Sigstr is excited to announce our plan to invest $1.4M in order to create 100 jobs right here in Indianapolis over the next 5 years, thanks to the award of $1M in EDGE Tax Credits. We’ve grown from 1 to 20 employees in just the last 12 months, and plan to hire over 100 more individuals across all areas of the business in the next 5 years as we aggressively expand operations to support our team and market opportunity.
The Sigstr team is incredibly grateful to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) for supporting our growth in such a significant way. In the words of Sigstr’s Founder and CEO, Dan Hanrahan,
“Employee email represents a tremendous, and largely untapped, opportunity for marketers, and we are just getting started unlocking that potential. We can’t imagine being better positioned for the future, and the decision to scale our business in Indianapolis is a huge part of our competitive advantage.”
We now serve over 175 customers and we’ve built a team of 20+ professionals, dedicated to helping marketers leverage the power of employee email signatures. We are continuing to aggressively hire top-level talent to support all functions of the business. For more information on open positions or to learn how your organization can put employee email signatures to use, visit: https://www.sigstr.com/company.
Interested in reading the entire press release?Access it here.
And a big “THANK YOU” to the local Indianapolis media for helping us share our news throughout the day!
I blankly stared at the woman who just asked me that question. The Dan she was referring to is Sigstrs CEO and Founder, Dan Hanrahan.
This was during a morning coffee networking opportunity. Our conversation up until this point had been fairly standard and surface level. Where are you from? Where did you go to school? What did you major in? Did you see that last episode of Game of Thrones?
This new question threw me for a loop. How do I describe what its like working for Dan and being a part of the Sigstr team? For some reason, it reminded me of a conversation that I had with my father when I was 14.
One of my dads closest lifelong friends has been his high school baseball coach. When it dawned on me that Coach B was quite a bit older than my father, I asked my dad about their friendship. Sort of taken back by the question, he paused before going into this explanation:
Coach B is the kind of coach that made you work hard. If you committed to working hard, he was your biggest advocate. If you worked hard for him, he worked hard for you. He is the kind of coach that makes you want to run through walls for him. It made him not only a great coach, but a great guy and now a great friend.
This recollection brings me back to the moment when I was asked, So whats it like working for Dan? Dan is the type of CEO that makes you want to run through walls for him. His passion and voracity for making Sigstr successful in-turn impresses a passion and voracity to work hard in all of us.
Personal Goals + Sigstr Goals
At the start of my career at Sigstr, Dan had me write down all my goals for this year, the next 3 years and beyond. He asks each new employee to do this within their first few days at Sigstr. We met at Patachou (which if you have NOT been, I highly recommend the Cuban Breakfast) and exchanged our printed list of goals. We talked through each point extensively – Dan genuinely interested in each point on my goal list, no-matter how ludicrous the ambition (i.e. walking the red carpet). Dans ending note on our goal conversation was that Sigstr would enable us to reach those goals.
I left our breakfast with a newfound sense of confidence that these goals were within reach. Any time I was feeling downtrodden by my (then) Business Development role (Business Development being a fancy term conjured to sugarcoat the number of prospect calls and emails being sent to gauge interest), Dan would bring up one of my goals. He would remind me that everything that I was doing was helping me get one step closer to my goal. Every time we reach milestones here at Sigstr, we are greeted by an alarmingly forceful high five or beer (or in my case an Angry Orchard).
Working Hard + Celebrating Achievements
Dan expects hard work. He wants Sigstr to succeed and help marketers save time and energy managing employee signatures for email. He wants Sigstr to give us the means to accomplish all the goals we shared with him and more. At the same time, Dan also expects us to participate in Friday late afternoon Beer:30s. He has one rule about out of office company bonding and it is that each adventure must end at a local Irish pub, which is met with no complaints (and if you want to understand why Dan is so passionate about Irish pubs, read this post).
Another Sigstr team member, Kolby, recently wrote a blog post that reiterates our work hard, play hard mentality:Life at a Tech Start-Up: Three Truths and One Lie. As said best, The benefit, or perhaps consequence, of being part of a small team is that everyone is expected to contribute in a big way.
We all work hard for our big wins, and celebrate when we accomplish them. Dan lives by the age old boss man proverb, if youre a man by night, youre a man by day. I can only interpret this as a more sophisticated way of saying you can play hard if you work hard.
The Sigstr team is growing and were looking for more rockstars to join our work hard, play hard culture. If youre looking for an opportunity in a high-growth Marketing SaaS company, wed love to meet you. Learn more about our opportunities at: www.sigstr.com/company
Our mission at Sigstr is to make marketers look amazing. We’re hard at work unlocking the incredible marketing ROI in employee email, and we wanted to share 3 breakthroughs you can use for your email signature template:
Analytics
You’ll notice “Sigstr Views” have replaced “Displays” in your campaign analytics. Sigstr Views will not tally a view when an employee composes a message, yielding more meaningful campaign impression counts and click-through-rates.
