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💡 : All our tips apply to all types of web banners.
Email banners are images placed under the email signature and can be clickable, directing the recipient to a specific page, such as the company's website. They can also announce promotions, events, services, products, launches, or greetings… The possibilities are endless!
While some communication channels are considered ineffective or inappropriate, the email signature, on the other hand, is the ideal channel to reach your target without spamming, like with mass mailing. Non-intrusive, they are naturally embedded in your emails and help create a sense of closeness and trust with your contacts.
Today, with the multitude of tools available, most companies no longer pay attention to the marketing potential of their email signatures. Yet…
Linked to your employees' emails, the email signature never goes unnoticed. Recipients are 100% more likely to open an email from an employee and see your email signature, unlike a mass email (which only has an open rate of about 20%).
An employee sends an average of 40 emails a day and receives 121. Furthermore, they spend 28% of their workday reading and responding to emails.
For a company with 1,000 employees, this represents no less than 800,000 monthly visibility opportunities!
Calculation: 40 emails x 1,000 employees x 20 working days = 800,000 opportunities.
Imagine the possible outcomes! If you integrate email banners into your signatures… Through your signatures, you can promote a significant news item, a new offer, an upcoming event or webinar, content, Success Stories…
In short, you can achieve real returns and make a profit without investing a single cent in advertising!
According to a study conducted among 789 marketing decision-makers, you can increase:
It's worth looking into the different use cases for email banners and all their subtleties!
Your email banners are an excellent way to do nurturing and build your company's brand awareness, employee engagement, customer loyalty... Moreover, they also allow you to bypass the whims of algorithms by guaranteeing impressions and clicks on your content.
However, if you communicate regularly with the same prospects, employees, clients, and partners: you need to diversify your email banners. Indeed, the multitude of exchanges gets your contacts' eyes used to your banners.
Result: they no longer look at them, and they lose their usefulness.
The use cases for your email banners are numerous:
When launching an e-book, a webinar... use your email banners! This way, you give visibility to all your events or content and encourage your audience to learn more or download your content.
Do you want to influence your short-term sales? The email banner is the best tool to subtly share: your discount codes, samples, trial offers, sales…
The email banner is ideal for communicating about the launch of a new product, recruitment, a new website, a new identity... It will quickly increase traffic to your site by spreading your current news to your employees.
You can take advantage of annual events to create a tailored banner: examples: greeting banners, a solidarity day banner… It’s an opportunity to reinforce the values of your company, whether for an internal or external audience.
Essential to improve customer satisfaction and your services, surveys are an important moment for any company. You’ll be sure to get maximum feedback by distributing your surveys in your email signatures.
We’ve created a library of email signature and banner templates, with over 40 inspiring examples available!
To effectively distribute your signature banners, we strongly recommend creating a communication strategy and a plan.
Your email signature banners are just like any other content piece. They deserve to have your clients, partners, employees, and prospects focus on them.
To do this, we advise you to develop a real communication strategy:
Every communication action should be measured to do even better next time. You’ll become more effective when creating your banners and implementing them in your email signatures.
For your message to be visually striking, it should take up most of the banner, especially the hook phrase. It’s the first thing email recipients should see. Don’t try to "sell at all costs" as you may break the trust relationship or even be seen as a spammer.
To help you craft your message, you can use the AIDA method.
The AIDA Method is the reference writing technique. It’s used for all types of content: newsletters, emails, article introductions, email banners…
The AIDA acronym represents the 4 stages a prospect goes through before making a decision. In the case of your email banners, it will encourage your contacts to click on them and discover your services.
Example: You are a communication agency. You are addressing marketing experts.
The CTA, the Call-to-Action, is the clickable element in the signature, usually represented as a button. This tells your audience that your email banner is interactive. They will be automatically redirected to a new offer, a webinar, a blog post, or even a video. It should align with your message.
It’s necessary to add a link to your CTA to send your audience to a dedicated page. The link added to your email banner must lead to the right page. Sometimes banners link to the homepage. That’s a mistake. If you’re promoting one of your ebooks, you should add the link to your landing page, not the homepage. This will help you achieve a better conversion rate.
