When utilizing affiliate partners for email marketing, always having an eye on your brand should be a top concern.
For some companies, brand protection may be a priority, but it may not always be considered when it comes to email marketing or, more importantly, affiliate email marketing.
In this blog, we’ll clarify brand protection in email marketing, explain its importance, demonstrate how it can be secured via discovery tools, and highlight the benefits it offers to your organization.
What is Brand Protection in Email Marketing?
When you think of the term “brand protection,” many things may come to mind—protecting IP, public relations, safeguarding trademarks, etc. However, protecting the integrity of your brand by reviewing the content in emails sent out, especially by affiliates, is an important component to consider as part of your brand protection strategy.
In email marketing, brand protection is ensuring that all content guidelines and any specific regulations are being followed and adhered to when presenting your brand to consumers.
Why Brand Protection is important
When it comes to creating marketing content, most companies follow strict brand guidelines. These guidelines include specific messaging that must be used for certain products or offers, as well as set imagery and disclosures. The company sets these guidelines to maintain cohesive content and compliance with industry regulations.
If you work with an affiliate partner, you most likely supply them with email templates or copy that follow your internal brand guidelines and regulations. However, affiliate partners may change content or forget to include certain elements, which could result in non-compliance with your brand guidelines and certain laws and regulations. This includes subject lines, images, links, offer language, and more.
For companies working in regulated industries, falling out of compliance could lead to fines and other punitive actions. Even if an affiliate partner made changes without your knowledge or permission, the burden is still on your organization.
It's also possible that circulating emails mention your brand that you may not be aware of. These emails could be particularly damaging to your organization if they're not quickly identified, as they could harm your credibility and reputation by giving an unsanctioned endorsement.
Legal issues notwithstanding, brand protection is essential for email marketing campaigns because of the reach of your messaging. An endless number of people could be receiving the content, and ensuring your brand is being presented accurately is crucial.
The Benefits of Monitoring for Brand Protection
Brand Consistency
Consistency in messaging and content is crucial for most brands. It helps to communicate a clear message to the consumer about the company and its offerings.
By monitoring how your brand is represented in affiliate emails, you can ensure that a consistent brand identity is displayed that aligns with your company's guidelines.
Compliant Content
Monitoring your branded content can help ensure compliance with regulatory standards for companies operating in regulated industries. Such standards can go beyond CAN-SPAM—such as more broad-reaching regulations like Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (UDAAP) or the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) —and may require strict adherence to specific guidelines. By keeping a close eye on all offers or promotions, you can ensure that they comply with the necessary standards.
Discover Unknown Brand Mentions
Discovering any unknown mentions of your brand in marketing emails can help mitigate the risk of reputational harm by quickly contacting the company and asking them to remove or edit the content or swiftly taking legal action.
Brand Protection Best Practices
Establish Brand Guidelines with Affiliates
When working with an affiliate, you should establish a comprehensive set of brand guidelines that they are required to adhere to. This can help avoid confusion on the types of content allowed or how affiliates can talk about your product or offerings—especially if you conduct business in a regulated industry.
Sign Up for Your Own Emails
By signing up to receive your own branded emails from the affiliate you are working with, you can manually monitor your content to ensure that your brand is being presented accurately and all of the language being used is compliant.
Automate Your Discovery + Brand Monitoring
By implementing a tool to automate the discovery of emails mentioning your brand that you may have been unaware of, you can optimize your efforts by reducing the manual labor involved in searching for content issues.
Protect Your Brand with LashBack
Automated Brand Protection
LashBack offers a unique view into affiliate emails. It also provides automated alerts to notify you of any potential brand or compliance risks, which can help eliminate the use of unapproved content or brand mentions and prevent compliance issues.
This is accomplished in two ways:
- Automated Partner Monitoring: Automatically find and review messages sent by affiliates on your behalf against custom rulebooks.
- Automated Partner Alerts: Receive notifications of content issues and easily send them back to partners for quick remediation.
Through monitoring and alerts to potential risks, LashBack helps organizations maintain the integrity of their brand and avoid any potential legal issues that may arise.
Brand Discovery
It’s not uncommon for companies to use your brand or image in their marketing emails or advertisements to promote a partnership or endorsement that does not exist or is unapproved. Such emails can potentially cause significant harm to your brand, especially if they are associated with companies not approved by your program. This makes it extremely important to be aware of all mentions of your brand in promotional emails. Identifying such emails is crucial, but it can be a challenging task.
Leveraging LashBack for Brand Discovery
With LashBack, you can explore the unknown by using various search criteria in our vast database of over 200 million emails to discover any emails that reference your brand or specific keywords and verify that they originated from a legitimate source.
LashBack can also automate brand discovery and will notify you any time it detects a brand issue, saving your organization both time and money and allowing for quick remediation.
The LashBack Advantage
Collaborating with an email partner can bring great benefits to any organization. However, being aware of the potential risks and compliance concerns is important.
Partnering with LashBack gives your organization unique visibility into email partners' actions. This enables you to better manage risk, ensure sound business practices, and hold your partners accountable.
Request a demo today to see how LashBack can help you. Click here to get started.
