Marketing
November 16, 2021

Which SaaS solutions help generate leads?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
Marketing automation has become essential to increase your campaigns’ efficiency and help you reach your business objectives. It can be defined as a series of actions designed to optimize lead generation and their progression in the funnel. So, how can you successfully generate leads, and with which tools?

Lead generation: guiding principles

Generate, nurture, and convert leads. That’s what lead generation is all about. What’s a lead? Any person who has expressed an interest in your company’s products or services: request for information by phone or via your website, download of one of your documents, registration for a webinar or sales event, underlying signals, such as frequent visits to your product pages.
Lead generation is about attracting potential customers with relevant offers and content. Once you arouse their interest and they form a positive opinion, these prospects can be contacted directly.

Lead generation: how to proceed?

The final objective is to make a sale. The company achieves this in several steps:

  1. Generation of contacts through various traffic sources;
  2. Nurturing, or educating these contacts (better understanding their needs and guiding them in the search for appropriate solutions);
  3. Evaluation as a “marketing qualified lead.” Once the lead has shown enough interest in a company’s offerings, a company representative can call them to offer their services, with an initial personalized contact with the insights gathered. This information can come from a form filled out to download an ebook, watch a webinar or listen to a podcast, test a tool or trial version, and more.
  4. All this is called the conversion funnel. Several models exist; this funnel model has the merit of simplicity:

Funnel marketing
  1. 1st Step: TOFU (stands for TOp of FUnnel).
    This is your company’s first contact with a potential prospect. You have the opportunity to “introduce” yourself to this future buyer. To do this, you have blog articles, posts on social networks, videos, and podcasts, etc.
  2. 2nd Step: MOFU (Middle of the Funnel)
    Prospects already know you and are genuinely interested in your company and its offerings. You need to continue to nurture that interest, through content such as white papers, webinars, and case studies.
  3. 3rd Step: BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel)
    A relationship is established, your random visitors have now become prospects, trust your company, and need a final nudge before becoming customers. Trials, demos, and sharing best practices are now your allies.

Before the development of the web and digital marketing, brands used to attract attention by posting themselves at an audience hub and shouting as loud as possible. Today, customers first seek information on their own. The first commercial contact is later, so a relationship must be established beforehand and then cultivated. Content is now the key to this. But the right content has to reach the right audience at the right time.

Such is the vocation of marketing automation solutions: to help brands orchestrate scenarios that move contacts through all the stages of the conversion funnel.

The automation specialists

The marketing automation market today has a number of large, well-known, established players who offer software in SaaS mode. Among them:

Hubspot

Hubspot board

Hubspot has several modules for marketing automation as well as CRM and content management (website, blog). With ergonomics known to be “user friendly,” Hubspot is very popular with medium-sized companies and especially with startups.

Marketo

Another key player in the automation market, Marketo, is an all-in-one solution that includes lead management and qualification, email automation, and analysis throughout the funnel. Its functional richness and positioning lead it to be adopted more by companies well familiar with the subject or by large accounts—especially when the latter use tools by Adobe, which acquired Marketo in 2018.

Pardot

Pardot Board

Edited by Salesforce, Pardot is unsurprisingly often adopted by companies that are already customers of the editor for its CRM solution. This has the advantage of simplifying communication between marketing automation and CRM. Like Hubspot and Marketo, Pardot automates marketing scenarios to achieve the best possible qualification of contacts.

Emailing solutions for marketing automation

Marketing automation is not the exclusive domain of these specialists and historical players. Over time, emailing solutions have gradually expanded their scope and functions to become more like automation solutions. Such is the case for the integrated marketing platform Mailchimp.

Marketing automation applied to the email signature

Although marketing automation solutions have been developed over the years to cover more and more contact points (landing pages, chatbots), in practice, none of them is exhaustive. In other words, marketers can’t escape the “best of breed” (i.e. the combination of several solutions) to work on the entire path of their prospects or to take advantage of communication channels that are not yet fully exploited.

The email signature also figures among these channels.

Automating management of these signatures makes it possible to use them as a marketing channel in their own right—thanks to clickable banners that enhance your content and campaigns. However, to achieve this, companies must assure strong integration with environments such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace to match the company’s organization and to guarantee a productive orchestration.

Animation clicks generated by email signatures

This is the role of a SaaS solution like Letsignit, which has its place in the marketing stack to help marketers deliver the right content, at the right time, and to the right person.

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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