3rd Party Integrations
We realize that individual customer and prospect interactions go beyond corporate email. That’s why we’ve made 3rd party integrations a top priority and are proud to feature new partnerships with Salesloft and HubSpot. Here’s what you need to know:
The SalesLoft Integration enhances your marketing efforts within the SalesLoft Cadence application by appending a Sigstr signature and campaign to your Cadence email communications.
Your input determines what integrations we build next. Drop us a note if you have suggestions!
Automatic Installation
Sigstr has released an automatic installation method for Gmail users: Gmail Signature Sync. The new process removes the need for employees to install Sigstr individually. Now, the Sigstr administrator has the ability to push campaign and signature updates to each employee’s email signature template through the application portal. Watch the two minute video to learn how you can start leveraging this powerful functionality!
We are committed to making Sigstr an invaluable component to your marketing strategy. Feel free to send us feedback about your experience and let us know what kind of features you would like to see added. All opinions are welcomed!
Thank you for believing in our mission and for being a supporter of Sigstr! If you’d like to stay in the loop with announcements like these, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter!
The Next Web, commonly referred to as TNW, has been sharing, inventing and advancing tech developments since 2006. The website offers a wealth of information for tech companies of all shapes and sizes, and has become a trusted source for how-tos, tech updates, and much more.
We recently ran across a TNW article, authored by Ritika Puri, entitled, “5 content distribution channels you might be overlooking”. In today’s B2B SaaS world – and for many tech companies in general – content has become king. For companies to survive and grow in today’s market, they must be seen as trusted advisors and thought leaders in their space, producing genuine content that helps the user or executive not only understand the product or service, but the industry as a whole.
According to a recent study conducted by The Guardian, 41% of people (and 33% of millennials, those aged 18-34 years old) claim to feel overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of choice on the internet. According to another study, the average attention span in 2012 was eight seconds. Even goldfish are easier to engage. Their attention spans? Nine seconds. In today’s digital work with so much content being produced by thousands of companies each day, the difficult part of content marketing (besides, of course, creating incredible content in the first place), is finding channels where your content will be noticed by your target audience.
In this TNW article, Ritika outlines 5 content distribution channels you might be missing. Ready to check them out?
1. Sales and Customer Success teams
According to Ritika, “Client managers and deal-closers are the crucial link between your company and the outside world. These team members are constantly in the field, solving your customers’ most crucial problems.”
“Sales reps and account managers spend the bulk of their days building relationships and fielding inbound questions,” says Ritika. She explains that content can help by providing the ultimate conversation starter.
Marketers can work with their companies’ sales masterminds to:
Pinpoint content ideas from incoming questions.
Distribute material: Build content into ongoing conversations such as the email signature (which we’ll touch on in the next “Email” section) — this process facilitates relationship-building at scale.
2. Email
Company blogs are everywhere, so it’s highly unlikely that your audience will be checking your blog each day for updates.
But according to Ritika, email is an invaluable channel for reaching — and engaging these audiences 1:1. “When you publish a blog post, send your audience a short and sweet notification,” she explains. “You can monitor peaks in unsubscribe rates to avoid spamming people.”
There’s no need to worry about visuals or an over-the-top newsletter. Just prioritize the basics in the form of:
Your great content.
A link back to the entire article on your block.
Useful Tip: In addition to using email to communicate content, also think about the email signature. Email signatures have been getting much more attention over the past year as marketers and companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to see email signatures examples as an important marketing asset. The employee email signature is quite possibly the #1 place where your company’s brand is viewed most often – maybe even more than your company website!
Consider this statistic: on average, an employee will send approximately 10,000 emails each year, so a company of 100 employees will send 1M emails per year and a company of 500 employees will send 5M emails a year! Can you see how this channel can play an important role in your marketing mix? According to a recent article by OfficeTeam, it may be one of the most overlooked marketing channels.
Here’s one of many email signatures examples that can be found promoting content:
3. Content syndication
“Is your blog audience relatively small?” Ritika asks. “As a new content marketer, you may feel overwhelmed by the challenge of building a reader-base from the ground up.”
Ritika explains that one solution is to amplify the reach of your content by syndicating it with other blogs or media channels:
Step 1:Build relationships with relevant blogs, brands, or publishers
Step 2:Pitch content regularly
Step 3:Return the favor – exchange value for value
Ritika explains that, “It’s important not to syndicate just for the sake of getting your post out there, but target it to the audience that will benefit most from your content.”
4. Good old fashioned networks
Don’t have a social media following? Don’t worry about it. “It’s likely that you’re involved with organizations — alumni groups, business associations, or networking events — that are distribution hubs,” says Ritika.
One solution is to reach out to these connections and ask them to support your content via social media. “Make sure to emphasize why this content would be valuable or inspirational to the group’s audience,” she says.
5. LinkedIn influencers
LinkedIn recently released its influencer program to the public. Today, it’s possible for any member to self-publish, syndicate, and distribute content on the platform, or even use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates as a paid content promotion channel.
Here’s a recent example of how Sigstr uses the LinkedIn Updates features to share content:
The Major Takeaway:
Find new channels for content distribution that aren’t widely used by others in your industry. If you simply promote your content the way every other company does, it will be nearly impossible to ensure your content is noticed.
