Thousands of people read emails from your employees every day. It might be the case in some companies that fewer people visit the website than receive emails from it. That’s why you need to see email signatures as a marketing channel.
Looking at it objectively, let’s face it. It is a marketing channel whether you see it as such or not.
Signatures already communicate something about your company, it’s just you don’t have it under control yet.
On top of this, the recipients are a special target group. They have already developed a certain degree of trust and openness towards your company through communication with your colleagues. Or let’s hope they did. (if they haven’t, then it’s more about changing employees than disputing whether their signatures represent an efficient marketing channel.)
What’s more, it is possible to manage email signatures centrally in your company. Thanks to that, every one of your employees even from different departments can have an email signature that is brand-consistent with your recent marketing campaign, a call-to-action and a link to your landing page.
What are the two main reasons to use email signatures as a marketing channel?
1. Brand consistency
With email signatures, a company can send different messages to the world. Either “we are careless, inconsistent and lazy” or “we are professionals and have things under control”. It all depends on the brand, its consistency (and spelling mistakes :). Of course, signatures are not the only channel through which brand consistency is maintained. Nevertheless, they are important. It also helps to share your brand design with your recipients and make it more memorable with every email.
As we stated in our article, there are many common employee mistakes with email signatures. Therefore, after receiving several emails from different employees, I frequently get the feeling that there’s a high level of anarchy in the company.
If you want to influence signatures, forget about manuals, appeals or threats. You need an IT tool, and a skillful manager to enforce the exact kind of signature you need. As such an important marketing channel, email signatures should lie in the domain of the marketing team, not individual employees.
2. New marketing channel
Here the bothersome way of enforcing restrictions to achieve consistency ends and the exciting way of using creative marketing begins. You can include anything that might be called a “campaign” in the signature by using banners. What do we mean?
Let’s have a look at an open list of different campaigns that our clients mostly use for signatures:
Seasonal campaigns
Do you prepare seasonal campaigns for summer, Christmas, Easter etc.? Great! Your employees’ and sales managers’ email signatures are a way to attract attention and lead the recipients to exactly the landing page where you need them.
Sales
The same goes for sales. Whenever you decide to discount your products or services, let everybody know! It is especially fitting for limited-time offers since you can plan a different campaign every day with SignatureSatori.
New products
The people your employees communicate with might be familiar with your company already. Therefore it is a good opportunity to introduce new products or innovations.
New content
Do you invest in content marketing? In that case, you know better than us that it is necessary to advertise the content. Show your recent blog post in the signatures!
Social media
Would you like to gain more fans, followers and subscribers for your social media? The email signature is your opportunity. Include a link and count the new faces.
Lectures and talks
Does your company organize conferences or public discussions? Do your talking heads give lectures or public talks? The email signature is a great way to invite everybody to register for the event on time.
Finding new employees
Your HR director will love the opportunity to find new faces via email. It is quite probable you communicate online with people with similar specializations.
