One of the Most Overlooked and Easiest Ways to Generate Leads & The Tools to Make it Happen
Spoiler: It’s your email signature.
Why it Matters
According to the Radicati Group Email Statistics Report, in 2019 [bctt tweet=”there are roughly 293 billion emails sent and received every single business day. By 2023, however, that number is expected to reach 347 billion.”] That comes to around 121 sent emails per employee per day. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since the majority of business professionals (62.86%) prefer email as their main channel of communication.
Be it current customers, prospective customers, vendors, partners, job candidates, or industry influencers, employees are interacting via email with an organization’s most important contacts every single day. To put it a different way, every email sent by your employees to an outside contact is, broadly speaking, an extension of your brand.
With the right design, relevant content, and call to action, employee email signatures can make for effective lead generation tools aimed at potential customers. They can also serve as a low-cost, high ROI marketing strategy for cross sell and upsell opportunities. Adding something as simple as a call-to-action and including a link into your email signatures can direct some of your email recipients to the landing pages for your products and services or your social media channels, turning them into customers and/or social followers.
Such a simple, yet effective tool like email signature marketing can help with building trust, boost brand awareness, and improve your social networking and marketing efforts. Granted, as far as digital marketing is concerned, employee email signature optimization will never be as effective as most of your other email marketing efforts. You shouldn’t expect a dramatic change overnight. Nevertheless, you will be driving real, incremental conversions for your business without actually having to invest any additional time or effort to maintain it.
The Tools to Make it Happen
Opensense
Opensense aims to help companies reinforce their brand, inform their customers, and build new relationships by making use of signature marketing. Opensense works by enforcing a particular signature across the entire company, thus ensuring consistent brand identity and centralized admin control. With customization capability, companies can design their own signature templates with consistent and dynamic messaging. Likewise, the platform offers marketing campaign management, tracking, and analytics.
As far as email signature platforms are concerned, Opensense is a great option for organizations looking for some more advanced functionalities. Thanks to its web-based management console and HTML editor, the learning curve is nice and gradual. This means that’s it’s pretty easy to get started and build signature templates from the ground up. The platform also offers a variety of features that can be added to email signatures such as photos, logos, ads, and social media icons.
Compared to some of its competitors, Opensense offers advantageous analytics features that can help you track performance. These metrics include open rates, forwarding statistics, lead generation, and others.
While useful in making adaptations, the increased functionality of the analytics feature adds a layer of complexity. Businesses looking for the most streamlined way to create and implement email signatures may not find exactly what they are looking for in Opensense. For data-driven organizations looking for strong functionality and increased user management, as well as multiple reports and analytics capabilities, this platform is the way to go.
Opensense Features
- As an email signature builder, Opensense allows you to easily insert graphics, logos, and social media buttons. This way, you can design visually striking signatures, with its HTML template editor.
- Opensense also allows you to enforce company signature policies and apply different styles for different departments if desired.
- It also integrates with multiple platforms like Hubspot or Salesforce for better marketing and sales coordination.
- The Management Console allows company-wide signature configuration without end-users having to do anything to implement.
- Full suite engagement analytics will show view notifications, track notifications, and attachment analytics.
- Banner ad functionality and a focus on lead generation
- Editorial calendar for content scheduling
- Landing page functionality and banner ad A/B testing.
Pricing starts at $250 a month and anywhere from 1-5 dollars per user based on the plan you pick.
Sigstr
Similar to Opensense, Sigstr is an email signature tool that helps companies use their email signatures for brand and product promotion. This tool also provides a wide range of features that allow emails to capture people’s attention via visually-striking banners or even GIFs, widgets, and countdown timers. Sigstr makes use of AI systems that apply personalized signatures as banner ads on every email. In addition, it also provides reporting and analytics capabilities.
It’s pretty easy to use, helping users to engage their customers through email communications. Sigstr also offers a solid web-based management platform and reporting. It allows for different signatures to be assigned to different employee groups and see how well your email campaigns are performing. Sigstr’s main focus is on marketing and creating visually striking product advertising to increase engagement and conversions.
Sigstr Features
- It’s an ideal platform for companies looking to advertise products, services, or events to each individual email recipient.
- Easy-to-use web-based template generator with relevant content applied automatically in signatures.
- Event marketing capabilities with registration materials and countdown widget features.
- Employee management features, such as design segmentation, based on individual employees, departments, and geography.
- Multiple reporting and analysis capabilities that measure ROI like click notifications, click tracking, and engagement statistics, alongside third-party tracking integrations.
Pricing starts at 50 licenses at 10k/year which isn’t ideal for smaller companies.
NewOldStamp
NewOldStamp is yet another email signature tool that you can use without needing any design or coding skills. Like the others, it allows you to customize email signatures just the way you want them, supporting all commonly used personal and business-oriented email clients. You can create email signature banner campaigns to test out different designs and discover what works best for your emails.
You can choose from a banner gallery available on the platform or upload one you already have. All performance metrics of your banner campaigns associated with your email signature will be available on the dashboard. The platform also allows you to automatically switch to a default signature layout or update changes without having to go through each one manually.
NewOldStamp Features
- Create interactive email signatures that meet all branding requirements.
- Manage all email signatures at the same time.
- Run banner campaigns.
- Track signature performance.
- Template customization with the ability to create unique email signature templates for different roles and departments.
- Awesome email signature editor and generator.
- Banner management and analytics capabilities
- Mobile friendly and compatible with major email clients
Pricing starts at 25 licenses billed at $432 annually or $72 monthly. They also offer a quarterly plan at $144 a quarter which breaks down to $48 a month.
With the constant influx of new technologies in the sales and marketing world, it’s easy to understand how email signatures can be forgotten. But when we take a look at how prolific email is and see that it is still very much the crux of our communication, we need to see it more than just a means to communicate words. Email can be a marketing and sales platform even when an email’s contents aren’t explicitly selling or marketing anything. And when done right, email can be a branding tool and a social engagement tool. Email may be old in the technology world but engage the help of the right platform and it may give your organization a subtle, but helpful boost.
Regardless of which solution you use, you will want to test the impact your email signatures have on your deliverability.
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