Thanks again to Ritika for sharing great examples of how companies can cut through the content marketing clutter.
For more email signatures examples, check out our latest resource below:
As someone who spent the first several years of her career working in a corporate cubicle, the idea of joining a start-up was intriguing. Like many, I wondered if Hollywood’s depiction of the quintessential start-up had any truth to it. In fact, the week before I joined Sigstr, I remember watching an episode of Silicon Valley and thinking it couldn’t possibly be realistic. As it turns out, the start-up perception isn’t that far from reality. Read on to discover three truths and one lie the world has been told about life at a tech start-up.
TRUTH: Offices are open and casual
The Sigstr office is completely open, adorned with a bright green wall, trendy artwork, and an assortment of desks that are frequently rearranged to make room for our growing team. The thought of cubicles lining our walls is almost laughable. Personal space is not a concept we are particularly familiar with.From my seat, I can easily communicate with anyone in any department. While distractions are frequent, we benefit immensely from the increased level of collaboration.
Scattered about the office, there are a number of items that give the place “character”.In the last few months, almost the entire team has invested in standing desks – partially because we care about out health and partially to fit in. We also own a basketball hoop, popcorn machine, nose whistle, and desk elliptical. Our attire? Take a peak in the dev room and there’s a 100% chance at least one person is wearing a tech tee. In short, we have mastered the “tech” look and are proud of it.
TRUTH: Business is fast-paced and ever-changing
The biggest adjustment I had when moving from a large corporation to a start-up was the pace. Change is rapid at Sigstr, especially in relation to the technology behind our email signature generator. Instead of having to tell customers features won’t be available until next year, we make monumental improvements to the Sigstr application every single day. It’s exciting, overwhelming, and highly satisfying.
To keep up with our evolving email signature generator, employee roles and the Sigstr business model constantly adjust as well. We all wear multiple hats. For example, I’m a Customer Success Manager, but I frequently join sales calls, create product marketing content, and write articles for our blog. As a Sigstr employee, there are endless opportunities to gain experience in a variety of areas.
TRUTH: Every employee matters
The benefit, or perhaps consequence, of being part of a small team is that everyone is expected to contribute in a big way. In a large company, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. At a start-up, every employee has a voice and every individual has the potential to make a lasting impression. It may sound like a line out of an HR pamphlet, but at Sigstr, everyone matters.
To drive the point home, employee impact isn’t limited to each individual’s functional area. There has been multiple scenarios where I’ve suggested application updates to our Product Team and they’ve taken my opinion into consideration. There’s no red tape. No bureaucracy. Just team members working together to create a better email signature generator.
LIE: It’s all fun and games
At the end of last quarter, Sigstr hosted our first ever Sigstr Field Day. The company spent half of a Friday playing whiffle ball and other miscellaneous games. It was glorious. That evening, I told a friend about my day at work. She rolled her eyes and joked about the “difficulty” of my job. While the teasing was lighthearted, the problem was that my friend didn’t know the whole story. Sigstr Field Day was created in celebration of the fact that we had exceeded quarterly goals. Ironically, the day was the RESULT of hard work and dedication. The Sigstr team may have a lot of fun, but the company’s success is always our number one priority.
Beyond the hard work, there’s also a high level of uncertainty in working for a start-up. Sigstr has proven it is a viable business, however, there is a certain level of ambiguity in ongoing strategy and direction. Hard-hitting questions are asked every day. What’s our next step? What features are the most important? Are we targeting the right people? Should we go in a new direction? As a result, big decisions are made that impact the whole team. Anxiety certainly ensues. The only solace is to have faith in the vision and experience of our leadership team.
At the end of the day, working for a start-up is an incredibly challenging, yet rewarding experience. I feel confident in saying that all of my teammates feel lucky to be contributing to the success and growth of Sigstr and our email signature generator. For anyone looking to work hard, diversify their skill-set, and make an impact, the start-up lifestyle might just be the golden ticket.
Interested in joining the Sigstr team? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions here.
B2B Growth is a podcast dedicated to helping B2B executives achieve explosive growth. Run by Sweet Fish Media, which executes B2B sales processes on companies’ behalf, the B2B Growth Podcast hits on relevant topics including “Email List Building or Segmentation?”, “Sales Call Horror Stories”, “Account-based Intelligence”, and many more topics important to B2B executives.
Did you know the average employee sends 10,000 emails per year? That’s 28 emails per day, or 28 daily impressions that prospects, customers, and users are having with your brand. Email signature etiquetteis massively important and an easy win to tackle. In this post, we’ll highlight some of Dan’s key points, but be sure to check out the entire podcast to learn more. Let’s hear what Dan has to say:
How is Email Signature Marketing Defined?
According to Dan, “Anything in terms of marketing starts with the audience and reach. The most frequent touchpoint prospects and customers have with a brand is through the email channel. The average employee sends at least 28 emails a day, so an organization of just 100 employees will send about 1M emails to their most important audience. And what does every email include? An email signature.”
