Marketing
September 25, 2023

2023 Report: Branding & Email Signatures in Enterprise B2B

By
Jessica Runnion
Senior Demand Gen Manager
We surveyed 100 marketing leaders at B2B enterprises about their brand and how it is affected by their company-wide email signatures. Check out the infographic and our analysis below.

What's the connection between your brand and email signatures?

Your company’s brand is ever-present, whether it’s in a perfectly crafted campaign or on the lips of your customers. As marketers, that can give us nearly endless potential contained only by our own creativity (okay, okay, and budget).

Take this summer’s blockbuster hit movie, Barbie. It was inescapable thanks to its reported $150 million marketing budget that included partnerships with Progressive, Xbox, Burger King, fashion brands, and a real life Barbie Dreamhouse on AirBnB. It generated social currency and memes – even memes about the marketing team!

But on the flip side, the omnipresence can be intimiadating – you simply cannot control your brand image everywhere. We’ve all seen a well-intentioned campaign go wrong and turn into a PR nightmare.

You can keep track of your company mentions with social and brand monitoring tools, such Mentionlytics, Qualtrics, Hootsuite, or free Google Alerts.

But first, the best course of action is to ensure 100% consistency in the brand presence you CAN control – your website, email marketing, organic social, internal and external communications, etc.

One channel that has become increasingly relevant is one-to-one business emails.

  • Email is the primary business communication method across all age groups.
  • Over 90% of the US population uses email.
  • Email is the preferred communication method for remote & hybrid workers.*

In contrast to mass eblasts or newsletters, 1:1 emails carry a sense of authenticity and personalization.

Messages from your employees are 82% more credible than from the brand.** Therefore, recipients are more likely to open and consider the information in these emails because they are not ads.

The opportunity in one-to-one emails are “hidden” right in your email signatures.

Many businesses overlook the opportunity in their emails, but there are potentially millions of impressions in this simple channel.

Consider that the average employee sends 30-40 business emails per day. If your organization has 5,000 employees, that’s 3.5 million impressions per month!

How to easily implement at your company.

It’s clear that email signatures are considered an important part of brand presence. But the challenge is HOW to manage this channel, especially at large enterprises.

  • 1 in 4 said 1:1 emails are a top 3 branding & comms channel
  • 45% said their company-wide signatures are inconsistent – with 25% saying they are “anarchy”!
  • Over half said they TRY to utilize signatures for marketing, but have difficulties

Sending out a template and asking your employees to manually update each of their signatures doesn’t work with hundreds or thousands of employees. The results are inconsistency, broken links, distorted images, and ultimately a damaged brand.

“We recognize the complexity in managing email signatures at scale, with multiple departments, subsidiaries, global locations, languages, and varied goals,” says Capucine Roche, CEO, Letsignit.
“This is why Letsignit was created to be so simple. Once it’s securely synced with your directory, updates are automatic and seamless for end users. The drag-and-drop designer is easy, and you can schedule out your campaigns. Now, your team can focus on creativity and results.”

Best practices, inspiration, and use cases.

In addition to brand consistency, email signatures can drive business results company-wide. Consider the variety of internal or external messages your company needs to promote for each department:

Upcoming webinar

New eBook

CSR initiatives

Hiring fair

Security news

As we learned in the report, most businesses that are using email signatures for marketing promote events and webinars; internal communications; and awards and news announcement. But there are plenty of other use cases. Discover our eBook to inspire you!

The results and ROI you can expect.

In our previous study of 749 marketing leaders, we learned email signatures can increase brand awareness by 34%, clicks/leads/traffic by 25%, and employee engagement by 34%.

But how does that translate to your business?

Schedule a demo with our team to see our ROI Calculator in action, with your own numbers and KPIs – including potential advertising value in your signatures. Or try it yourself below!

*Statista: Email Usage in the US

**Sociabble: 10 Employee Advocacy Statistics that Prove Its Effectiveness

About the author
Jessica is the Senior Demand Gen Manager at Letsignit. She leads marketing campaigns, social, events, anything and everything else to grow Letsignit in the United States.
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.

Frequently
asked questions
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Looking for a tool to manage your email signatures?

Letsignit allows you to create, manage, and deploy email signatures for all your employees in just a few clicks.
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