How to turn your email signatures into an effective and free marketing tool
You seek to take full advantage of all free marketing opportunities to reach customers and partners? Undoubtedly, corporate email is great for this purpose, but there is one of its features whose potential you are probably not exploiting entirely – signatures. Your business email correspondence goes out every day anyway, so why not turn signatures into an unobtrusive yet very effective marketing tool? Let’s talk about Email Signature Marketing (ESM).
The underestimated importance of email signatures
The use of signatures in emails has become an inseparable part of business etiquette. Signatures provide details about the sender, their position and contact data, also include the corporate logo, fonts and colors, disclaimers, links to the company website and social media, etc. This entire set of information is practically an electronic business card of the company and its employee and serves therefore as a tool to promote the look and feel of your brand. Ensuring that the email signatures of everyone in your organisation are consistent and in line with brand guidelines goes a long way to creating a professional impression, building trust and brand awareness, not to mention verifying the identity of the sender (to distinguish against impersonations or cyber-attacks).
A good number of companies have already recognised the potential of one-to-one email communication and have seized the opportunity for uncomplicated B2B or even B2C marketing that Email Signature Marketing offers. Whether you are sending to just one contact or many, it is a great way to engage on a more personal level with a short and focused message. Through simple but eye-catching banners, buttons and CTAs, links, quick information about products, events, deals, customer testimonial, etc., you add value to your message without disrupting the flow of the email body. And you have the absolute flexibility to tailor the ad according to the recipients or occasion.
For instance, customer service emails confirming orders could include a banner announcing a discount of certain product category and a link to it. Or the technical team can include a link to a product case study in their emails to partners. Or how about providing a link to the conditions of your partner programme to the signatures of the business development team. If the contact is a new prospect, the signature ad can invite them to book a demo, or for an existing customer, to check out your new product feature or write a product review. The variations are countless, because Email Signature Marketing can be used to promote a wide range of advertising messages:
- Sales information such as about new products, deals, sales, discounts, upselling, customer service updates, etc.
- Invitation to internal or external events, demos, webinars, lectures, expos
- Links to relevant materials such as whitepapers, videos, blog posts, interviews, case studies, podcasts, newsletters
- Links to surveys, opinion polls, product reviews
- Announcements of significant company news, awards, certificates, charities, initiatives
Benefits of Email Signature Marketing
Companies with broad and versatile external communications and with multiple employees in different departments often opt for signature management software to ensure automation and consistency. Signature and disclaimer management solutions such as iQ.Suite Trailer allow the signatures of all employees to be set and managed centrally and consistently, with the flexibility to easily define entire marketing campaigns by certain employee, position or entire departments. There is basically no downside of Email Signature Marketing and you enjoy the following benefits:
- Cost effective – well, it is free after all (or at very low cost)
- Easy to set – With an Email Signature Management solution, ads can be set centrally, automatically and for a specific timeframe without even involving the employees. All you need is a visual with short message and maybe a link. You also make sure all signatures throughout the company are consistent with the brand guide.
- Improved reach –You derive the optimum from a channel that you are already using., without causing additional burden. The campaigns can serve various purposes: to generate more traffic to your website, engage people on social media, announce sales or share your newest content.
- Better lead conversion with personalized and targeted ads – Using your close relationship with the recipients and your knowledge of their interests empowers you to personalize the ads you send them. By engaging on a more personal level, you also increase the response rate and improve the chances of converting your contacts.
- Stronger brand awareness – By providing more relevant content and enhancing the experience your contacts get from your email communications, you build more credibility and engagement.
- Easy to monitor performance and generate insights – With Email Signature Management tools like iQ.Suite Trailer, you can monitor clicks and open rates using dashboards and evaluate the performance of your ads. Knowing what triggers the most response will help you tailor your ads even better.
In times of information overload, everyone is fed up with ads appearing everywhere, pop-ups and shrill promotional messages. Newsletters are often ignored, and marketing emails are usually considered annoying. With Email Signature Marketing, you send a focused message that is not intrusive, but still very targeted and cost-effective. In other words, you have nothing to lose, but a lot to gain.