Dan explains that there are 2 critical components to email signature etiquette:
An on-brand experience across every employee, which includes traditional information like name, company, and contact information.
A meaningful call-to-action that takes advantage of the white space that’s underutilized to promote your company’s most important initiatives. Marketers can inject content into that area that gives them the ability to update employee email signatures without bugging employees and taking them away from their day-to-day work.
Awesome Customer Stories
SalesLoft: “One of the best use cases for Sigstr has traditionally been event marketing,” explained Dan. “As SalesLoft was preparing for its upcoming annual conference, all employees included a Sigstr Campaign which promoted Rainmaker. The team was already pouring their hearts into the event, so it was easy to integrate Sigstr in the marketing mix.”
Lesson.ly: “The hard part about sales is getting the attention of prospects,” Dan explained. “Often times Lesson.ly doesn’t even meet the customer’s team in-person before they come on board. Lesson.ly has an incredible culture that’s fun, energetic, and pretty unique, but often times their customers don’t get to experience that. The Sigstr Campaign for Lesson.ly includes a fun ‘Meet the Team’ image, which points to a blog post that talks about the Lesson.ly culture and how important that is to their mission. Just a few weeks after launching the Campaign, the sales team already had 3 companies raise their hand for that initial conversation, as tracked via the Sigstr Campaign. From those 3 opportunities alone, the team was able to track $30,000 in new business dollars generated by the campaign.”
How Can the Entire Company Become Marketers?
“At Sigstr, we believe each role across the company has a marketing responsibility,” explained Dan. “Whether you’re on the HR team recruiting for a career fair or on the sales team promoting a new video or case study, everyone is involved. With Sigstr, the marketer can determine which Campaigns should be associated to which groups or departments so employees always have a Sigstr Campaign promoting something they care about.”
What Advice Do You Have For Companies Experimenting?
“Start experimenting now, whether you invest in a tool or not,” recommended Dan. “Why not try standardizing your email signature etiquette and including an image and call-to-action? First and foremost, find out if it works for your company. The best thing you can do is experiment and try out various Campaigns.”
Click herefor the full rundown of the podcast (including the recording).
HubSpot has built an amazing business around the power of inbound. The power of creating helpful content to power inbound leads. Today, marketers pour their hearts (and budgets) into creating incredible content, and Sigstr injects that content into your employee email signature – the most frequent point of interaction with customers and prospects.
Back in April, I wrote a blog post about how to pump Sigstr metrics into HubSpot to measure the overall impact a Sigstr campaign has on your company’s objectives. Objectives like driving more traffic to your website or increasing exposure to a specific piece of content. And then even generating more leads for a Marketing campaign.
Yes, I am a Sigstr team member (so I may be biased in that regard), but first and foremost I’m a digital marketer. From that perspective, I can tell you this is something I use everyday because of its impact.
At Sigstr, we’re all about making life easy. We use employee email – which reaches a higher volume of targeted contacts than any other medium – and then take advantage of otherwise unused real estate inside, your marketing is organically exposed to thousands more impressions. And the metrics in Sigstr measure the effectiveness, so you can make changes based on science, not on “feeling.” Pumping your Sigstr metrics into HubSpot helps you, as a marketer, see how your prospects, contacts or even current customers are interacting with your brand through employee email.
It’s amazing what my team and I’ve been able to do by using Sigstr + HubSpot together. After mentioning this to our Product team, they realized the overlap between the two and decided to productize it.
In my first post, I gave you a quick rundown on how to manually connect Sigstr to HubSpot. Now, it’s even easier and the connection can be made in Sigstr!
Here’s how it works:
1. After clicking “Create Campaign”, uploading my image, and appropriately labeling my Sigstr campaign, I then clicked on “Connect To Platform”.
2. After clicking “Connect To Platform,” a box popped up asking if I would like to connect to HubSpot.
3. Then, I logged into my HubSpot account and clicked “Grant Access.”
4. Now I can see HubSpot goodness flowing right into Sigstr. In the Sigstr campaign, I can access the full list of landing pages I’ve created in HubSpot.
5. Rather than manually copying/pasting in my HubSpot landing page URL, it automatically populates within my Sigstr campaign.
Remember that image of the funnel at the top of this post? Here are the first two parts. Track total email signature displays and clicks within Sigstr.
Track unique landing page visits, contacts gained, and customers won within HubSpot. With these three metrics, along with your metrics in Sigstr, you have a full picture of how prospects, contacts and customers are interacting with your professional email signature format and just how much impact this can have as an additional digital marketing channel.
The awesome people at HubSpot preach the importance of landing pages and how each one should be connected to a HubSpot campaign – which is what we do here at Sigstr. And so, by connecting my Sigstr campaign to the right HubSpot landing page, I can connect the two and see the impact of employee email signatures within a specific HubSpot campaign.
Investing in simple tools that help make your life easier is important to digital marketers. We like things easy, efficient and effective. So tracking metrics to prove that it’s working is important, too. (And effective marketing makes you look good in front of your boss.)
