A vice grip – this is what the digital environment looks like for many marketers at the start of 2021. And for good reason.
First, the GDPR and state-level regulations like CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) require requesting explicit consent before activating any tag on a website. Additionally, browsers – Safari in particular, but others are following suit – are gradually getting rid of third-party cookies. As a result, the ability to track a user's history, perform ad retargeting, and control advertising precision is becoming almost nonexistent.
Caught up in this technical-regulatory stranglehold, marketers have no choice but to go back to the fundamentals: "first-party" data (that which the company itself actually holds) and "organic" levers (as opposed to paid or advertising levers). That's why SEO is so important. It's also why email, whose demise has been foretold many times, has never been more alive.
It must be said that email has some attractive qualities. According to the 2019 EMA B2C study, it remains consumers' preferred communication tool. And unlike a social media post, it's not subject to algorithms – only spam filters. No, there's no guarantee that an email will be opened, especially when the opening rate tops out around 25%. But here we're talking about general mass emails, not about 1-to-1 emails sent from one person to another in a contextual and personalized way.
1-to-1 emails show an opening rate approaching 100%. In other words, they provide a privileged point of contact. A direct line with an audience that, in today's very constrained digital marketing landscape, represents priceless value.
How can I optimize these emails? How can I use them to make "touch point" marketing effective? By making sure to use these signatures in email campaigns while also ensuring that… they don't look like campaigns. No, it isn’t contradictory.
To succeed, you'll have to be able to make full use of the email signatures accompanying every email sent by every team member. With a 100-employee company, we're talking about an average of 80,000 emails a month. This number alone shows that an email signature is indeed a marketing channel of its own.
And like any marketing channel, the email signature requires the right set of tools and best practices.
Regarding tools, a centralized solution for email signature management like Letsignit is strongly recommended. It is specialized tools like this that will help you edit email signatures efficiently and, most importantly, manage them like your campaigns. That is, to plan and allocate them to the right team members according to their location, department, or function.
Solutions like this will also allow you to analyze the performance of email signatures in fine detail and measure their contribution to your marketing objectives.
As for best practices, mastering the call-to-action (CTA) is required. CTAs embedded in email signatures must stick to the engagement and conversion funnel. In other words, the idea isn't to default to "hard selling" in the email signature, but rather to be more interesting.
Commercial messages aren’t forbidden, but they must be used at the right time, on the right people, and fall under a global plan. The phrase "email signature" can thus take its place alongside the phrases "blog," "social network," "newsletters," etc.
Because these email signatures take time and effort (planning, production), it's important to measure the results. Again, a solution like Letsignit provides a valuable service since each link inserted in a signature is tracked by default. And – good news – this tracking doesn't depend on cookies, but on a simple attribute called "UTM" (variables inserted in the URL).
Statistics, collected via our email signature solution, provide the answers to these and many other questions.
Beyond gross performance, how can an email signature’s performance be optimized in a marketing plan?
First, by comparing their performance to those of other channels, looking at both traffic and conversions. It can be enlightening to look at how different levers (SEA, SEO, social posts, signatures...) contribute to a landing page’s traffic. Even more interesting: follow conversions along the funnel to identify, with high granularity, where closed deals originated. The levers that bring the most traffic aren’t always the ones that generate the most qualified contacts.
An email signature is sent by team members, transmitted via reliable and controlled media (email), and has all the qualities necessary to contribute to the marketing funnel. This is even more true today. A solution like Letsignit helps you manage them on a large scale. Because in today's digital environment, an "owned" channel (of which the company has full latitude) with such high performance deserves close attention.
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.
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