Brand
September 20, 2020

The decisive moments when your visual identity counts

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
Brand identity and visual identity… if their link is immutable, it is even more so at specific moments for your company. Discover our tips and tricks to make sure there is never any confusion for your target audience!

Brand identity vs. visual identity

Before diving into the crucial moments for your visual identity, let’s take a look at the link that exists between your visual identity and your brand identity.

Your brand identity is the perception that your customers have of your company: your values, your positioning, your commitments, your value proposition, etc.

Your visual identity is the way in which you will succeed in expressing your brand identity through images: through a logo, typeface, colors, the layout and design of your website, your photographic universe, etc.

3 reasons why you should not neglect your visual identity

  1. Be quickly identified by your contacts
  2. Capture attention and make a lasting impression
  3. Demonstrate a real guarantee of quality and confidence

If your brand identity is not clearly defined, your customers will do it for you by analyzing the visual components of your communication media. And real consequences will be felt. Indeed, if the visual elements you use do not reflect your values, your audience will quickly see the inconsistency.

4 decisive moments for your visual identity

1. Throughout your business relationships

When you interact with your prospects, customers, or partners, your identity must be immediately identifiable. Whether it is your logo, your website, or more precisely your emails, your identity must be consistent and harmonized on all your communication channels.

Your email signatures, often overlooked because of their complexity to manage, are like your virtual business card. If they are not harmonized between all your employees, your company image is quickly degraded and you lose credibility. Our centralized and automated email signature solution helps you regain control over your brand image to ensure overall consistency, with ease!

2. When recruiting

When you are expanding and recruiting, your brand needs more than ever to maintain consistency across all your channels. Certainly, your visual identity is an indicator of your corporate culture. Neutral job offers without a visual identity miss an opportunity to showcase your brand. Displaying the right colors, images and logo will reinforce the positive perception of your company.

The email your candidate receives letting them know they got the job is equally as important and should have the same effect as the job offer. Be careful not to neglect your identity through your email signature, as it will kick off a good relationship between your new employee and your company.

email signature visual identity

3. During your events

Before, during, and after your physical or digital events, your visual identity must be harmonized so that a common thread links each step of the journey for your customers, prospects, and partners. Whether it is your communication banners (email signatures, social networks, displays) before your event, your stand on-site, or your satisfaction surveys, make sure not to neglect your brand identity!

4. When you change your graphic charter

Any change in your visual identity deserves a big announcement! Whether you want to give your image a facelift or your brand has merged with another, your audience is curious to discover your new look.

If you need to update all your communication materials and make sure that all your employees have access to them, also think about communicating this announcement in your email signatures.

At Letsignit, this is what we chose to do in the summer of 2018. In just a few clicks, we created and deployed new email signatures, more in line with our new graphic charter, and launched a new campaign to communicate this change of identity.

In the space of 2 months, our email signature banner was clicked more than 3500 times! Our curious recipients were eager to discover our new identity, our new website, and our new key messages.

Letsignit email signature visual identity

In the end, ensuring consistency between your brand identity and your visual identity is a long-term job, which is carried out throughout the year. To help you, tools such as Letsignit exist and have already helped thousands of companies.

Thanks to Letsignit, everyone has the same signature template, our brand image is standardized and relayed by the greatest number of people. There is no longer any doubt between our different entities. The information is all up to date, for all employees and the management of all subsidiaries is done centrally.
– Nicolas Brocq, Groupe Argus – See the 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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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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