We have learned a heck of a lot over the past two years from over 350 companies using email signature marketing. We even took it a step further and teamed up with EyeQuant, an AI platform that helps companies make faster and better design decisions, to find out what resonates most with email recipients. We want to share our research with you so that we can help you make the most of employee email as a marketing channel – so we turned that research into a #allkillernofiller webinar hosted by our VP of Marketing, Justin Keller, and CEO, Bryan Wade.
We conglomerated 25 minutes of killer information into these 3 takeaways:
1. Never underestimate the power of email.
Marketers have been trying to predict the Doomsday of Email for decades. “Email is dead” has been the headline of far too many blog posts for too long, and we are here to put that to rest. Justin opened the webinar with some pretty staggering statistics that support this thesis.
“Every day 1 billion songs are streamed on Spotify. 4.4 billion searches are done on Google. These are all make-your-brain-hurt size numbers but they all pale in comparison to email. Over 274 billion emails are sent every day. 3.2 million emails are sent every second.” – Justin Keller
Adobe’s 2017 Email Consumer Survey yielded some pretty substantial evidence that backs up these numbers. The report reveals that email still reigns supreme as the most preferential avenue for brands to communicate with their audience.
In fact, Adobe even went so far to say that millennials are “obsessed” with email. This is music to our ears. Think about the math…
“It’s not rocket science, it’s pretty easy to find out how many impressions your company can get every year. The average employee sends about 10,000 emails a year. If you have 100 employees that’s 1,000,000 impressions!” – Justin Keller
The beautiful thing about email signature marketing is that you don’t have to change what you’ve been doing – there is no crazy system that you need to implement or be trained on. As Justin said, it’s not rocket science! It’s simply a new way of thinking about the emails your employees send out on a daily basis. Every email is a unique touchpoint with an engaged audience. Your marketing team could be utilizing that as a highly-personalized and targeted marketing channel by simply adding a call-to-action banner in your employees’ email signatures!
2. Email signature marketing works.
Don’t just take our word for it – we brought in the big guns to prove the effectiveness of email signature marketing. After months of hearing “does this really work?” we teamed up with EyeQuant to put the questions to rest. The extensive and eye-openings results of that study can be found here. If you’re more of an auditory learner, Justin and Bryan did go over some of the most mind-boggling findings in the webinar (the recording can be found at the bottom of this post). If you’re more of a skim reader like me, here are the highlights.
We ran 3 different EyeQuant tests to compare an unbranded vs. branded signature:
Perception Map: Intended to show what the email recipient will see and miss in the first 3 seconds.
Hot Spots: Intended to show the 10 most attention-grabbing spots of the email.
Attention Map: Intended to show which elements capture the most attention.
“The science tells us that when you have a beautifully designed email signature, as well as an image with a clear call-to-action, it becomes an effective way to engage with your customers.” -Bryan Wade
The proof is in the pudding! Couple these results with the aforementioned results from Adobe’s Email Consumer Survey and you can’t deny it: Email is still the workhorse of digital marketing. Your most important contacts are engaging with employee email communications every single day and paying attention to the email signature. This piece of digital real estate is an extension of your brand – so use it to your advantage to drive conversions and distribute relevant content.
3. The key to effective email signature marketing is in the design.
Specific design elements can help engagement rates sway one way or the other. From colors to the call-to-action, there’s a lot to think about within a campaign banner design. The goal of this webinar was to share data that might take out some of the guesswork. A highlight reel of the “Art” section of the webinar is below. And if you’re interested in more best practices and data, check out this blog post that highlights our top 9 takeaways after analyzing our own email signature data during the 2017 year.
“One thing you want to make sure you’re really doing is clearly defining the CTA. This will get the attention of the email recipient and spur them to take action.” – Justin Keller
“Be clear and concise with your wording and description of the resource – but get a little crazy with the graphics! Go bold! Use unusual imagery. In this customer’s campaign example, we’ve got a llama on a tv and that definitely makes me want to click on something.” – Justin Keller
Thanks again to those who joined us for this #allkillernofiller webinar. The research (science) shows just how impactful email signature marketing can be, and design (art) plays a big part. Between the live presentation (find the recording below) and this blog post, hopefully we’ve inspired you to think of employee email as a new marketing channel that can provide value to your business. See you at the next webinar!
