How to Use Exclaimer for Email Signature Marketing (Guest Article)

Companies are constantly looking for ways to extend their brands. In the digital era, every company is promoting its products and services through the common marketing channels. These include search engine optimization, per-per-click advertising, email campaigns, social media advertising, and so forth.

This mass proliferation of outbound marketing tactics has made it difficult for companies to achieve customer visibility through these broadcast methods. What customers want is personalization and focused communication.

Where outbound marketing focuses on “pushing” your marketing efforts through advertising channels, inbound marketing focuses on “pulling” customers toward your brand and message. This is most commonly done through content marketing strategies. The strategy of inbound marketing is to provide value and gain permission from the customer to continue marketing to them, modifying messaging based on their unique needs.

Inbound marketing is successful when it enables a company to have a dialog with the customer, and to build trust.

One of the most over-looked inbound marketing tools for the enterprise is the email signature. When included within your overall marketing strategy, email signature marketing allows for consistent delivery of key branding and messaging, but as a secondary aspect of your customer interactions. In other words, when individuals in your company interact with customers and prospects through corporate email, the primary focus should be the one-to-one relationship and conversation.

Rather than dilute the trust you are developing with customers by following your interaction with an obvious email marketing message, running an email signature marketing campaign is a great way to reinforce your brand in a more subtle, yet consistent manner.

Consistent delivery of your marketing message

For organizations using the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) platform for email and collaboration, Exclaimer is the premier solution for ensuring the consistent delivering of your email signature marketing messaging within every customer and prospect interaction.

Rather than follow up a customer call with an “official” email that could undo the goodwill generated through your personalized interactions, the use of Exclaimer allows employees to focus on the needs of the customer. As trust is built, the consistent branding and messaging within the signature acts as a “Call to Action” for the customer.

In this digital marketing era, there are on average 10-12 customer “touches” required before a prospect takes action. That means that prospects will often read blog posts, join webinars, download whitepapers, and see your brand in online and social advertising a dozen times before responding to an offer.

Email signature marketing can really reduce the number of customer touches. This is because it works in the background of your relationship building interactions via email. The faster you are able to build trust, the faster the prospect will move toward a conversion activity. An example of this would be visiting a landing page for a product demo or free trial.

Exclaimer works exclusively within the Microsoft cloud environment. It is also hosted within Microsoft Azure datacenters throughout the world, ensuring the highest levels of availability at all times.

Creating your inbound email signature marketing campaign

Once installed within your Office 365 tenant, Exclaimer provides administrators with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. This allows you to create a single signature template for your entire organization. You can even build customized email signature designs templates for teams, business units, or user role. You can then easily run email signature marketing campaigns as everything is centrally controlled.

All signatures can be personalized for any user. However, the marketing value comes from the fact that the administrator can centrally manage and modify each template. This ensures that the email signature marketing message and branding are consistently used by all employees.

By employing different email signature templates based on employee role, your email signature marketing strategy becomes even more personalized. For example, your sales and marketing team may have a signature campaign that is broad, pointing customers and prospects to high-level messaging around your product or service.

Your Sales Engineering (SE) team, however, may have a more specific campaign strategy, with their email signature marketing messaging pointing to more technical details of your product or service, such as a technical whitepaper or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) around the offering. This makes sense, as the SEs generally become involved at the technical review phase of a customer discussion.

In addition, you can build make your email signature templates act intelligently. This is done by changing the templates that are used based on specific user attributes. These could include geography, company, or customer title, ensuring the appropriate message and call to action is always used.

By leveraging email signature marketing opportunities, you help advance the overall customer journey toward that conversion activity.

As marketing tactics and offers change, the central management of email signatures through Exclaimer means that any changes made to a template are immediately reflected on all outgoing emails, in real time.

Exclaimer should be factored into all of your inbound and outbound marketing strategies. To learn more about the solution and how to build email signature marketing campaigns, visit www.exclaimer.com

About Christian Buckley

As a Microsoft Regional Director and Office Servers & Services MVP, Christian has a deep background in collaboration, social and graph-based technology, supply chain, and marketing tech.

He is the Microsoft GTM Director for AvePoint Inc., the largest Microsoft 365 data management solutions provider, and runs the popular CollabTalk Podcast and monthly community panel discussions.

Additionally, he is an advisor for revealit.io, an AI and blockchain powered interactive video technology company, as well as tyGraph, a leading Microsoft 365 analytics solution provider.