Let’s start with a disclaimer: there is no single martech stack that suits all companies and all needs. Depending on your expectations, audience, the notoriety and attractiveness of your company, some tools will be indispensable while others are more superfluous. A company that sells its products or services directly to the consumer (B2C), for example, does not use the same channels or the same techniques as another that only addresses companies and organizations (B2B); hence the different technological needs.
However, marketers have long dreamed of a five-legged sheep capable of meeting all their requirements. But some specific needs require specialized tools, which bring finesse and functional richness. Lead generation thus requires marketing automation solutions as well as more specialized tools to produce landing pages or to program a conversational agent.
The evolution of the market reflects this complexity: in a single decade, we’ve witnessed some 150 marketing solutions develop into... 8,000! This is a staggering increase, as evidenced by this other figure: of all the solutions presently on the market, one in five didn’t exist just two years ago. All of them are listed by Chief Martec in a map that gets more and more dizzying every year:
Whatever their situation, market, and strategic positioning, almost all companies have one thing in common: they send emails, and most often with a professional signature. It remains to transform these few lines (name, position, contact information…) into a new communication channel, a new marketing asset. How do you accomplish this? Simply by using a professional email signature solution.
With such a solution, the banner at the end of the email can present important news or promotions, an upcoming event or webinar, or even a real marketing campaign. The best way is a unified approach—at the end of every email, to all the recipients of all the company’s employees.
With more than 300 billion emails sent every day worldwide, the power of this channel cannot be ignored. However, you need to be equipped to implement this strategy both in a targeted manner and on a broad scale.
Companies and organizations should build their own visual identity and use it consistently across all media. This identity contributes to its notoriety and brand image in the broadest sense.
The email signature can contribute to this—as long as you don’t leave it up to each user and her or his individual tastes and preferences, different graphic-design and HTML skills, and simple personal habits. In that case, your email signatures could quickly turn into a hodge-podge free-for-all. Some forget to specify their position. Others adopt different department names, whether within the same department or among subsidiaries. All of this can be detrimental to your brand image. All your email signatures must remain standardized, attractive, and professional so your customers, partners, service providers, and prospects can all easily identify you.
To this end, choose a solution that brings you consistency, uniformity, and quality, all with a high level of personalization. Letsignit is designed to meet this challenge and help communication and marketing departments homogenize email signature templates. Editing a template is simple and productive: a “color picker” extracts the dominant color of your logo to automatically create email signatures in your image while a “designer” allows you to arrange the desired elements (function, contact information, and so on) with a simple drag and drop. No technical or graphic skills are required, and you can customize everything in a few clicks.
That’s it for the signature itself. The banners that come with them can be produced using SaaS solutions for creating visual content that are already part of the daily life of marketing and communication teams. Of course, such signatures won’t seem very useful if the deployment side is a chore. Out of the question to proceed in a manual way by sending signatures to employees that they would need to set up themselves. The key words here must be centralization and automation—two principles applied by Letsignit in order to offer a solution that can be activated directly from Microsoft 365 (Office 365) and that don’t require any action from the user.
Another major question that should guide your choice: how to allow email signatures to serve your business? An effective email signature solution opens the door to a new marketing channel that is as effective as it is economical. In order for this solution to really contribute to your objectives, simplicity is key: if deploying a new campaign is complicated or time-consuming, your teams will drop this channel. Make sure it takes just a few clicks to create a campaign, import the new banner and fill in the redirect link. Other settings should be just as quick, whether it’s setting up the campaign’s timing or priority level, or the people involved.
You can then easily turn all the emails sent by your employees into a targeted marketing campaign. Each theme has its own banner:
Hence the interest in relying on a SaaS collaboration tool—a key element of any marketing stack, to plan email signatures in a way that’s consistent with the company’s calendar and all campaigns.
To manage your marketing campaigns effectively, you want to be able to measure their effects in real time, to know their performance precisely. You can’t manage your marketing actions without a global performance measurement. Marketers have understood this and are increasingly turning to SaaS data warehouse solutions to collect and display data that is sometimes disparate.