Sigstr helps you (easily) manage your professional email signature format and opens up a new channel to promote your content. From attracting visitors to closing customers, HubSpot brings your entire marketing funnel together. Put these two together and some pretty cool things can happen.
Want to see more? Here’s a tutorial video that walks you through each step:
The average worker will send more than 10,000 emails this year. And next year. And probably more the one after that. That means your company of 200 employees is sending over two million emails each year. Usually, when you’re doing something that often, you want to make sure you’re actually doing it right. But as we work to hone our messaging – adding the right amount of humor paired with an amped up value prop – we’re forgetting to optimize one crucial piece: the employee email signature.
This is one of the most visible representations of your brand – likely even more so than your company’s website. So why are we allowing our this digital real estate to include cheesy quotes and bad avatar photos?
Our Role in Marketing is Changing
We’re creating ideas (on and offline), executing them through fruition, measuring our analytics, optimizing our programs and improving conversion rates. And if that’s not enough on our plate, now we’re tasked with managing how every employee across our company represents the brand image we’ve worked so hard to create. And because social media – especially Facebook – is so pervasive, that responsibility seems to increase daily.
To this fusion of responsibility, add a touch of technology which have made it easy for employees to share your branded messages. One-to-one human email, for instance, has been on the up and up for years. Last year, more than 215.3 billion emails were exchanged every single day. And research predicts we’ll be exchanging 257.7 billion emails a day by 2020. The email signature is more important and more valuable than ever.
Proper Etiquette for Your Email Signature
In your workplace tech toolbox, your email signature is often taken for granted. So many first impressions are made through email, and your email signature is your chance to shape that impression. OfficeTeam’s overview, Email Signature Etiquette: The Good, The Bad & The Unnecessary, sits on par with our own best practices.
The Good
According to business etiquette expert Jacqueline Whitmore, a sender’s contact information is the most important part of the email signature. Your recipient needs the ability to quickly access ways to reach you. And they need direction on what it is you want them to do. To ensure your information is always available include these:
Your full name
Your phone number (office or mobile)
A single, clear call-to-action
The following information is also helpful, but not always necessary:
Your company name & website
Your firm’s mailing address
Social media links to either your company or personal accounts
When it comes to your email signature, less is often more. Nix an abundance of flare from your signature to cut clutter and make your information standout and readily available. Here are a few elements to cut from your signature:
Inconsistent fonts and colors: Avoid too many colors and font styles. An abundance of varying typography in your email signature can undermine your credibility as a serious professional.
Inspirational quotes: Inspirational quotes are a fantastic way to show your personality – on your Pinterest board. Some may give off a conflicting message from your brand’s stance, while others just simply make you cringe after reading it.
Additional messages: “Please consider the environment before printing this email,” is a nice sentiment, but it just clogs up a space you could be using to inspire your recipient to act. And it doesn’t do a ton of good when someone’s reading a print of your email. Not to mention, the default, “Sent from my iPhone,” signature is showing your recipient you’re just too lazy to proofread.
Sigstr turns your company’s email into a targeted marketing channel that help drive event registrations, distribute content, execute account-based marketing, and more. Side note: If you book a quick demo with one of our team members, we’ll send you some sweet Sigstr sticker goodness.
Sales development representatives, sales reps, and account executives rely on email more than any other role in your organization. If your sales or SDR team uses SalesLoft Cadence for email communications, you may want to consider an integration with Sigstr.
SalesLoft Cadence drives incredible efficiencies and visibility to the SDR process. Sigstr helps you get more out of Cadence and every email your employees send. As with any email, Cadence messages often close with an email signature. Sigstr ensures every email signature in Cadence, Gmail, or Outlook is consistent and includes a demand generation call-to-action. Analytics within Sigstr help you see how prospects and contacts are interacting with your email signature examples.
The best part? The Sigstr + SalesLoft integration requires minimal configuration. Watch the video below to see how the magic happens:
Through the Sigstr API, SalesLoft aligns to your Sigstr account and user profiles. Using the user email address as the common identifier, SalesLoft applies an individual signature to his/her SalesLoft signature settings.
To enable the integration, first navigate to your SalesLoft settings. Then, to your integrations tab. Once in the integrations section, simply use the toggle button to activate the users. Once active, each user’s SalesLoft Cadence signature settings will automatically be updated with a Sigstr signature and campaign.
As you can see, this integration can make your email sending incredibly efficient. Personalized and sincere emails are key when communicating with prospects. Lesson.ly, a learning management platform, uses this integration as an integral part of their process. Sending hundreds of email per day through SalesLoft Cadence, Lesson.ly harnesses the power of Sigstr with no added effort. Once a Sigstr campaign is created, the administrator applies it to one or all members of Lesson.ly’s sales team, and the campaigns and signature instantly appear in Cadence.
Today, Sigstr announced significant advances to its product announcing three important new product capabilities, including:
First, with central deployment capabilities, the install process removes the need for employees to install the application individually. The Sigstr admin now has the ability to push updates via the application portal.
Second, multi-brand companies can now utilize different signature templates for various subsets of employees now allowing several signatures to be simultaneously active across the organization.
