Advice
April 27, 2020

How to turn your Outlook signatures into a marketing tool?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
The email remains the essential channel for your marketing campaigns. But, are you sure that you are using it to its full potential? What about your employees’ email signatures?

As a strong call-to-action, email signatures can respond to several cases to accelerate your marketing- provided it is managed and centralized in Microsoft 365 (Office 365). It’s an all too common challenge for marketing managers: ensuring the visibility and personalized messages arrive to the targeted audience. The email remains the main communication tool, but few enterprises think of amplifying and updating their messages through their employees’ email signatures. The numbers are eloquent: on average, employees send 121 emails and receive 40 every day. In the professional context, the opening rate of these messages is 100% compared to only 23% for mass emailing campaigns. This means that an enterprise of 100 employees that deploys an automatic and harmonized signature has an opportunity to expose its message 80,000 times.  Why deprive yourself? Easy to implement and administer by using Outlook, the signature is an accelerator for your marketing with numerous use cases. Let’s take a look...

Your email banners: a recruitment channel and visibility for your events

The email signature is the perfect vector for communicating your future internal and external events. Whether it is to announce a webinar, speaking at a conference, or your participation at a tradeshow, the banner in your email signature allows you to make the announcement and increase its visibility.  When creating the banner, don’t hesitate to encourage the recipients to register for the event and refer them to the dedicated page; add a clear call-to-action that will incite them to click. You will find, here, the 4 tips to create an efficient banner. Don’t hesitate to also do A/B testing to measure which signature is the most engaging.

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Inbound marketing: synchronize email signatures with your campaigns

A significant news item? A new white paper, a post, or a contest to promote? The banner can be updated according to the content and be amplified on day 1. Highlighting your content will help capture new prospects or reactivate already acquired customers by directing them to useful content that matches their profile. By programming your campaigns from the admin area, it is easy to link the signature at the beginning of the sales funnel with high value-added content or, in the case of a customer, to push content designed to build loyalty: a video of a new product, an invitation to a webinar or other.

ABM: personalize your signature to your recipient  

The direct relationship between your employees and your recipients makes your email the perfect channel for your targeted Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns. Today, most interactions with clients are based in Outlook as the preferred messaging client. So much so that the products and services Microsoft 365 (Office 365), Outlook.com, and OneDrive have 7.1 million subscribers, 400 million active users, and 200 million users respectively. By taking advantage of the dynamic management of signatures, the enterprise can address a personalized and targeted message depending on the phase of the sale cycle to strengthen the link and commitment with the recipient of a specific account. Tracking the interactions allows for measuring the precise and daily results (number of clicks per campaign, per signature or the combination of a signature and a campaign, etc.) for reassuring you of the performances of your marketing actions.

Image control, a must for HR Marketing

The brand image of your enterprise is an essential factor for all candidates. Benefiting from a homogeneous and consistent signature positively impacts a potential candidate’s impression of the company – just as it does for your other contacts. And yet...with the increase in subsidiaries, takeovers, or simply due to the absence of a charter, employee signatures can vary in form and even in substance, and even within the same department! Between the demands of human resources and those of other departments, how can we be sure that everyone is using the same signature template? By simply defining a charter and a common template. The signature also offers support to diffuse your recruitment offers. Support, but also an ally because you will be able to imagine a sequence of content at each stage of the recruitment process, in the same way as in an inbound campaign: creating interest with a corporate video, then proposing more personalized content for the interview, etc.  

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Studies and surveys: benefit from a big volume of exchanges

The credibility of a study or survey depends on the panel of respondents and its volume. By relying on the digital exchanges of your colleagues, the scope and visibility of your surveys will be multiplied accordingly. Here too, a call-to-action coupled with a graphic banner will increase the number of participants in a targeted manner.

Use Outlook for automizing the process of your signatures and campaigns

A special path for your marketing, the email signature is also simple to manage and to deploy from Microsoft 365 (Office 365) - no more time-consuming and cumbersome management.  In concrete terms, log in on the Letsignit Cloud platform gives you direct access to the administration interface of your future campaigns. Once your logo has been uploaded and the name of your company filled in, the automatic connection to your company directory gives you access to your employees' profiles. You can also add them manually, by using a link or by importing a CSV file. Three steps are enough to create your marketing campaigns from the "campaign" tab of the interface:

  1. You import the banner created in the desired format (png, jpg. or gif.).2. Assign it a destination link (landing page, form, event page...). 3. You can assign your campaign to a group of coworkers, by department or function, simply by ticking boxes. 4. You define the start and end dates of your campaign as well as its priority level.  

It's done! You can then measure the results with the dedicated analytics tool and boost the performance of your marketing actions. Final tips for more effective campaigns:

  • Remember to regularly modify your banners so as not to bore the recipient: events, commercial offers, satisfaction surveys, don't forget the essential cases of use for marketing banners.
  • Update the signatures according to your campaigns and contacts.
  • Do not exceed two months for a campaign.
  • Inform and train your collaborators!
About the author
Amandine is the Head of Acquisition at Letsignit! Initially a content specialist, she now actively contributes to the profitability of acquisition channels: SEO, SEA, SMA, SMO... Amandine is also one of the pillars of Marketing at Letsignit! For more than 5 years, she has been participating in and initiating marketing projects and campaigns that systematically reflect her vision, writing style, and creativity (which can also be seen in all of her colorful outfits that brighten up the day of everyone she meets).
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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