The good news is that this performance is also available for email signatures. Indeed, the emails that each employee sends daily to your customers, partners or prospects benefit from a high credit with the recipient. The sender is a person, often already known, hence the high level of confidence in his message. Hence, the importance of creating an eye-catching, visually successful email signature that refers to interesting content.
So how to measure the performance of these signatures and their clickable banners? Letsignit offers dashboards that are both readable and accurate. A global view shows the number of clicks and clicked links, while a detailed view lists these clicks by user, signature and link. For a more detailed reading, you can use the advanced search: select a period, signature, or campaign and get corresponding performance. It’s also easy to filter this data to focus only on a particular group of users’ performance and GDPR compliant.
Now you know exactly which employees generate the most leads. You also know which of your calls-to-action (CTA) perform the best. It’s then easy to prioritize which banner performs best to boost your marketing campaigns even more—a real virtuous circle. Thanks to a simple “UTM” setting (variables inserted in the URL), you can also compare the performance of your email signatures with other channels for the campaign (emails, posts on social networks, content hosted by third-party sites, sponsored links and more). This data can then be consulted from within Google Analytics.
Make sure that the platform you choose offers this rare but particularly useful feature: the possibility of creating different email signatures depending on whether the recipient belongs to the company or not.
The interest is twofold. On the one hand, it allows you to offer external recipients (customers, prospects, suppliers, partners, etc.) the banners that are most likely to interest them – sales promotion, participation in a trade show, white paper to download, etc. And on the other hand, to offer the company’s employees banners on current corporate topics: invitation to an event, adoption of a new tool, reminder to take time off, internal training, mentoring program, internal survey, etc.
This internal banner is also the ideal place to promote a Wiki reminding employees about the company’s best practices and documentation on a daily basis or inviting them to an internal exchange forum, intranet, or social network. Gone are the days of constantly nagging employees about where they can find answers to their questions: now you regularly and automatically remind them of the source.
The advantage is that this information is delivered directly to employees, without cluttering up their inboxes (unlike a dedicated email or a traditional newsletter). Many employees don’t read internal newsletters in much detail, but they do pay attention to the latest news presented in an automatically updated banner. This saves time for your HR team as well as for the IT department or internal communication managers.
Few email signature management platforms are so open to dialogue and conversation. Yet we’re often tempted during long email exchanges to pick up the phone to settle a point quickly. With a solution like Letsignit, it’s even easier: just add a Teams button to your signature. Anyone who clicks on it will be able to get in touch with you and start a Teams conversation or call with one click. It’s a particularly innovative feature—perfect for asking a question, addressing an urgent issue, or requesting quick clarification or step-by-step guidance. What’s more, it’s useful for your internal colleagues as well as those outside the organization.
Also, to engage and encourage conversation, you can add a call-to-action to email signatures that link to employees’ agendas. This feature is relevant for all professions within the company, including sales representatives for attracting new prospects and customer service for remaining responsive.
This is a crucial point for large organizations: does the email signature platform allow delegation? For companies that have several thousand employees, it’s impossible to know which banner to assign to which person. This management must necessarily be delegated at a more local level, such as a BU or a country subsidiary. So turn to a solution that allows for fine-grained management and delegation of administration, to allocate the right email signatures to employees, depending on their location, department, function, and language.
Letsignit allows your different entities to open their own workspaces in order to create, assign, and manage email signatures autonomously, in just a few clicks. Simply segment your directory (by country, city, company, etc.) to create independent workspaces, then choose the administrator(s) who will manage those users’ signatures, and you’re done! The communication department can be sure the delegated administrators are using the right templates, and the IT department is also relieved of numerous exchanges with little added value.
Before choosing a SaaS platform, pay attention to the support it will offer you on a daily basis. Letsignit, for example, offers a very complete FAQ, available in three languages: French, English, and Spanish. It also offers phone support as well as a 24/7 chat to quickly answer your questions.
As you can see, a email signature management platform such as Letsignit offers advanced features. It’s enough to transform the few lines at the bottom of each email into a new marketing asset: a flexible, economical, efficient, and measurable channel. That’s powerful.
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.
