Brand
September 1, 2021

Brand visual identity: how much should be left up to the employee?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
When it comes to the visual identity of your brand, your employees are your best ambassadors. In fact, they are perceived as being 82% more credible and authentic as well as have 8 times more reach on social media when advocating your company. However, there are pitfalls to leaving your entire visual identity in your coworkers' hands.

The issues of leaving your visual identity solely up to your employees

First, when designing your visual identity, it is important that you create an image that is recognizable, bold, creative, and a perfect representation of your brand personality. After all, it is what sets you apart from your competitors and the element that sticks in your customers’ minds.

Therefore, it is important that it stays consistent – your customers should always know what to expect from you and can easily identify you. If too many of your employees have control over this image, you will certainly run into inconsistencies.

Take your employees’ emails for example. If each employee is left to insert the brand visual identity into their email signatures themselves, would they all look the same? The answer is most likely no. This is a common issue and one of the main ways companies hurt their visual identity.

Take the example of Pace Center for Girls who used Letsignit to manage and unify their email signatures. Before turning to this solution, their employees’ email signatures had mismatched logos, random formatting, and personal “quotes of the month.” The result was unprofessional outgoing emails and a negative impact on their visual identity.

No clear guidelines can lead to employees’ own interpretation

Just as we mentioned before, if left to your employees, your visual identity can quickly become inconsistent. To combat this, it is important that you keep every employee on the same page. A clear set of rules and guidelines should be shared and always accessible. Think of making this information digital so that even when your employees are not at the office, they have a way of finding it.

It is not always easy to get this information to your employees. However, via your email, a channel your whole company uses, this can be easily achieved. Think of adding a banner to your employees’ email signature to internally promote the location of where they can find the visual identity guidelines. Likewise, by having each of their signatures branded with your visual identity, they have a direct view of the identity, every day.

This is also critical in case your company changes its visual identity or any other important information. With an email signature solution like Letsignit, it only takes one click to update this information for every member of the company.

internal communication ebook

Your visual identity could be used unprofessionally

Maybe your employees used your logo for personal use and the message they attached to it was not professional. This can have dire consequences on your brand. It is thus important for you to let your employees know when and how they can use your visual identity. Along with your guidelines, add a disclaimer which explains that your visual identity should be used for work purposes only and if they wish to use it outside of work it will need approval first.

The perfect harmony between your visual identity and your employees

Of course, you should have trust in your employees to carry your visual identity proudly. However, having marketing resource management (MRM) or digital asset management (DAM) tools implemented and overseen by your Brand Manager adds that extra layer of security in guaranteeing it is used professionally and methodically.

A great tool is Pickit, which allows you to share images, templates, and documents with your employees. With this solution, you can also track the performance and optimize how your visual identity is used. Your customers will always know who you are and what your brand personality is.

Another tool is Letsignit, which allows you to manage your employees’ email signatures and keep track as well as defend your visual identity daily. With this SaaS solution, you can guarantee that every employee is 100% properly representing your brand in an efficient way.

Letsignit has already been used by many international companies to help them in this task:

“We are captivated by Letsignit for how quickly the users adopted it and the intuitiveness of the platform.” – Thomas Clauw, Rouge Gorge
“Letsignit is really handy! I can update all email signatures in a few clicks without having to ask all users to change it themselves.” – Céline Brailly, Zumaplast
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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