Advice
April 27, 2020

How to turn your Outlook signatures into a marketing tool?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
The email remains the essential channel for your marketing campaigns. But, are you sure that you are using it to its full potential? What about your employees’ email signatures?

As a strong call-to-action, email signatures can respond to several cases to accelerate your marketing- provided it is managed and centralized in Microsoft 365 (Office 365). It’s an all too common challenge for marketing managers: ensuring the visibility and personalized messages arrive to the targeted audience. The email remains the main communication tool, but few enterprises think of amplifying and updating their messages through their employees’ email signatures. The numbers are eloquent: on average, employees send 121 emails and receive 40 every day. In the professional context, the opening rate of these messages is 100% compared to only 23% for mass emailing campaigns. This means that an enterprise of 100 employees that deploys an automatic and harmonized signature has an opportunity to expose its message 80,000 times.  Why deprive yourself? Easy to implement and administer by using Outlook, the signature is an accelerator for your marketing with numerous use cases. Let’s take a look...

Your email banners: a recruitment channel and visibility for your events

The email signature is the perfect vector for communicating your future internal and external events. Whether it is to announce a webinar, speaking at a conference, or your participation at a tradeshow, the banner in your email signature allows you to make the announcement and increase its visibility.  When creating the banner, don’t hesitate to encourage the recipients to register for the event and refer them to the dedicated page; add a clear call-to-action that will incite them to click. You will find, here, the 4 tips to create an efficient banner. Don’t hesitate to also do A/B testing to measure which signature is the most engaging.

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Inbound marketing: synchronize email signatures with your campaigns

A significant news item? A new white paper, a post, or a contest to promote? The banner can be updated according to the content and be amplified on day 1. Highlighting your content will help capture new prospects or reactivate already acquired customers by directing them to useful content that matches their profile. By programming your campaigns from the admin area, it is easy to link the signature at the beginning of the sales funnel with high value-added content or, in the case of a customer, to push content designed to build loyalty: a video of a new product, an invitation to a webinar or other.

ABM: personalize your signature to your recipient  

The direct relationship between your employees and your recipients makes your email the perfect channel for your targeted Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns. Today, most interactions with clients are based in Outlook as the preferred messaging client. So much so that the products and services Microsoft 365 (Office 365), Outlook.com, and OneDrive have 7.1 million subscribers, 400 million active users, and 200 million users respectively. By taking advantage of the dynamic management of signatures, the enterprise can address a personalized and targeted message depending on the phase of the sale cycle to strengthen the link and commitment with the recipient of a specific account. Tracking the interactions allows for measuring the precise and daily results (number of clicks per campaign, per signature or the combination of a signature and a campaign, etc.) for reassuring you of the performances of your marketing actions.

Image control, a must for HR Marketing

The brand image of your enterprise is an essential factor for all candidates. Benefiting from a homogeneous and consistent signature positively impacts a potential candidate’s impression of the company – just as it does for your other contacts. And yet...with the increase in subsidiaries, takeovers, or simply due to the absence of a charter, employee signatures can vary in form and even in substance, and even within the same department! Between the demands of human resources and those of other departments, how can we be sure that everyone is using the same signature template? By simply defining a charter and a common template. The signature also offers support to diffuse your recruitment offers. Support, but also an ally because you will be able to imagine a sequence of content at each stage of the recruitment process, in the same way as in an inbound campaign: creating interest with a corporate video, then proposing more personalized content for the interview, etc.  

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Studies and surveys: benefit from a big volume of exchanges

The credibility of a study or survey depends on the panel of respondents and its volume. By relying on the digital exchanges of your colleagues, the scope and visibility of your surveys will be multiplied accordingly. Here too, a call-to-action coupled with a graphic banner will increase the number of participants in a targeted manner.

Use Outlook for automizing the process of your signatures and campaigns

A special path for your marketing, the email signature is also simple to manage and to deploy from Microsoft 365 (Office 365) - no more time-consuming and cumbersome management.  In concrete terms, log in on the Letsignit Cloud platform gives you direct access to the administration interface of your future campaigns. Once your logo has been uploaded and the name of your company filled in, the automatic connection to your company directory gives you access to your employees' profiles. You can also add them manually, by using a link or by importing a CSV file. Three steps are enough to create your marketing campaigns from the "campaign" tab of the interface:

  1. You import the banner created in the desired format (png, jpg. or gif.).2. Assign it a destination link (landing page, form, event page...). 3. You can assign your campaign to a group of coworkers, by department or function, simply by ticking boxes. 4. You define the start and end dates of your campaign as well as its priority level.  

It's done! You can then measure the results with the dedicated analytics tool and boost the performance of your marketing actions. Final tips for more effective campaigns:

  • Remember to regularly modify your banners so as not to bore the recipient: events, commercial offers, satisfaction surveys, don't forget the essential cases of use for marketing banners.
  • Update the signatures according to your campaigns and contacts.
  • Do not exceed two months for a campaign.
  • Inform and train your collaborators!
About the author
Amandine is the Head of Acquisition at Letsignit! Initially a content specialist, she now actively contributes to the profitability of acquisition channels: SEO, SEA, SMA, SMO... Amandine is also one of the pillars of Marketing at Letsignit! For more than 5 years, she has been participating in and initiating marketing projects and campaigns that systematically reflect her vision, writing style, and creativity (which can also be seen in all of her colorful outfits that brighten up the day of everyone she meets).
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