Finally, Sigstr’s SalesLoft integration enhances marketing efforts within the SalesLoft Cadence application by appending a Sigstr Signature and Sigstr Campaign to Cadence email communications.
“Building an exceptional and easy-to-use product is incredibly important to the Sigstr team,” said Sam Smith, VP of Product at Sigstr. “Our customers are replacing their manual and time consuming ways of updating signatures, and we have built a product to make this process seamless. These new product updates are critical to our users, and we are hard at work building further integrations and product updates that will deliver incredible ROI and brand cohesion.”
In addition to the SalesLoft integration, Sigstr has a variety of integrations available for Microsoft and Google. Push Sigstr to all employees, or have each employee run a one-time Install. Don’t stop there! Consider Sigstr for any tool you use to send email:
Read More & Get Started with an Email Signature Creator
Want to learn more about Sigstr and its recent product announcements? View the entire press release here.
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature creator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Did you know that the average employee sends roughly 10,000 emails a year? In a company of 100, thats 1,000,000 emails! Because digital communication is so prominent in the workforce, youd think most professionals would be masters of proper email etiquette. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. If you want to ensure your emails are being well received, leverage the following four tips and join the emailing elite.
1. Keep it short and to the point
If you cant get your point across in a paragraph or less, revert back to the Stone Age and make a phone call. Contrary to popular belief, giving someone a call can save an extraordinary amount of time and effort. The added bonus is that speaking to someone directly means youll receive a response instantaneously. Imagine that!
2. Avoid the dreaded “reply all”
Weve all been victims. A well-intending colleague sends out a company-wide email about leftover pizza in the breakroom and all hell breaks loose. One person unintentionally asks the entire office if there is left-over pepperoni at the same time the office jokester replies with a GIF of stampeding elephants. All of a sudden, inboxes are full and everyone is annoyed, confused, or best case scenario, entertained. Whatever the situation, do not be tempted to reply-all to tell everyone else to stop replying-all. You are part of the problem.
3. Use emoticons wisely 🙂
Personally, Im a big fan of the smiley face. However, its worth remembering that Im a millennial who loves texting, open-office environments, and Gilmore Girls. Not everyone in the professional world is like me. If you cant imagine a day without a friendly semi-colon and parenthesis, opt to use emoticons in internal email threads instead of external communications. Your coworkers will be much more forgiving.
4. Represent your brand appropriately
If any email signatures in your company look like this, youre doing it all wrong.
First things first, inspirational quotes have no place in your email signature template. Furthermore, your digital signature does not need to mimic the styling of Lisa Frank or look like John Hancock designed it himself. Instead, use your companys branding guidelines to create an appropriately formatted email signature template. If the term branding guidelines conjures no understanding, your company may want to consider an email signature generator. Yes, this is a Sigstr plug.
Theres no question that email is a necessary and impactful communication tool in the professional world. With these four tips and a little common sense, youll be well on your way to becoming an email expert in no time!
Want to see more bad examples of email signature templates? Check out this recent blog post:
Last week, nearly a dozen of Indys smartest marketers gathered to contemplate the trials and triumphs of digital marketing. The event was hosted by Sigstr,a platform for email signatures, andwas the first of many future Digital Marketing Roundtables – an event conceived with learning and networking with the best and brightest in mind.
There is a constant debate as to who truly owns brand. From our discussion, we reached a simple conclusion: everyone. You can invest millions of dollars in fancy marketing campaigns and advertisements, but your people are your front line. No matter the size of your organization, your people are your brand. If you invest in culture and hire the right people, your brand will flourish. See how email signatures can also help with that in this recent blog post.
2. Marketing’s impact on the entire organization, including culture.
A strong company culture is a beautiful thing. If only celebrated internally, you have happy employees. If showcased to the world through the use of digital marketing, you have happy customers, prospects, and peers. Marketing can make a colossal impact on all aspects of an organization. Using the aforementioned example, showcasing culture can lead to higher interest in becoming a part of that culture and can impact the quality of talent in potential hires. There are a variety of channels that can be utilized to exhibit culture (including through your email signature template – Lesson.ly is the perfect example of this).
3. Budget breakdown.
With hosting a multitude of different organizations comes a multitude of opinions and theories on how to spend your budget. In the breakdown of digital vs. traditional marketing channels, several companies stated they allocate less than 20% of their total budgets to digital marketing efforts. Dan asked the group what they would do if they were given an additional $1 million in marketing budget. The unanimous decision was to invest in talent.
Perspective from Tim Kopp, General Partner, Hyde Park Venture Partners:
“The easiest way to fix culture is to win. Marketing helps you know how you are winning. Start measuring your efforts, setting goals, and ensuring each person knows what they are accountable for. I have never seen a losing organization with a winning culture, period. Setting a culture of performance helps motivate team members and create transparency. Marketing is a crucial player in fueling these efforts.”
Tim also recently published an entire post specific to marketing’s role in building genuine culture and the effect it has on talent attraction, development, and retention. You can check out the post here.
