On August 8, Sigstr made perhaps the biggest announcement since the company started back in 2015. With the launch of Sigstr Relationships, we solidified ourselves not just as an email signature marketing (ESM) product, but as a Relationship Marketing platform. Pulse is a game-changer for relationship-based sales and marketing, and its addition to our platform actually made us better at ESM!
We all worried that Pulse would distract us from email signature marketing. How could we build and introduce a new product to our customers without distracting our services, product, and go-to-market teams? How could Pulse actually make ESM better across all functions? In short, we wanted to be sure this was a 1+1=3 for our customers, and we worked hard to be intentional about the decisions we made to ensure that this launch would have that effect.
We asked these questions to smart people who had done what we were doing. Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot, offered advice that stuck with me. HubSpot became a platform very intentionally, and along the journey they wanted to be sure each new product had a few things in common with the existing products. This includes:
- Unified brand
- Same tech stack
- Same buyer or ideal customer profile
The decisions we made for Pulse and ESM were always guided by these three criteria. It is so easy to get distracted, and I’m proud that our team made ESM stronger with the building of Pulse. Let me dig into each topic to provide some examples.
Unified Brand
Sigstr created the email signature marketing category. Other solutions existed for IT, but nobody was as determined to unlock marketing value from employee email like Sigstr has been.
Pulse builds further value on top of the channel Sigstr knows best: employee email. Your employees email the companies and contacts most important to your business everyday, and with ESM, marketing can deliver content at scale to the perfect audience. Relationships are built on communication. These same employee emails plus calendar meetings can also predict business relationships, which have been impossible to quantify (until now).
Former ExactTarget CMO and current Sigstr investor, Tim Kopp, describes marketing through your employees as “marketing from the inside-out”. Our team and culture are already committed to helping our customers do exactly that. The Sigstr Green has always been about putting the needs of our customers before our own – none of that is changing. We’re looking to help our customers win through human-to-human marketing, and the addition of Pulse to our platform allows our customers to take that even further.
Same Tech Stack
ESM and Pulse are built on a common tech stack. Customers can use either product independently or use them together. They share a single log-in experience and both build value on top of email platforms like G Suite and O365. Both products share common objects or themes such as customer segments, employees, accounts, and contacts.
Our next-level integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo (and more coming soon!) allow users to sync segmented lists of targeted contacts and accounts. These lists can be used both in the ESM product for account-based marketing targeting, and in Pulse for relationship intelligence.
As we’ve worked to make the product experience the best that it can be for both ESM and Pulse, both sides have benefited. Improvements to the user experience, such as “log-in with Google”, were built to simplify logins for Pulse. However, this also instantly made the lives of ESM customers easier. Enhancements like this will continue to make our UX best-in-class as we work to provide a seamless, easy-to-use experience for our customers.
Same Buyer
We wake up every day thinking about ways we can make our customers look like rockstars. We want to help them get a promotion or earn a bigger budget so they can help their sales team drive revenue faster. With Sigstr, marketers can market through their most valuable asset: their team.
As such, our ideal customers are those work most closely with sales. They are typically focused on events, field-marketing, account-based marketing, and marketing operations.
Think about these roles for a minute. Each is tasked to build relationships with the right accounts and contacts. Everyday these marketers, and the sales people they serve, wake up and think about relationships: “Which accounts and contacts should I focus on today?” Pulse and ESM together are a relationship marketing platform. We help marketers look like heroes for their sales and service teams. We give them powerful ways to provide air cover on key deals, drive more meetings at events, collaborate on lead follow-up, and promote new offerings to current customers.
Wrap Up – TLDR
The Relationship Marketing Platform provides a foundation to do more than we ever have before, and for our customers to do the same. ESM is stronger because of Pulse, and vice versa. With our two products working in tandem, the Sigstr platform allows marketers to to make their employees more productive, ensure that their marketing teams dominate their strategy, and blow away their personal and professional goals.
Our amazing customers were a huge part of making Pulse possible. Before our launch on August 8, we already had over 30 customers using the product and guiding us to build what was most valuable for them. We’re continuing to gather feedback and learn how we can take both products, and the platform as a whole, to the next level. Stay tuned – we’re just getting started!
