You Can’t Market to Everyone, And You Don’t Have To
It takes time, money, and people to attract, convert, and delight new customers. As a savvy marketer, you want to target people who will deliver the best return. When it comes to leveraging your email signature real-estate as an owned marketing channel, providing end-to-end campaign tracking and performance insight shouldn’t be any different.
Turn the End of Every Email into the Beginning of a New Opportunity
Now, we all know what an email signature is. It’s a contact block added to an email, an electronic business card so to speak. It supplies information to a recipient on how to contact the person who’s emailed them.
But what makes it such an interesting marketing tool is that it can be tactfully attached onto a trusted business exchange in such a discreet way, enhancing real estate in an email that is effectively empty space. When used correctly, an email signature can easily communicate calls-to-action that make perfect sense in the context of one-to-one email correspondence and promote opportunities without making them feel like a hard sell.
The value of email signatures arises from volume, trust, relevance, and targeting: the very same traits of corporate email. They don’t have to compete with other advertising channels and are incredibly low cost when compared to other advertising channels.
“The value of email signatures arises from volume, trust, relevance, and targeting.”
As a recipient reads an email sent to them, they are more likely to pay attention to any surrounding information. Email signatures get delivered where marketing emails get blocked. If something is displayed on your work email continuously, it guarantees an audience – and a large one. This means your signature content is seen repeatedly and often.
This provides your company with the perfect avenue to subtly increase your brand exposure and get free advertising exposure. The marketing message is not forced on a recipient as it is with other channels. You’re not hitting recipients with intrusive messaging that they choose to ignore. You’re delivering marketing content in addition to the main email content. This makes recipients more likely to engage with it.
When an email is known to be legitimate and from a trusted sender, it offers a fantastic opportunity to introduce a tailored message around your latest campaign or social media post for instance. You’re then influencing interactions in a subtle way without disrupting the main content of the email.
You can then go further with profiling and segmentation that can be used to offer different signature variants. Content can be modified for different teams, giving recipients messages that have a direct relevance to their needs. For example, potential buyers could see an introductory offer while existing customers could be invited to a virtual event. You can use an email signature to further enhance the relevance of that content and personalize the message to better suit a different audience or conversation. You can even make the signature interactive, providing a more “fun” element to corporate communications. Signatures containing links to games, quizzes, and images help keep the recipient engaged.
Taking Your Email Signatures to the Next Level
In an age when it has become even more difficult to get your messaging and promotions in front of the right people, email signatures can play a vital marketing role. Using professional email signatures, corporate email becomes a key piece of digital real estate that gives your marketing efforts an extra boost, increases actionable feedback, and reduces customer churn.
Signatures can be varied for maximum effect by altering the message or merely the way it’s communicated. Or they can be used to influence interactions without interrupting the email conversation. The message is always suggested rather than imposed or forced. This gives an advantage over other advertising channels where content can easily get lost in what is a very ‘noisy’ marketspace.
To learn more, get your free white paper on the marketing value that email signatures can provide for an organization.
Examples of Email Signature Marketing Campaigns
Flash sales, exclusive offers and discounts
The people your employees email will likely know your brand and what it offers. This means the messaging added to email signatures can be very simple and concise. Many email messages are sent to existing customers, particularly from your customer-facing team/s. Selecting these colleagues to carry tailored messages can directly influence upselling and customer retention goals.
Cross-selling
This approach benefits from the strategic deployment of sales and marketing messages from specific employee groups. In the case of sales teams, employees can carry cross-sell promotions for products and services offered elsewhere in the company. These leverage the trust factor between a sales representative and customer to deliver marketing messages that don’t distract from the overall email conversation.
Sales engagement
A logical extension to email signature contact information is to allow a recipient to schedule time with the sender. Scheduling sales meetings and demos from an email signature can directly boost sales activity while saving customer effort. All that needs to be included is a custom link that takes a recipient directly to the salesperson’s calendar. This then lets the customer engage with your organization on their terms, switching from email to a much richer conversation.
Customer retention
Customer churn often occurs from persistent issues with a product or from a poor experience requiring a lot of support to rectify. Organizations that are mindful of these threats design customer retention campaigns with high-touch support to rediscover and reset customer expectations. Email signatures are well suited to this.
Community building
The primary avenue for growing a follower base is through social media. Email signatures can expand on this community building by promoting the benefits of following the brand on certain social media icons platform. This can be done with the simple addition of social media icons contained within the main email signature design.
Content marketing and news
Marketers want to get as much value from their content investments as possible. Email signatures can be used as a perfect complement to opt-in lists and other outbound email channels. This is also true for news distribution and PR success stories like customer wins, awards, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Word of mouth and referrals
Marketing professionals know the value of positive reviews and understand how trust and engagement are necessary to make them a reality. Email signatures a natural space for this call-to-action, typically linking to forms and third-party review sites. This can also be used for creating awareness for referral campaigns and user groups.
Brand alignment
Purposeful brand values, corporate social responsibility, and related initiatives are now firmly entrenched as key marketing and communications goals. Brands understandably want to cultivate a shared understanding of what they stand for among customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders. Email signatures are the ideal vehicle for promoting these values effectively.
Event participation
Investments in trade shows and expos, corporate events, and upcoming webinar series demand registrations to demonstrate a return. When numbers need boosting, particularly at short notice, email signatures can have a larger impact when compared to other tactics such as constant marketing messages or callout campaigns. Registration links can be sent to thousands of people with no extra effort needed.
Customer feedback
The 1-click survey is an increasingly common feature in email signatures and can elicit valuable business intelligence. Use universal icons like smileys or stars to ask recipients for feedback on anything from their experiences with your product/service to new pricing models you’ve introduced. This feedback can then inform companywide improvements and personalized responses.
Accelerated payments
A less common application for email signatures, but very suitable for certain sectors like charities and debt management. Chosen senders can include a ‘make a payment’ call-to-action to launch the payment process without having to look for it elsewhere.
Now the ending is just the beginning
Transform your email signatures from simply displaying contact information into a valuable platform to drive your business and build stronger relationships. Get your free white paper on the marketing value email signatures can provide for your organization.
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