How can you do it with Microsoft 365 (Office 365)? Find out more below. Using Outlook to process email signatures is a good idea because a consistent and visually appealing signature drives a positive image for the enterprise. However, in practice, the pitfalls multiply. Starting with the administration: it is impossible to automatically configure the signatures from the Outlook administrator account. It is the user that, from their Outlook settings, must configure their email signatures. To help employees manage their own signatures, proposing a graphic charter and a predefined template seems easy enough. But when done, each employee will interpret the elements and adapt them according to their technical and graphic abilities.
Leaving it to each user doesn’t go without issues. The visual aspect, positioning the logo, and entering the information demands a minimum of understanding of HTML, or a minimum of patience to place each of the elements. The processing of image formats can also give way to issues in the management of add-ons and resolutions.
The results: the signatures vary from employee to employee. Some forget to specify their position, others adopt a different department name, within the same department or between subsidiaries.
All these elements undermine the consistency of your brand. To avoid these possible mistakes, an IT manager can, of course, take it in their own hands to create an adapted and charted signature for every workstation. An option that is possible, but time-consuming: for an enterprise of 200 employees, configuring the signature for each user represents about 100 hours of work!
A daunting task that will have to be repeated if the company decides to change its logo, name, or simply move. To automate this task, some companies try to develop scripts, but this sometimes makes the problem worse.
These scripts are very sensitive to the slightest change and should be maintained regularly and carefully. And really, it’s a shame to settle for imperfect and wasteful measures when there are actual solutions out there.
Rather than being a time-consuming a repetitive task, choosing to automate and centralize the management of email signatures is a much more appealing option. Centralizing the deployment avoids both random individual configuration and loss of time for both the user and the IT department.
By using the SaaS solution, Letsignit, it becomes easy and quick to automate and centralize the creation of email signatures, as well as the deployment via Microsoft 365 (Office 365).
The first step consists of creating your Letsignit account and choosing your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) email to connect. Once on the platform from the integrations tab, you will be asked to choose an importation method for your users. All you must do is synchronize your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) directory, or you can do the alternative method and upload a CSV file.
n both cases, all your user information – the different domains, groups, attributes, and more, are immediately imported and available on the platform in only a matter of minutes. Another interesting benefit: every new user added to your directory will be automatically imported to Letsignit. Hard to be simpler!
Are your users synchronized? All that remains is to create the signature. Nothing could be easier with our "Drag & Drop" editor. Depending on your graphic skills or your tastes, you can choose the one that suits you best from among 16 proposed templates. Once this choice is made, you can open the "drag & drop" editor to complete the signature. This is all the easier as all user information is already pre-filled thanks to the automatic synchronization.
Take advantage of this signature to promote your social networks - this is of course provided for in the editor. Note that expert administrators can decide to perform all these operations in HTML: your signatures will then be created on a dedicated platform and imported directly.
Your signatures are ready. You have nothing else to do then to assign each type of signature to your users by ticking the box next to their name. Next, invite the users to download the app and connect to Letsignit – the user only needs to use their Microsoft 365 (Office 365) account to take advantage of their signatures on Outlook Desktop.
There is also the “server-side” which your mail flow makes a detour through the Letsignit services (hosted in the Cloud Azure) in order to receive the email signature. This rerouting requires you to configure an SMTP connector from your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) account.
The big advantage of this process is that the email signature is added "at the source", so the process works regardless of the device the email is sent from(a PC, a Mac but also a smartphone, or a tablet).
Once the deployment is executed either on the “client-side” or “server-side”, your employees will benefit from an elegant, harmonized, and up-to-date signature, starting from the first email sent. And all of this regardless of the Outlook device and messaging client used: desktop application, web browser, or the mobile application!
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.
