When to Use Corporate Stationery
Corporate stationery is part of maintaining your brand image so that both customers and employees understand the organization in terms of a fixed identity. A stable corporate image helps customers to know what to expect from your products and services. For employees, grasping the organization's identity helps in making business decisions and setting priorities. To maintain professionalism, use corporate stationery for all official external and internal communications.
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Letters to Partners, Suppliers and Stakeholders
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Use corporate stationery in all written correspondence with partners, suppliers and stakeholders. Whether you're sending a letter via snail mail or fax, use official company letterhead to quickly identify your organization to the recipient. Make sure that your corporate logo is consistent in terms of size, shape and color. A logo that's the same every time conveys sound management and governance, while a poorly managed visual brand communicates disorganization.
Hire an outside vendor to develop official stationery, or have people from marketing and PR design it. This way, you won't have employees modifying the company logo to create their own stationery across departments, resulting in visual identity disunity.
Contracts
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Use corporate stationery to lay out official contracts, whether they're internal between departments or external agreements with customers and partners. Official letterhead makes written business transactions feel more official and adds an air of credibility to the promises you make in your documents.
In sales arrangements, the appearance of professionalism can help seal and solidify a deal. When dealing with partners and customers, a strong visual identity helps to instill confidence in business relationships since branding makes an organization seem more established and reliable.
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Official Employee Correspondence
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Use official branding and letterhead on employment contracts, employment offers, HR letters about benefit changes and any other messages communicated to workers in written form. Including the corporate brand makes people feel that messages are coming from the top. You can use additional departmental signatures on your letterhead to give people a sense of exactly where the message is coming from, whether it's the HR department announcing annual raises or the office of the CEO providing news about a new office opening overseas.
Branding in Email
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Less correspondence takes paper form in the electronic age, with emails overtaking letters, faxes and memos for correspondence with colleagues, other offices and customers. To ensure a professional image in all forms of communication, ask employees to take on a standard signature. The signature should include the company's brand, contact information for the sender and the sender's name and official title. Provide guidelines for font size, color and style so everyone's professional stamp looks the same.
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References
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