Branding Your Financial Paperwork: From Invoices to Receipts

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Your company’s brand is the face it shows the world. It includes your company name, logo, and tagline, as well as the way that your customers perceive your company image. Therefore it is important to not only create a brand that appeals to your customers, but also to maintain it consistently through all of your business functions.

Your business’s financial paperwork – invoices, credit card receipts, and other communications – represents a clear opportunity to promote your business brand. You send a variety of paper and electronic messages to your customers, so why not use them as an opportunity to consistently promote your brand?

The Importance of Branding

Words and images have meanings and connotations that extend far beyond their textbook definitions. For that reason, it is important for you to strategically choose your company name and logo, so that they communicate your business’s values clearly and effectively.

Once you have decided on your business brand, promote it in everything you do and at every level of your business – including your financial paperwork.

“Early branding of a small or emerging company is key to business success. It is the quickest way for your company to express what it is and what it can offer. Inaccurate branding of a new business can make it difficult for people to grasp why the business exists in the first place.” – The New York Times

Financial Communications

You produce a large amount of financial messages that are sent to your customers. For a single online purchase, a customer may receive an order confirmation, invoice, receipt, and packing slip. If each message has a different header, logo, or font, that’s a lost opportunity for maintaining your brand.

• Before the advent of electronic messages, businesses would print all communications on office letterhead. To replicate this professional style, create a custom, branded header to use on all of your communications – from your invoices and receipts to your printed packing slips. Include your business name, logo, and other pertinent information.
• When you use the same header on your printed packing slip as the one you used in your order confirmation emails, that solidifies your branded image in the mind of your customer.

Branding Your Emails

Whether you run an online business or a brick-and-mortar office, you will produce any number of email messages. These can include automated responses to online purchases, payment confirmation from your online credit card processing service, and promotional messages through your email marketing campaign.

When your email communications are routed through these numerous different financial and marketing funnels, your branding can suffer.

• Choose ecommerce and payment processing services that allow you to customize your automated messaging content and appearance. Include your custom header, but also ensure that all of your messages use the same font style, font color, and background color. Consistency is the key to branding, and even minor differences can be glaring.
• An easy way to maintain brand consistency in your electronic communications is to integrate your sales processes into one single sales management service, like Stitch. Once you have created your custom message, these services will automatically apply it to all of your outgoing communications – from invoices to receipts, order confirmations to marketing emails.

In order for you to benefit from your business brand, you need to communicate it regularly. Your brand should be consistent across the spectrum of your business: it should feature in your ad content, on your business cards, in your marketing emails, and on your purchase receipts. The image it creates will effectively engage current and potential customers.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for Resource Nation. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as email marketing services. 

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