Perspective from Sigstr’s VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes:
“Yesterday my horizon was expanded and eyes opened. I had to the privilege to learn from the best and brightest marketers in Indianapolis. I learned how broad of a reach marketers have on their organization’s success. They impact culture, perpetuate brand halo, drive employee engagement and enablement, and of course deliver leads to the sales organization. For me, it spurred a subtle reminder that in the race to the sun every action and individual is impactful. We, you and I, have the responsibility to represent and promote our company’s passion as we work to develop and grow.”
We are very appreciative of the opportunity to host a room full of smart digital marketers. A big thank you to all of them for taking time out of their days to join us for the event. We walked away smarter and look forward to continuing to learn and grow at future events.
Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr Founder/CEO, provides a recap of the day in the video below:
“So, first and foremost, it’s mostly about giving back and adding value to the digital marketers in Indianapolis. It’s so hard to sort of get out in your community when you get buried in your work. So, to look around and see those connections and one-off conversations marketers have with one another, to help them connect, is really invaluable.
In theprocess of that, we (Sigstr) learn, and our job is to ask questions (hopefully smart questions) and sit back and listen to the smartest people in our community tell us about their opportunities and challenges. So, if we facilitate an environment along those lines and facilitate that discussion, and maybe even add a few beverages of choice, people tend to have a lot of fun and walk away with better connections that help them.
They’re all really facing the same sort of decisions and evaluating the same opportunities. It’s really interesting, there were all kinds of engaging conversations and we talked a lot about budget, strategy, and brand, and things along those lines. We asked this group, ‘If you had a 10% increase in budget that just showed up today, how would you spend it?’ and the entire room, almost without exception, said people.
It’s really clear (I think there were 3,400 logos of technologies you can buy in themarketing tech stack) that the marketer is sort oflimited with their time. They can only log in and do so much fromso many tools. And so, the marketer is really constrained in the tools that add value without requiring a lot of time, and those are the ones that tend to win.
We also talked a lot about the brand piece and how marketers show return on investment on brand. There were some really interesting conversations there. It’s a really hard thing to do, but we all agreed that, more than anybody in the organization, marketing cares about the brand. They can provide tools to enable the organization – but at the end of the day nothing creates a better culture or brand than winning. The brand stems from the people you place within the organization.
It was fascinating to sit back and understand what kinds of decisions these guys face everyday and how many different things are pulling them for time and what matters most. So for those of you that were here, thank you so much for spending the day with us. It was an incredible opportunity and very humbling to see so many busy and smart marketers spend some time with us. It won’t be the last we assemble a group of really smart digital marketers and we’ll continue to listen and build that feedback into the Sigstr email signature generator so we can help in the ways you need us to.
So thanks again for coming and we hope you join us again. For those that didn’t have a chance – please reach out we’d love to have you next time.” – Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr Founder/CEO
For more on email signatures, email signature templates, or professional email signatures, visitour Resources page.
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #3.
Clever Tip #3: Focus on Relevance Over Differentiation
Differentiation is important to product companies. Most brand models (and business schools) argue the need to differentiate. However, it is rare for a business services brand to achieve complete categorical differentiation. Let’s face it, many service firms offer similar services. As such, it is difficult to actually own a unique market position. So forget about those product oriented, one-word descriptions.
Instead of attempting to be amazingly different from the rest, focus on being relevant. Specifically, relevance as it pertains to the client. The ideal service brand merges the needs, wants, and desires of the client with the character and values of the company.
The key lies in creating a space where customer needs meet company essence, an ideal combination of rational and emotional attributes that apply to both groups. This common ground approach develops a brand that not only resonates with the client by delivering what is important to them, but also develops a brand that is genuine, appropriate, and defensible by the company.
By staking the claim for what you stand for, communicating how you help your clients succeed, and proving how reliable you are in doing this, you’ll develop a unique identity. Most business service companies don’t have the stick-to-it ability to get this far, but if they do, they’ll stand out in the market.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
While content marketing can be extremely valuable to prospective customers and current customers alike, make sure that you are providing resources above and beyond for customers. This includes: training seminars, certification classes, how-to blogs, customer user groups, in-depth customer case studies via webinars, templates, hands-on learning guides, and more. Educational resources can help your customers become more familiar with your services and processes which will help them feel closer to your offering as well as to your people.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
At Sigstr, we help companies of all sizes see the potential of employee email as a new digital marketing channel. Your marketing and/or creative team spends valuable time and resources creating quality content that helps drive brand awareness and demand generation. As a company, all of your employees are already sending a ton of email to a handpicked audience. Why not marry the two and promote your latest content or most important company initiatives through your email signatures?
On average, an employee will send 28 emails/day. That’s 10,000 emails annually. For a 100 employee company, that’s 1,000,000 emails/year. The impact of adding this as a channel to your digital marketing mix is huge. And as a marketer, you probably want to measure the heck out of this to see just how big the impact can be. With that in mind, Sigstr offers analytics within its email signature generator to help you do just that. Impressions, clicks, average click-through rates, etc. We also understand, in some cases, marketers want to take it a step further with metrics such as leads generated, contacts added, and ultimately closed/won business.
