Brand
September 8, 2021

How to protect your brand visual identity every day?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
Your visual identity is an important factor in your business. It is how your customers recognize you, how you stand out amongst your competitors, and is the face of your brand personality. If neglected, you could face serious consequences: loss of customer trust, the appearance of unprofessionalism, or public ridicule. Discover our advice on how to protect your visual identity every day.

1. Establish brand guidelines

There are many ways your visual identity can be jeopardized. One of them is by not having a clear set of guidelines for it. This can cause your visual identity to be inconsistent, which can be viewed as unprofessional, confuses customers, and loses their trust.

To avoid this, be sure you have a graphic charter with your primary and secondary brand colors listed (do not forget to add the hexadecimal and RGB code). The typeface and logo(s) along with templates should also be available. This information should then be shared with every member of the company. Sometimes, it is even necessary to add descriptions on how and when to use this information so that there is no confusion at any level.

Another important element to be considered is the legality of this information. Any original work of authorship such as your logo should be copyrighted. No other company or person will be able to use or steal your unique visual identity which sets you apart.

2. Monitor your online brand visual identity through alerts

It is important that you keep an eye on your visual identity, especially online. A great way to protect it is by monitoring it. You can set up alerts on Google which notifies you whenever you are mentioned on any of Google’s indexed pages. Take it further by using solutions like Mention that allow you to monitor over 1 billion sources across the web. You can also use the tool Image Raider to see if your images are being used online by someone other than your company. Knowing how your visual identity is being used online allows you to move quickly if an issue arises.

3. Be consistent

Your visual identity should be recognizable no matter where your customer interacts with it. One way to ensure this is to be consistent. To do this, always use the same designer when creating campaigns or use images from similar sources. You might want to even consider having a brand manager to oversee your visual identity and create procedures to best manage it. Finally, once again, be sure that your employees have access to all the guidelines and know how to properly use your identity.

4. Use tools to keep it controlled

The number one place where your visual identity can get out of control is in your employee emails. 30 emails are sent every day by the average employee, multiply this with the number of members at your organization, this represents a big risk for you to lost control of your visual identity.

Do these emails have your company logo? Brand color? Are their signatures all the same? If left up to the employee, your visual identity can quickly become degraded.

email signature brand identity

To ensure that it is consistent for each employee, you can use a solution like Letsignit to manage, create, and diffuse a harmonized signature branded with your visual identity.

You ensure that everyone is on the same page: they have the same logo, brand color, and correct job title displayed on this very important channel.

With Letsignit, pre-made templates are available with your brand color already integrated into them. All you must do is choose the one that best suits your company. Then, to diffuse them to your employees, it only takes one simple click. And, if there are ever any changes such as a new logo, color, or company address, it only takes one modification on the platform to implement company-wide.

Letsignit is already used by many to defend their visual identity:

“First, we want to give you a big thanks! Your tool is simply a genius!” – Alexandre Dennemont, EQUIP'oi
"Letsignit allows us to organize and simplify things. We’re able to offer an identical corporate image to everyone.” – François Simansour, RTM

Read RTM's full success story.

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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