Last fall, sometime between August and October, Sigstr released our first ever “September Issue” – a compendium of the best email signature marketing campaigns from our customers created over the course of 2018. With a deliberate nod to Vogue’s legendary issue of the same name, and what started as a clever idea some months before, this resource has quickly emerged as my favorite piece of B2B marketing content that I’ve ever had a hand in during my career.
I’m so proud to say that Sigstr’s September Issue has been nominated for this year’s Killer Content Awards taking place at the annual B2B Marketing Exchange (happening this February in Scottsdale, AZ). We’re a bit of an underdog in the category, as we’re up against massive brands like Google, NBC, and the very talented team from PathFactory. In spite of the fierce competition, I really think the Sigstr team and, specifically, our Marketing Director, Brad Beutler, and designer, Anna Zimmerman, deserve to come home with a “Finny” at this year’s B2B Choice Awards. Here’s why:
1. It Cuts to the Heart of Sigstr’s Message
One thing our team constantly tries to establish in the market is that email signature marketing isn’t about the signature itself, it’s about the channel. Sigstr provides its users with an immense and targeted advertising channel by including a relevant call-to-action banner in every email (which just happens to live in the email signature section of the email). Said differently, marketers aren’t flocking to Sigstr because we standardize the business card information of every employee in their email. That’s easy. The main driver of Sigstr’s growth is our ability to give marketers a dynamic and unique ad channel. I say unique here because the scalability, volume, and ability to personalize within this channel isn’t available in any other medium.
By abstracting the campaign banner from the email signature, our September Issue is able to celebrate the purest aspect of what makes Sigstr so powerful:
Relevant marketing impressions to a company’s biggest and most important audience, delivered passively through a B2B business-person’s most frequent daily activity.
At an average of 6.5 hours per day, business professionals spend the vast majority of their time working in email. The September Issue recognizes the marketers who are viewing those 6.5 hours (multiplied by number of employees) as thousands upon thousands of marketing opportunities.
2. It’s All About Our Customers
The ultimate goal of a marketer is singular – grow the business. And the activities a marketer can adopt to achieve that goal are limited (account-based marketing, events, expansion, education, etc.). But from there, the email signature marketing possibilities are endless. We set out to create a piece of content that grouped together the most important initiatives of our customers by studying, analyzing, and hand-picking the most beautiful examples of those initiatives.
Our customers launched nearly 10,000 Sigstr campaigns last year! And while most of them met the beauty standards to qualify for the September Issue, we wanted to find examples that moved the needle on the most common activities shared by modern marketers. As a result, we’re both giving our current customers examples of the kinds of campaigns that made a material impact on their peers’ businesses while inspiring other marketers about the possibilities of a marketing channel they hadn’t fully considered. It helps existing customers, prospects at every stage of the funnel, and even our own team (all without wasting a pixel or keystroke).
3. It’s Simply Beautiful
While every piece of content we produce requires hours of effort and creativity, no other resource we’ve done before has stolen the limelight quite like the September Issue. It’s our highest performing piece of content of all time in terms of views, downloads, shares, and social mentions. And thank goodness for that, because we put in many hours of time, thoughtfulness, and examination of approximately $40 worth of high fashion magazines for inspiration. We passionately wanted to celebrate the creative work of our customers with a sophisticated level of style and pizzazz.
If you have ever clicked “send” on an important marketing email to your entire database, been tasked with driving hundreds of registrations for a large event, or signed a vendor contract where return on investment isn’t guaranteed – then you’re familiar with the lump of marketing anxiety that forms somewhere in your thorax. Email signature marketing campaigns, like the ones in the September Issue, come with that same pressure.
An average 500-employee company using Sigstr will generate nearly 5 million campaign impressions every year. That campaign image will show up next to the name of every employee in your company, including his/her boss, their boss, and the CEO. Our customers recognize both the possibilities and pressures of that opportunity, so they pour their hearts into developing beautiful, relevant, and irresistibly clickable campaign banners. They do it because they’re responsible for their entire company’s brand and marketing reputation every time an employee clicks “send” on an email.
Sigstr users are working hard to generate amazing content, events, experiences, and more. And all that work culminates into a beautiful design that’s used in a Sigstr Campaign. We understand that and we respect the hell out of it. It’s worth celebrating in the most elegant way, and that’s what we tried to accomplish with the September Issue.
Vote for Sigstr!
Please join us in celebrating the amazing work our customers are doing with Sigstr by checking out our first September Issue here. And if you think we’re worthy of bringing home a Killer Content Award, click here and vote for us.
See You in Scottsdale?
Having attended B2BMX before, I can attest that it’s an incredibly well-organized event stacked with fantastic content. Because Sigstr is a sponsor of the conference this year, we get a nifty discount code that you can use to attend. Click here to learn more about B2BMX and if you want in, use the code “25SIGSTR” to get 25% off your pass.
