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Unlike email marketing, your employees' emails reach and invariably get more responses from customers, prospects, colleagues, and partners. Being more authentic and personal, they instill a sense of trust and commitment rarely achieved in digital marketing.
Therefore, the email signature is an ideal advertising space to reach a target audience and avoid the saturation of traditional channels.
By integrating communication banners into your signatures, the target audience is far more likely to buy or act when presented with offers, product information, content, webinar invitations, demonstrations, etc.
In this article, we explain how to determine the real value of email banners and your ROI by calculating the advertising equivalency of your email signatures.
While there are similarities in terms of contacts, clicks, and impressions, it's crucial to acknowledge the differences. The value of your email signature marketing campaigns may be higher than that of other digital marketing activities. Thus, it's essential to apply the correct calculation method to know your actual costs and returns.
So, what is ad equivalency?
Advertising value equivalency (AVE) quantifies the value of advertising placed in a company's email signatures across all professional emails.
Simply put, the value of your communication banner'sad equivalency is calculated by multiplying the number of emails sent by your company by a determined CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions or views).
To apply ad equivalency relative to the number of impressions (views) of your signatures, this is calculated based on:
Let's take an example: we will determine the weekly AVE of email signatures for a company with 1,000 employees.
Average emails sent per day per employee: 33 (Radicati Email Statistics Report, 2015-2019)
CPM: $8.00 (Global social media ads CPM 2022 |Statista))
AVE multiplier: 0.008 (CPM/1,000)
Formula:
AVE multiplier x (# of emails X # of employees X # of days) = total AVE value
($8/1,000) x (33 x 1,000 x 5) = $1,320 ad value equivalency from your employee email signatures.
We used the $8 CPM figure as a default value(worldwide average across various channels), but you can adjust it to match your company's averages.
We strongly recommend evaluating the AVE multiplier sat a higher level than standard advertising CPMs. Keep in mind the dual advantage of trust and deliverability brought by person-to-person email communications.
The AVE multiplier could potentially be set around$0.08. Using the above figures, the total AVE value would be $13,200 per week.
Following the previous calculation, we can determine the AVE for clicks on your banners.
As mentioned earlier, the value of your communication banner's ad equivalency is calculated by multiplying the number of emails sent by your company by a determined CPC (cost per click).
Example:
CPC is $2.50 and the CTR is 3.17% (average observed on Google Ads in 2023) for 33 emails sent daily by employees in a company of 1,000employees.
(# of emails/day X # of employees X # of days) = total impressions (as calculated above)
Total impressions x CTR % = total clicks per week
Total clicks per week x CPC = total weekly AVE value
Example with the above scenario:
(165,000 x (3.17/100) = 5,230 clicks per week
5,230 x $2.50 = $13,075 AVE value
Thus, by equipping all its employees with communication banners in signatures, the company could generate $13,075 of advertising value.
If we finally combine the ad equivalencies (impressions + clicks) for this example company, then we can estimate the total media value of email signatures at $14,395 in just one week.
To optimize the advertising value equivalency of your email signatures, it's crucial to give them some attention. Indeed, for a significant impact, it's imperative that your employees have:
Without a tool for centrally harmonizing the email signatures of all employees, it's challenging to implement these features in all your company's email signatures.
This is Letsignit's promise: to allow communication marketing departments to regain control over all employees' email signatures and turn them into a powerful engagement and broadcast medium.
From a single platform, managed by an administrator, the communication & marketing departments can control the visual aspect sand information in all email signatures, while setting up communication campaigns according to the company's news.
It's all automated, simple, and offers unmatched ROI.
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
