Each day, an employee sends an average of 40 emails. Every external message is a touch point, a point of contact with potential clients. All these emails have a signature, generated automatically by email software or a signature management tool. And these signatures have become increasingly sophisticated in the past few years, with photographs, contact information… and CTAs.These CTAs are banners with clickable links embedded in the signature that allow you to redirect the recipient to a new offer, webinar, blog post, or video. In short, it's the perfect element for acquiring new prospects and nurturing old ones. But it still needs to be done intelligently. Here are some tips:
Whatever the purpose and content of your CTA, it must be easily associated with your company. In other words, keep to the same visual and written aesthetic by using the same color palette, font, icons, and tone as in other media. Ideally, the person viewing the banner should be able to associate it with your company. If they aren't familiar with it yet, the banner will act as their gateway to the brand.
The call-to-action can serve different purposes depending upon its content and the page to which the prospect is redirected. This purpose could be presenting a (new) commercial offer, seeking candidates for a position, or presenting recently published content. In all cases, you have to offer a preview: a product photo, a headline, a screenshot from social media, the position to be filled, etc. The email service or signature management software will offer various CTAs adapted to different types of content.
The signature is not the central element of an email—on the contrary. The reader won't devote more than a few seconds to it, hence the importance of choosing succinct but catchy wording. Avoid writing a whole paragraph about the history of your business or your new offer—the reader will ignore it. Limit yourself to a few words that will capture their attention.Some examples?
It all depends on your objective, the reader's place in the acquisition funnel, and the tone you usually employ.
To encourage readers to click on the signature banner, you can offer them a reward that's only valid for a certain window ("Take an extra 30% off... this week only!"). But be careful, this kind of message has to be calm and friendly—not try to "sell at any price." This threatens the prospect's trust and you risk being written off as a spammer. Another idea is to offer the reader targeted content: an article on inbound marketing for a CMO, a report on recruiting for HR teams, or a podcast about finance for a CFO.
The whole banner of your email signature is clickable, but placing an obvious button inside it will encourage the reader to click. It reminds them of buttons they encounter in the real world—in web design, this is called skeuomorphism. It's a way of hinting to the reader that they can click on the banner.
The CTA is an essential element of your signature, but it shouldn't get in the way of its primary role: introducing you. So give your name, title, and contact details first, then show the banner. The banner shouldn't take any more than 80% of the space devoted to your signature. Remember: email is a direct and personal means of communication with your contacts. Readers should be able to contact you and easily "position" you within the company.
If you communicate regularly with the same prospects, they're already familiar with your banner. They’ll take it for granted, making it less effective. To bring your banner back to life, remember to change it regularly, either with updates and news from the company, or seasonally—New Year's greetings, summer vacation, the holiday season, etc. A CTA in the form of a clickable banner in your email signature is a great way to nurture and build awareness without overthinking it, and also bypass algorithms. But there are ways to optimize its effect, encouraging the reader to click on it without insisting. To avoid having to think anymore about it, use an email signature management tool like Letsignit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
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.
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:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
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:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
