?

Are you going to go with the brand that’s been around for years and has a proven track record for providing high-quality products? Or will you go with the more established option, because it has already proven itself capable of withstanding the test of time?

You’ll probably pick one or the other based on how much you trust each brand, which is what we call brand credibility. And once you’ve developed enough brand credibility, increased brand awareness and shown social proof, your customers will know they can count on you. 

The Effects of Brand Credibility on Customer Loyalty

Brand credibility is like the Golden Fleece of email marketing. It’s the end goal—the holy grail. 

You may not think much about the emails that show up in your inbox every day. But when you open one, there are a few things you do notice. You notice the sender’s name. You notice the subject line and see if it’s something you’d like to read or click on.

And, especially if you’ve never gotten an email from that sender before, you probably check to make sure the sender isn’t a spammer or someone who’s trying to steal your information.

In other words, you pay close attention to whether or not an email is credible. This means that you trust the email’s message—that it’s not misleading or working to scam you in some way.

This element of trustworthiness is a crucial part of credibility. As a consumer, you’re more likely to buy from someone (or some company) that seems trustworthy than from someone who doesn’t seem trustworthy at all.

How to Build Brand Credibility through Email? 

Credibility starts with content. Your customers need to know why they should care about what you’re saying and why it matters to them. If your audience isn’t familiar with your content, they won’t feel connected to you or your brand.

When it comes to email, brand credibility is built by presenting a trustworthy email address. You can ensure that your emails are getting delivered by authenticating them through DMARC authentication, which stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).

DMARC protects your domain from being spoofed by spammers who could otherwise use your domain to send fraudulent emails containing malware or phishing scams.

Building Brand Credibility: A Comprehensive Strategy for New Businesses 

Business is built on trust, and your brand must earn the trust of potential customers before they will do business with you.

The following steps will help you build brand credibility for your business:

1. Be transparent with your customers.

2. Establish an industry reputation.

3. Encourage customer reviews.

4. Provide a great product or service experience.

5. Give back to the community.

#fun-fact: In the year 2019, Levis Strauss & Co partnered with Cotton Inc.’s Blue Jeans Go Green program to use recyclable denim as a gesture for reducing product wastage. This is how organization’s can give back to the community and build brand credibility at the same time! 

6. Enable email authentication protocols like SPF and DKIM to stop your emails from being marked as spam

7. Enable DMARC reporting to monitor your email’s performance, and report incidents of domain abuse and impersonation

Additional insight into improving your brand image

When you’re trying to build a brand and get your products out in front of people, one of the most important things you can do is establish credibility. People are highly skeptical about new brands these days because there are so many scams out there—it’s hard to know who to trust.

So what can you do to make yourself stand out from the crowd? Here are some suggestions:

1. Have a strong online presence

You need to have a website, social media accounts (ideally on multiple platforms), and an email list for all of those accounts. If you have these things and regularity post social media content, people will be more likely to trust that you’re a legitimate company, because they can find you easily.

It is also worth taking care of your online presence through SEO activities and using a rank tracker for your content. Ranking as high as possible in the SERPs helps increase organic traffic and attracts new customers. However, be sure to do this smartly and use proven tools where you can check your website’s visibility, analyze your competitors, search for relevant seo keywords and plan and create the perfect content for your website.

2. Use reputable partnerships

If you can partner with or get testimonials from people who already have credibility in your industry, that will help to get your name out there and make it seem like you’re trustworthy too.

3. Be consistent

Your branding should be simple and easy to remember across all of your platforms so that it’s clear when someone interacts with one part of your brand that it’s the same brand as all of their other experiences with you.

4. Increase brand recall

If you want your brand to stand out and gain visibility, BIMI is for you! Brand Indicators for Message Identification is a two-in-one email authentication and marketing tool that allows domain owners to attach their unique brand logo to specific outgoing emails. This increases the chances of your potential customers opening your emails, perceiving you to be a trustworthy source. 

5. Leverage testimonials from satisfied clients

Testimonials from real, satisfied clients can provide powerful social proof and enhance your brand image. Displaying authentic testimonials from clients on your website, social media, and email campaigns can establish trust and credibility, showing potential customers that others have had positive experiences with your brand and making it more likely for them to trust and choose your products or services.

Your brand credibility is just a reflection of how your audience perceives your brand, and it’s important because it influences their ability to trust you as a business. We hope this article was helpful for you! As DMARC experts PowerDMARC helps global brands gain compliance on their emails. Sign up for a free trial today!