Although we included a “vs.” in the title of this blog post, we first want to mention that we recommend doing both traditional email marketing and email signature marketing (ESM). As you may have noticed from our sticker collection, we’re big fans of email in general, no matter how you approach it with your marketing strategy.
This post, rather, is intended to show how ESM is a new innovative form of email marketing (and award-winning according to MarTech Breakthrough). As a marketing team here at Sigstr, we have strategies for both sides. And based on what we’ve seen so far this year, we had a “hunch” that ESM was racking up more clicks. So we put on our math nerd hats and crunched the numbers, and what we found was pretty amazing.
Collectively, our email signature marketing campaigns have achieved 1,500 more clicks when compared to traditional email marketing total clicks.
Before we determine the why behind the numbers above, let’s back up and start with the basics of marketing email.
Some Background on Traditional Email Marketing
According to HubSpot, “Marketing Email” is defined as:
“Any email sent that primarily contains a commercial message or content intended for a commercial purpose (i.e. nurturing leads through the funnel). Marketing email is generally sent to groups of contacts that are prospects or customers.”
For our team, this includes the following tactics:
- Bi-weekly newsletter
- Lead nurturing
- Event follow-up
- Customer-focused announcements
- Webinar promotion and follow-up
- New content promotion
- New product or feature announcement
Traditional email marketing still has a place in our overall marketing strategy and is something we’ll still continue to do. However, we’re also adjusting to the recent trends. While open rates are currently trending up for mass email, click rates continue to decline (according to SendGrid’s Global Email Benchmark Report). On the flip side, everyday one-to-one email (think Gmail and Outlook) is a different story. That’s what separates email signature marketing from mass email marketing.
Why Email Signature Marketing Is Different
Think about the thousands of emails your employees send to your most important customers and prospects every year. For some companies, each employee averages 10,000 sent emails a year. If you start to do that math across all of your employees, you’ll quickly realize that everyday one-to-one email represents just as many marketing opportunities as traditional email marketing (if not more).
Unlike traditional mass email marketing, employee email provides your team with millions of continuous impressions to your most engaged audience. How engaged? Science proves that email recipients not only pay attention to your employees’ email signatures, the majority of their attention and focus shifts to that area.
Some Sigstr customers call this “passively acquired attention” – which is a gold mine for marketers. Email signature marketing can yield better results because these are emails that are, for the most part, almost certainly going to be opened and read. Email signature marketing allows marketers to inject a call-to-action into an email in a non-intrusive way, and get a message in front of someone who is far more likely to open and engage with that CTA.
In addition to the volume, engagement, and attention employee email provides as a channel, it also represents the most pointed way of targeting (according to Sigstr customer, Lumavate) for account-based marketing purposes. Based on the email domain, teams can mix and match personalized banners with specific industries, vertical, accounts, and even sales stages (here’s a few examples from our own Sigstr account).
What’s Your Email Marketing Strategy for This Year?
How are you feeling about your 2019 email marketing strategy? If your open and click rates aren’t where you want them to be, we encourage you to test a new form of email marketing. An approach that is high-volume, super targeted, and for us, much more effective.
Learn more about email signature marketing here and see how it can help make the email marketers on your team look like rockstars. Happy emailing!
