More and more marketers are realizing something we’ve known at Sigstr for a long time: employee email is a valuable marketing channel and email signature marketing (ESM) is the secret to unlocking this channel. For many teams, ESM has become a main source for promoting events, driving engagement, and bolstering initiatives.
Whether you’ve been following along with our content proving that email signatures draw attention and drive clicks, or you’ve come into the space on your own and are looking for tips, tricks, and best practices, we’re here to help you understand how to best drive engagement – but also help you know if (and when) purchasing email signature marketing is the right choice for your business.
Just by virtue of reading this, the great news is – you’re on the right track! It may be that you’re currently either using or thinking of implementing a manual solution for your company’s email signatures. This is a fantastic way to dip your toes into the world of ESM, and we encourage marketers to pursue this option.
Employee time = real money
If you’re sending an email to everyone in your company featuring the correct branding guidelines for the email signature and a banner to copy/paste at the bottom of messages, that’s a great sign that you’re on the right track for harnessing your employee email. But think about it – we’ve all seen the email that marketing sends to everyone at the company with 10 to 12 steps on how to update their email signature (which takes time away from the marketer’s day).
If it takes each employee 8 minutes to walk through that process of setting up their email signature and campaign, and they make an average of $30 per hour, what does that math look like? For a company of 1,500 employees, that comes to 200 hours, or a $6,000 hit in productivity to your company EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to make adjustments to that marketing message. Our best practices suggest switching out a marketing campaign every 4 to 6 weeks to keep the messaging fresh. If that 1,500-person company changes out a campaign once a month, they’re losing $72,000 in productivity over the course of the year.
That’s not to mention other time-wasters and hiccups with the manual process. If you’re looking to segment different email signatures based on teams or departments, that’s even more time spent changing out campaigns. And there’s always the inevitable employees who won’t follow directions and will be off-brand, even after countless follow-up emails and check-ins (time wasters themselves). In short – this process can get messy, and it can get expensive.
Save time for your employees while adding value
That’s why Sigstr is here to help. If you’re a marketer looking to implement standardized email signature marketing across your company – you’re clearly already a rockstar! We want to work alongside amazing people like you and help make the process simpler, less expensive, and more effective.
Sigstr gives central control of company-wide email signatures. We work with your IT team to deploy across your entire organization in a seamless implementation process. Once completed, you as the marketer have full control over the email signature and call-to-action banner. There will never again be the need to take your employees’ time (and your company’s money!) to ensure that your latest initiatives are being promoted.
In addition to the centralized control, Sigstr offers advanced functionality that simply isn’t possible in a home-grown solution. Our scheduling feature lets you plan out campaigns months in advance, and switch to a new campaign depending on when time-sensitive events begin and end. Targeted campaigns allow you to switch out campaigns based on recipients, so that you can ensure that your top prospects, key partners, and current customers are seeing exactly the right message at the right time. The level of personalization allowed with Sigstr is unprecedented, and adding a new campaign takes no end-user time. Think of a company like Lumavate – they’re using Sigstr as part of their ABM strategy, implementing hundreds of targeted campaigns to key accounts. Can you imagine them asking their end-users to switch out campaigns every time they compose an email based on the recipient? With Sigstr, the marketing team has full control over that messaging and targeting, and they’re saving time and money by centralizing the management.
Additionally, Sigstr allows you to track concrete numbers, attribution, and ROI. If you’re doing ESM on your own, hopefully you’re measuring performance with UTM parameters to understand how valuable the space can be! We’re able to go beyond that, offering CRM integrations, recipient analytics, Google Analytics tracking, in-app analytics, end-user notifications, and more. We work hard to give you visibility into what Sigstr is doing for your business.
Free up IT resources
Building your own ESM solution is not one-and-done. As with everything in computing, there a million ways to get all your employee email signatures looking the same. If you’ve talked to your IT or engineering team about solving this, they’ve probably got some ideas! But as with anything in the IT world, a project is never truly done.
Email client compatibility, HTML, content rendering, template design best practices, email deliverability – centrally controlling email signatures is a deceptively complex task. If you choose to build your own ESM solution in house, your IT department should be aware that they’ll be expected to maintain it over time, fix it when it’s broken, and tackle new projects in the future when you want to improve things. Sigstr has years of industry experience building and supporting all of this for hundreds of customers – each with their own unique tech stacks and use cases – and we’re always adding more!
If you’re ready to take ESM to the next level, Sigstr is here to help
Of course, Sigstr comes at a cost, and we work hard to determine the best packaging and pricing for your company. We want to be sure to give you exactly what you need to succeed, at a price point that makes sense. And we’re confident that you’ll see a clear return on investment.
Experimenting on your own with ESM is great, and we highly encourage it! By setting up standardized email signatures and campaign banners, you’re already halfway there. We’re here to help take what you’re already doing and save you time and money, in addition to delivering more options for central control for your marketing team. We hope you’re ready to work with us – because we’re ready to work with you.
