We’re all very excited to show you our sendXmail rebranding. 🤗
Hi, I’m Rui Nunes, the founder of sendXmail, and this is the story behind our new rebranding.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a rebrand is when we make drastic changes to not only the look and feel of a brand but also the positioning, tone of voice, and so many go-to-market key elements.
Quite basically, we want to change how you perceive our brand and, inherently, our company and, most importantly, how we do business.
After more than 10 years in business, this is not our first rebrand, which means we may have become better at it. 😅
Start with the “WHY”
The question you might be making is WHY?
Why have we decided to do a sendXmail rebranding, and why now?
Because everything changed. Again!
In any business, things evolve, and we need to keep up the pace if we want to stay relevant, but above else, if we want to deliver excellent service to our clients.
There are many new services and products as you would expect, but above all, the team changed quite a bit. The sophistication and depth of data intelligence and the team’s business development have brought us to new challenges.
A brand is something that affects everything in a business. It’s not only for outside; it’s also a great tactic to change everything inside the company as well.
So, the WHY is also profoundly connected to how I want all our stakeholders to understand sendXmail. External and above all, inside our organisation.
Every year, the entire team approaches our brand uniqueness and values.
- Are we still relevant?
- Does the market understand our message?
- Are we able to cut through the noise of today’s trends?
- How does the market see us?
These questions are just a few we ask ourselves every year. We want to understand the bottom line: Does our brand help us or hurt us?
Last year, it was clear to everyone that the brand was ageing very badly, and it didn’t reflect how we see ourselves today.
Main Reasons to Rebrand
The Process of sendXmail Rebranding
First of all, we needed to understand our strengths and our weaknesses. We’re very good with Email Marketing and Marketing Automation, but we’re not qualified to conduct this rebranding ourselves.
But I’m also the founder of a full-service digital marketing agency called ZOPPLY. 🤩
Yes, it wasn’t a democratic process or even subject to discussion to do with anyone else. If I don’t trust my ZOPPLY team to do this, why should it even exist?
Both teams worked side-by-side to make it happen, which made us connect in a way that even originated a few more business ideas along the way. 🤔
With the ideal partner selected, it was all set to follow the other process steps.
ZOPPLY’s Process Steps
It seems easy, right?
Let’s break it down one by one, shall we?
Step 1 – Research
If you’re thinking that we went asking people on the street about what they thought about our brand, you’re… almost right! 😅
It wasn’t the streets per se, but we’ve done several hours of deep listening to several stakeholders. Internally we wanted to feel what our team thought about us and what we stand for. Externally, we wanted to know what they really thought about us.
When someone says sendXmail, what do you think immediately? Is it clear to you what we do and what makes us different from others doing the same thing?
The answer to most of these questions was very humbling. 😩
Email marketing comes immediately to your mind, but not so much what we do in the marketing automation field or what that means exactly.
Which is kind of good news. Why? Because we identified the problem and can now change this.
What kind of story do we want to tell and the promise we deliver based on our values, mission or vision?
Step 2 – Analysis
It’s time to put everything together and understand what we can extract from the information to define our positioning.
What makes us different and unique?
This is where this graph comes in handy.
How do our products or services fill our clients’ needs?
What are the factors vital for the success of the target market?
What business value is derived from our services?
What supports our core competencies which differentiate us from the competition?
What enables sendXmail to compete?
To know our value proposition deeply and our core competitive differentiation is critical to any brand communication.
It is time to build our visual identity.
Step 3 – Identity
At this time, it was clear to me who I should bring to the table and work with us on this project.
ZOPPLY uses the industry’s best professionals to stand out with outstanding results for several special projects.
So, we hired the best. 😎
We asked Vitor Caneco, a long time friend and an incredible multifaceted creative genius. Besides being a talented coding developer, he is an incredible designer and a videographer, and the list keeps ongoing.
Some of the most exciting startups worldwide have their visual identity designed by him, so why not ask him to help us with ours?
So he did. 😏
It was almost clean-slate from the past.
The only thing we kept somewhat similar was the X between the (send) and (mail) indicating an envelope for two reasons:
- It’s our brand’s name. 🤷♂️
- It keeps a similar string between the old logo and the new one, which won’t drive our clients completely confused. 😅
Check the main differences below.
Old Visual Identity
New sendXmail Rebranding
The differences don’t stop there.
We also revamped all of our web presence properties and our brand material accordingly.
Here’s our website from before and now.
Old Visual Identity
New sendXmail Rebranding
And our social media as you could expect.
Old Visual Identity
New sendXmail Rebranding
This fresh, more iconic visual branding totally adapts to our reality and communication channels without losing identity or readability.
Crisper easy to read lettering, with a unique iconography that makes it distinguishable everywhere.
We couldn’t be happier with the final result.
That iconographic approach also made way for a more creative process for our website design style.
By navigating through our website, you can see different design illustrations keeping the same iconographic style.
Step 4 – Tone of Voice
It leaves us with the final stage of the sendXmail rebranding. The very own messaging needs to be coherent throughout our channels.
Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we lightened up how we express ourselves on our new website and in this post 😏.
Everything will be more transparent, cleaner, and easy to follow with our communications from today forward.
Also, it’s crucial to have a core story around which everything revolves.
Ok, fine. But if we go back and analyse what makes us unique and stand out from the competition, here’s what drives us and describes our positioning.
Tagline
There’s a new tagline with this new rebrand.
“X More. For Less.”
What does that mean?
As you may notice, when you visit most of our pages, there’s a headline above the content which transits by each purpose.
Scale More. For Less.
Connect More. For Less.
Deliver More. For Less.
Convert More. For Less.
And the list goes on and on.
“X“, besides being a part of our brand name, represents the variable you want to improve in your business. For less, it means that you can reach your goals by being smart and less time-consuming or resources.
Some solutions may vary depending on the correct term in English, but you get the message.
Hard Decisions
One incredibly hard decision we had to make was to drop our Portuguese version from every communication, including our main website.
This is due to two main reasons:
- It slowed us down to wait for a complete and adequate translation of what we produce (English is our company’s official language).
- Our ideal audience and business are completely international, and it wouldn’t make sense to keep having a Portuguese version just because I’m the founder.
It doesn’t mean that we’re going to quit supporting several institutions in Portugal, like APPM – The Portuguese Marketing Professionals Association, and so many others —we’re preparing a space just for our partnerships and supporting initiatives.
Another hard decision was to drop services where we weren’t adding enough value to be perceived as a great asset.
Focus is also one of the results of the sendXmail rebranding.
I’m really proud of both the sendXmail and ZOPPLY teams to have performed this sendXmail rebranding.
This post was all about us and the new sendXmail rebranding. I think it’s interesting to know how and why we came up with this completely new rebranding.
Sometimes, we think that rebranding is only about a different logo, new website design or colours. It definitely is not.
It goes right into the core of the company. The rebranding is not only for our external stakeholders. It’s mostly for our team—how they do their work and feel the brand will impact our clients and our audience.
I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I did. Please keep following our work here or within our social media channels below.
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