EAV: The Metric for Email Signature Marketing
EAV (equivalent advertising value) is a metric unique to email signature management. It recognizes the email signature space is an untapped, native advertising space that organizations already own and unlocks an opportunity to reach a completely unique, high-quality audience without incremental ad spend.
EAV quantifies the value of advertising placed in the email signatures of an organization’s outgoing business email messages. EAV appraises the savings gained as you target customers and prospects, from a trusted source, with promotional messaging and interactive elements that are highly likely to be viewed by the recipient and engaged with.
The argument for EAV goes beyond adding a useful corporate hygiene that ensures organizations recognize the exploitable value of their digital assets. Such a metric can equip the marketing function with a comparable measure of budgetary return. For every $1 spent on a given digital marketing program, marketing leaders will be able to determine the relative value of innovating and exploiting their email signature arsenal. For every $1 of email signature value utilized, marketers will be able to demonstrate the ROI of maximizing this unique and highly trusted customer and prospect communications channel.
Calculating EAV
Simply put, the Equivalent Advertising Value of your email signature space is calculated by multiplying the number of emails you send that carry a signature, by a dollar amount each ‘eyeball’ is worth to your business.
EAV harnesses CPM (cost per mille, or cost per 1,000 impressions/views), a universally adopted measure for the monetary cost of digital marketing.
With typical CPMs on high quality inventory anywhere from $5 to $100 it is possible to determine the equivalent advertising value (EAV) of the email signature inventory already at your fingertips.
To calculate EAV you need a multiplier and you can draw upon a best-fit CPM that you currently use in marketing budgets to come up with one. For example, if the CPM (i.e. cost per 1,000) is $50, the multiplier would be $0.05 (one one-thousandth). Using this EAV multiplier, if your organization sent 32,568 emails (with signatures) over the course of a week, the total EAV would be $1,628.40.
We strongly recommend that marketers weight their EAV multipliers at a higher level than standard advertising CPMs. In the same way that paid content (e.g. advertorial) is worth less per word than earned content (e.g. editorial), a page impression for a digital ad is imbued with lower trust, integrity, likely engagement and value than personal email correspondence. Bear in mind too, the twin assets of trust and deliverability brought by one to one email communications.
EAV multipliers could therefore be set around the $0.50 mark. Using the figures above the total EAV value is $16,284. We have used this $.50 figure as the default in our Marketing Cloud dashboards, but you have the ability to change it up or down to suit your own business.
Applying EAV to your outbound email
The number of emails sent by your company can easily be ascertained using Exclaimer Signature Marketing Cloud dashboards. This gives businesses an accurate and real-time picture of the potential value of the emails the company sends, ensuring you can give every employee a signature with a marketing-approved payload.
Also, EAV is best applied as a perpetually occurring value that can be segmented by time interval (e.g. month/year). This relates directly to how the volume of email signature messages is determined as part of the EAV calculation:
$$ EAV = (No. employees) x (externally sent emails per employee/interval) x (EAV multiplier)
Let’s take an example with an EAV multiplier of $0.50 where there are 100 employees in an organization and each employee on average sends 40 external mails per day.
(100 x 40/day) x $0.50
4,000/day x $0.50
$2,000/day (approximately $60,000/month)
Sizing your EAV opportunity
A key benefit of EAV is to demonstrate the potential, exploitable value available to organizations through their email signatures. Sizing this value opportunity relies upon:
- Maximizing the use of email signatures for orchestrated marketing campaign purposes to the greatest number of employee email accounts
- Utilizing the digital real estate of email signatures for marketing programs of the greatest impact. A list of best practice email signature marketing campaign examples is provided in this White Paper.
According to Statista, email usage will continue to grow from 319.6 billion sent and received in 2021 to a staggering 376.4 billion in 20258. Email has never been more important than in the new, post-pandemic, remote/hybrid working environment. The figure of 40 emails per employee per day given in the calculation above reflects current research9 and expected market norms. This represents a significant number of highly valuable advertising opportunities to target messaging to prospective and current customers, via a medium that is trusted and personally delivered.
Calculate your EAV
Use this calculator to see how much the email your company already sends is worth to you.
Average office worker works 255 days per year
0.50 Equivalent Advertising Value based on Exclaimer research and white paper
Annual cost of Signature Marketing Cloud may be lower based on employee volume