The format of your email banner is crucial for better display and readability. The same goes for images in your email signature. For the format of your email banner, we recommend using a banner with a width no larger than 600px and a height of 180px. From experience, we suggest importing a .JPEG or .PNG image for optimal quality.
💡: To learn more about the dimensions of an email signature, visit here: What size image for an email signature?
Ensure the visual consistency of your employees' email signatures. Your email banners should follow your company’s color palette.
If you want to stand out in your market, use your email signature to clearly and coherently communicate your expertise and brand identity.
Only use the fonts and colors that are in your graphic charter. Your email signature should represent your brand and what you stand for. It shouldn’t turn into an advertising billboard, so make sure it remains legible.
Your banner should align with your brand identity. It should reflect the soul of your company and be present across all your content. We advise you to choose relevant images or illustrations consistent with your graphic charter and brand identity. But that’s not all!
You should choose images that will perfectly illustrate what you want to promote through your banner. They should reinforce your value proposition and your hook phrase.
You can download free resources from sites like freepik, pixabay, or o-dan.
Every action must be measured! Whether it’s a commercial banner, marketing banner, holiday banner… Measure your results!
By doing this, you’ll be able to improve your future banners and increase your results.
You can track clicks and conversions using Google Analytics or a specialized software tool that integrates with your email.
In most companies, email signatures are managed manually by the IT department. When the marketing and communications team wants to integrate email banners into employees' email signatures, it is impossible to do so automatically without a tool.
If the number of employees is in the thousands, it is impossible for the IT department to integrate the banners. So, the communications team sends the email banners to all employees to manually add to their signatures, either through HTML code or a PNG or JPG image.
However, not everyone has the same level of IT skills. So, there's a strong chance that some employees won’t integrate the banners into Outlook. Moreover, this creates several problems: no control over the banner changes, no tracking of KPIs, and no guarantee of deliverability (email size)... This is why the best option is to use a dedicated tool.
To integrate your email banners into Outlook, the best option is to use an email sig nature management tool.
With a dedicated solution, you can deploy thousands of uniform email signatures and banners automatically.
You have full control over your brand identity, as well as your email signature communication campaigns. You can choose the duration of your email signature banners' display and track their performance. A real advantage to make sure your email banners are fully integrated into your overall strategy.
You no longer depend on IT or your employees. You are the sole manager of the project.
To get the best results from your email signature campaigns, there are several criteria to consider:
You should opt for a solution that allows you to create, manage, and deploy signatures in just a few clicks. The goal is to assign uniform email signatures to all employees without taking up too much of your time and without relying on IT staff.
The easier the tool is to use, the less resistance you will have to using it. No one wants to use a tool with a non-intuitive interface. Everything should be easy to do, especially when you're measuring campaign performance.
If you delegate the project management, your employee should be able to use the tool easily.
The solution should allow you to schedule the start and end of your campaigns. This way, you can align your campaigns with your communication plan.
Once your banner is inserted and scheduled in the tool, on D-day, you’ll only need to check that it appears correctly in your signature and let the campaign run.
The tool should allow you to measure the performance of your campaigns during the scheduled period. Make sure you have these features to be fully autonomous in deploying your signatures and measuring ROI.
The email signature solution should allow you to assign your email banners granularly, meaning you should be able to assign a banner for your service.
Example: Your customer service team has no interest in having a banner dedicated to sales prospecting. You should be able to assign a banner to promote a client webinar, a new feature, a satisfaction survey... Or you won’t want to send banners for your American clients to your French clients. That would make no sense. The solution should allow you to create groups based on your services and subsidiaries to assign the right signatures to your audience.
Prospecting, customer loyalty, promotional offers, or events... A real library of modern and design email signature and banner templates you can use for inspiration in your campaigns.
You now know all the best practices for creating and distributing impactful email banners!
💡: All the tips shared apply to all types of banners or visuals: banners for social media, LinkedIn campaigns...
Good creation!
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