Marketers – it’s time to unleash the power of your email signatures

It’s also clear that emails are the number one communication channel for businesses. On average, people at work send 40 emails per day. That’s 400,000 emails every 24 hours for a company of 10,000 employees, equating to eight million monthly views of company emails and brand.

Despite this reach, emails remain underestimated, underutilized, and are rarely optimized. Capucine Roche, chief marketing officer at Letsignit, an email signature management company, says that this must change: “Since the numbers add up with each new employee, organizations need to start paying attention to email signatures as part of their marketing funnel.”

Strong marketing benefits of email signatures

Quite rightly, marketing plans place a significant focus on social media as a way of connecting with audiences. However, while that’s essential to many businesses, it’s also worth noting that there are issues here in terms of being dependent on algorithms, and requiring relatively high budgets in the case of paid-for campaigns.

This is where email signatures can have an advantage, because they are by default a channel that all companies have at their disposal. Beyond the basic contact info and links, signatures can be upgraded to feature timely, relevant communication banners.

Unlike campaigns on social networks, or online advertising, there are no CPM or CPC costs because emails are sent by the hundreds, natively, by an organization's own employees. And, once an email signatures campaign is launched, companies are not charged according to the number of clicks.

Beyond cost, there are further benefits in using email signatures as part of the marketing mix. That’s because they are used to facilitate contact and to identify people, and due to their one-on-one nature, they are intrinsically non-intrusive, reaching an audience where they are, where they are most receptive. As with social media, clickable banners in email signatures are able to be targeted and measured, offering ultra-precise levels of targeting based on factors such as role/discipline and location, delivering ROI of above 5% click rate.

It's also the case, according to a recent survey of CMOs from Letsignit, that email signatures have a strong impact on brand metrics – boosting awareness by 34%, and then real power in growing leads – creating a 25% uplift in conversion rates. In addition, they have the potential to be flexible and to achieve varied targets for various departments across the business.

For instance: sales, pushing promotions and success stories; customer service, the ability to issue surveys and notification incentives; marketing, building personalized communication, and distributing the latest white paper or webinar link; and, for HR, to connect on recruitment and send holiday best wishes.

There’s also the potential for marketers to push the use of email signatures further in terms of account-based marketing (ABM), driving awareness, consideration, and decision-making by pushing specific content for each step of the funnel.

Letsignit’s CMO adds: “With the over-solicitation we know today, and the war for attention that is increasingly strong, email as the first communication channel remains one of the best tools available. And one-to-one email even more so, because it reaches a captive audience, providing non-intrusive content via the email signature and an ultra-personalized, human connection.”

The 25% conversion rate, coupled with the fact that all companies already have emails at their disposal by default, makes email signatures “the most underrated communication tool in today’s business world.”

How to optimize email signatures for marketing

To help marketers and their teams deliver strong, effective campaigns, Letsignit has published a comprehensive guide to boosting marketing results using email signatures.

But why is it worth investing in a tool such as Letsignit’s?

Roche says: “The reality is that, too often, email signatures contain a bad logo, bad information, aren’t updated, and are not standardized. People try to solve the problem and distribute templates, but usually it’s not automated or optimized, and not respected by teams.”

With Letsignit, a straightforward ‘drag and drop’ designer provides guaranteed compliance with a brand’s charter, automatic updating of employees’ personal information, instantaneous assignment of a signature to new recruits, and distribution of multi-device signatures.

“No coding experience is necessary, and it simplifies the process for marketing and the IT team – IT synchronizes the tool with the email client, then marketing creates and manages signatures/campaign,” adds Roche.

When it comes to using email signatures in marketing campaigns, it’s important to remember one-to-one emails are your company’s primary communication channel. Using them to their full potential is just as important as your website, content, advertising and social media.

When this is achieved, email signatures have the potential to unify and reinforce a brand identity (providing clear logos, information, and branding). They also align employees to that positioning and maintain the consistency of identity across all external channels. There’s an added benefit, says Roche, in that email signatures marketing also “turns your employees into ambassadors.”

Email signatures in action

Evidence shows that this delivers impact for marketers. On comparative platform G2, the reviews are unanimous – one stating that “Letsignit is very practical for quickly unifying the signatures of employees and integrating promotional campaigns without intervening directly on the computers of the people concerned.”

Other reviews boast the benefits of a platform to manage all team signatures in one place and the ability to easily adjust marketing messages from one central location: “I can create multiple, customized signatures based on department, role, or any other variable. We need branded email signatures and we can actually go further. The sales, marketing, executive and HR teams all need to have different information on their signatures – this helped us keep it all together in one place.”

There’s now a way for marketers to test how email signatures campaigns could work for their own business, because Letsignit has created a quiz for all brands to take part in and test the likely impact on their brand identity and lead generation.

The quiz findings help to demonstrate the power of email signatures marketing. As does the success of Letsignit’s own business. Based on four values – ‘creative’, ‘human’, ‘accessible’ and ‘smart’ – it has attracted more than 700,000 users who have seen the opportunity provided by email signatures. An opportunity that will only grow in the future and should be grasped by more in the marketing community.

Like LVMH, Miro, Sorenson, Food 52 and the Propharma group, start unleashing the potential of your email signatures. Discover more about Letsignit, and request your free trial here.