Marketing
January 18, 2022

How effectively do email signatures perform? 749 marketing decision makers respond

By
Capucine Roche
Chief Executive Officer
In their new role as Chief Connecting Officer, the marketing director must carefully evaluate the role of each tool, and strict adherence to performance expectations. This is a good reason to get interested in email signatures—embedded right into the dozens of messages we send every day.

An orchestra conductor. This is the role that the marketing director has always had to take on in making a brand shine, playing a score composed of the multiple communication channels at hand. According to Gartner, in 2022, this role will evolve even further: the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) must adapt to the position of CCO (Chief Connecting Officer).

But is this just a semantic shift? Well, in reality, it highlights two developments: the ability to create strong bonds between the brand and the company's employees and our connections, which are now played out through complex, interweaving channels—and not just digital.

319 billion emails in 2021

In this hybrid mix of online and offline marketing, email still carries a lot of weight. For one simple reason: in the professional world, no newer channel—including all the new collaborative apps and platforms—has even come close to completely replacing it. In 2021, around 319 billion emails1 will be exchanged worldwide. That's 15 billion more than in 2020 and 26 billion more than in 2019.

On a company-wide basis, each employee sends an average of 30 emails per day. This means that email has the type of reach that no company can afford to ignore. Some legitimate questions, then, are how to capitalize on this reach and what concrete results we can reasonably expect.

In essence, transforming corporate email into a full-fledged marketing channel comes down to finely utilizing the email signature, which carries the brand identity and can promote a call to action. Two bits of good news here: solutions exist, and the results are measurable—and have been measured.

Double-digit conversions

The best people to report on these results are our customers, who use Letsignit, our email signature management solution, on a daily basis. Among them, we surveyed 749 marketing decision-makers from groups of more than 100 employees.

Brand visibility - traffic leads - employee information

So, what are the results? These marketing decision-makers estimate that the email signatures implemented via Letsignit have increased the readability of their brand portfolio by an average of 34%2. That means less confusion and dissonance among entities.

We get this same percentage—34%2 on average—when asked to evaluate the increase in employee involvement and information thanks to the signatures.

This is a considerable figure given current hiring challenges or when it comes to communicating the right information at the right time— especially in the context of the democratization that has been brought on by remote work formats.

Internal and external email signatures

Finally, based on the clicks recorded on email signatures, the generation of traffic and contacts increases by 25%. A relevant channel to relay all types of marketing operations: events, surveys, offers, content, testimonials, rewards, and more.

After all, how many channels can boast of more than 20% or 30% conversion rates? Don't bother looking, there aren't many...

Inside this comprehensive and in-depth guide, you’ll learn about email signature marketing and what you stand to gain by including this highly underrated but powerful tool in your marketing mix.

Download The ultimate guide to increase your marketing results with email signaturesl

Inside this comprehensive and in-depth guide, you’ll learn about email signature marketing and what you stand to gain by including this highly underrated but powerful tool in your marketing mix.

Granted, there's nothing magical about these results. But to achieve them, you must have the tools to automate the integration of email signatures and adapt them to the best of your ability—both internally and externally and based on the roles of your employees and the intended recipients. It's also a matter of integrating email signatures as full-fledged levers into your campaign scenarios—an effort that's easy to justify today in light of the results we've just shared.

Source:
1Statista 2021
2Average from answers given via a survey conducted in September 2021 among 749 marketing decision makers within companies with more than 100 employees, Letsignit customers.

About the author
Previously serving as the Chief Marketing Officer at Letsignit, Capucine has now stepped into the role of CEO at the same company. As one of the early members of the organization, she has actively contributed to its growth for over a decade. From the nascent stages of the solution, she provided the strategic direction to shine both nationally and internationally. Additionally, she values workplace satisfaction, equity, and representation of women in the SaaS industry. Her secret for maintaining unmatched calm during high-stakes projects? Engaging in midday Yoga sessions.
About Letsignit
With Letsignit email signature manager, connect with your audience in a way that's on-brand and personal, while driving quality lead generation.
Frequently
asked questions
1
Is it possible to track the number of clicks on email signatures?

Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.

You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.

If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.

2
Can we add links to social networks, our website, and appointment-setting applications such as Calendly?

With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.

And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.

3
Can employees update their signature information themselves (number, function, etc.)?

It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.

This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.

4
Why it is important to standardize our email signatures on a large scale to ensure our identity and brand image?

It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!

A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.

With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.

5
What is the user experience like for our employees?

What is the user experience like for our employees?

  • If you opt for the Letsignit Add-in for Outlook, they will have a dedicated space in their Outlook account where they will be able to view the signatures and campaigns assigned to them.
  • If you opt for the Letsignit Desktop APP, they will be able to preview all their signatures and campaigns in this space. If they want to change their default signature to another one when sending an email, this will be done in their signature library in Outlook.

In both cases:

  • They preview their signature before sending an email and choose from signatures assigned to them.
  • Based on the permissions granted, they will also be able to modify their personal information such as their name, position, or address in these spaces.

In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.

6
Can my employees have multiple signatures available to them?

With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.

Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:

Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.

7
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

8
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

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asked questions
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