The 8 Key Attributes of Email Signature Marketing

Targeted

As a starting point, you often know who is receiving your email, the context of the message and roughly when the recipient is going to see it. This provides immense opportunity for precise targeting and segmentation with email signature marketing.

Different departments within a company will speak to different types of external contacts. For example, your sales team will be speaking to potential customers, while your customer service department will be dealing with current customers.

So different signatures can easily be applied and communicate a variety of messages to different audiences at different stages throughout the customer journey. It’s a unique opportunity to target specific audiences incredibly precisely and provide information that is of key importance to the contact in question.

Continuous display

Continual display is a major feature of email signature marketing. Your professional network will end up seeing your signature repeatedly and frequently. Compare that to other marketing channels such as direct marketing emails where the message is often only seen once, if that!

That’s why email signatures have the most impact when ongoing business relationships are maintained between a single point of contact and a corporate partner. For example, between your sales and customer support staff and your customers, your procurement staff and your suppliers, or your logistics staff and your distributors.

Signatures can then 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. For example, you could cross-sell an add-on product or service in a manner that is not forced like with other marketing channels.

High volume

The average office worker sends around 40 emails a day. In something like a 50-person office, this would roughly 2,000 emails a day and just over 730,000 emails a year. Now that constitutes a substantial audience.

If an email signature marketing message is displayed on your work email, you can guarantee that it will get an audience – and a large one at that. That means your message will be received by many thousands of contacts.

And no matter how big your company is, you’ll consider the audience to be large. This is because it scales based on the number of employees you have and the size of your operations. It’s also worth pointing out the outbound travel of emails. Remember, these are often forwarded on and copied between colleagues and contacts long after you sent the original message.

This is actually one of the key facets of the email channel, especially when used to reach external partners like suppliers and customers. That’s why you should consider email signatures as advertisements for your company.

Valued

Every email you send is going to contain what is essentially a payload of information such as an order confirmation, specific assistance to a customer etc. The recipient will want to read the message, which guarantees at least one impression with each signature sent. Again, this will predispose them to react with the content you’re promoting with your email signature marketing efforts.

It’s an opportunity to land a cross-sell message, drive your social media following, promote your presence at an industry event or share your latest piece of content. It’s a time when a recipient is most invested in your company so it’s perfect for landing that marketing promotion in their lap.

Personal/trusted & business relevant

So, when an email is from a trusted sender, it offers a great opportunity to introduce a special message around your latest marketing campaign. As the recipient and sender will know one another, there’s already an implicit trust in what’s being said. This makes it more likely that a recipient will react to a campaign banner placed in the signature. The authenticity of the message being sent will intensify the impact the banner has on your email signature marketing efforts.

The main content of the email will also usually be positive towards your company. This provides more of a reason for the recipient to engage with the messaging placed in your signature.

Corporate email is used for commercial and professional conversations. That’s why adding email signature marketing content makes perfect sense. As email signatures are targeted and controlled, you can enhance the relevance of your email to personalize a message for a particular audience or conversation.

So, if a recipient knows an email has come from your sales department, it’s potentially relevant to mention pricing or potential product or services add-ons. If the email is from the customer service team, it might be relevant to add something about the ongoing use of your product or service.

Low cost

When you look at all marketing channels available, they can be very expensive with no guarantee on ROI. But with your corporate email signatures, there’s basically no monetary cost involved.

Your graphic designer creates a banner, and the IT team adds it to the signature. It then appears on all outbound emails, reaching a vast audience at no cost.

You don’t have to pay to host the imagery anywhere. There’s also no need to worry about spending money on a platform that might not work for you. Every click you receive is essentially an additional interaction with your marketing campaign.

Internal opportunity

All of the channel attributes we’ve discussed, such as they’re trusted, targeted and valued, also apply to internal emails you send within your company. In fact, the larger your company is, the more essential your email signature becomes.

Are there some new internal job opportunities? Do you have a new clean-desk policy? Email signature marketing can easily incorporate internal communications without having to get your users to do anything extra.

It’s also a great marketing channel if you have employees located in different areas. More and more people work remotely these days and are not in the same building or the same country. By adding a small message under internal emails, you keep employees up to date without interrupting their day.

For more information on this topic, check out our on-demand webinar on how email signature marketing can open up new opportunities for your business.