Here at Sigstr, we make an effort to “eat our own dog food” (as some would call it). We pump Sigstr metrics into other tools that we use, such as Google Analytics (see the tutorial video) or HubSpot, to measure the impact a Sigstr campaign has on an overall company objective. Objectives like driving more traffic to your website, increasing exposure with a specific piece of content, or even number of leads generated within a specific marketing campaign. Effectively representing your brand and promoting content in your company’s email signatures can help with all of these.
Today we’ll focus on HubSpot, and how you can use Sigstr + HubSpot together to do some really cool things. There are two different ways to feed Sigstr metrics into HubSpot:
1. Create a Tracking URL
For us, we wanted to track how many visits a Sigstr campaign drove to a specific landing page promoting our new ebook.
Step 1: Generate a unique URL in HubSpot, label appropriately.
Step 2: Copy/paste your shiny new generated URL into your Sigstr campaign.
Step 3: Sit back, relax, and watch the metrics (in this case, visits to the landing page) flow into your campaign view within HubSpot.
2. Clone Your Landing Page in HubSpot; Rename Specifically for Sigstr Campaign
If you have a particular resource that is “gated”, meaning a visitor to your site will need to provide contact information and fill out a form before accessing, you can see how many contacts your Sigstr campaign generated. For us, we did this to take it one step further so we could see how many visits AND how many contacts our Sigstr Campaign drove when promoting our new ebook.
Step 1: Clone the landing page that is connected to the particular resource you want to promote and rename appropriately so you can quickly identify its relation to your Sigstr campaign. Also be sure to connect it to your desired campaign in HubSpot.
Step 2: Be sure to do the same with your form (clone and rename appropriately). Go to edit mode in the landing page, add in your new form. In the Campaign view within HubSpot, click on “Landing Pages” to view metrics on visits, contacts, and customers.
Step 3: You can now see this as an interaction (a prospect/contact clicking on your Sigstr campaign and downloading the resource) and how it relates to other touchpoints. This can be found in the specific contact view within HubSpot.
Bonus: View Sigstr Metrics within Salesforce
If you’re also using Salesforce as your CRM and have your Salesforce integration turned on within HubSpot, you can pinpoint specific interactions a lead or contact has had with your Sigstr campaign.
This can be found in the lead view within Salesforce. Scroll down and find the “HubSpot Intelligence” section, then see when that particular lead/contact interacted with your Sigstr Campaign in relation to other touch points.
Email Signatures + Sigstr + HubSpot = Your New Secret Weapon
At Sigstr, we’re all about making your life easier with employee email and taking advantage of this untapped digital marketing real estate. Metrics within Sigstr help measure the effectiveness of this. Pumping your Sigstr metrics into HubSpot or Salesforce helps you, as a marketer, see how your prospects, contacts, or even customers are interacting with your brand through employee email signatures. Add these all up and you now have a new secret weapon and new addition to your digital marketing mix.
For more on Sigstr, what to do with your email signature format, or best practices for your email signature template, check out our latest resource below:
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #2.
Clever Tip #2: Worry About Growing Revenue, Not Your Market Share
Product companies are taught that they must be number one or two, in terms of market position, to be successful. Service brands, on the other hand, should concentrate on growing revenue (not gaining market share, as product companies do). This is especially true because many business services companies focus on specific geographies, such as a local city or state, rather than owning the entire market nation-wide (or even thinking about their global reach). Business services companies that focus on delivering results will see that revenue will grow naturally by ensuring happy, satisfied customers that are willing to share the results with peers in the marketplace.
In the business services industry, whether it be accounting, law, architecture, or consulting, local markets are usually fragmented and crowded with many successful firms generating considerable revenue from like-services. Instead of concerning yourself with your position in the market, focus your efforts on improving the bottom line and ensuring happy, satisfied customers – the rest will follow naturally.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Consider implementing an account-based marketing approach as it is based on the collective decision-making process. It takes into account that most B2B buying decisions are not made by a single person, but rather by a collective group of people. This is where account-based targeting comes in handy. Since each company has its own dedicated IP address, it is easy to identify them collectively by looking at IP addresses. So if you want to target an account, you can target those IP addresses specifically, ensuring you are marketing to the correct group of people in the most efficient way possible.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
At Brooksource, their business is people. Relationships are at the center of what they do. A successful partnership is only as strong as the relationship built. Brooksource is a trusted partner for IT hiring, recruiting and staffing needs. For over 15 years, Brooksource has established and maintained relationships that are designed to meet IT staffing needs. Whether its contract, contract-to-hire, or permanent placement work, they customize their search based upon your company’s unique initiatives, culture and technologies. With their national team of recruiters placed at 20 major hubs around the nation, Brooksource finds the people best-suited for your business.
Brooksource has one simple philosophy: People come first. They know that quality service can only come from quality relationships. Thats why they are committed to understanding their clients cultures and needs and strive to continually strengthen their partnerships.
Brooksource began using Sigstr, a platform for managing employee email signatures, as one of the first pilot companies when Sigstr was in beta mode in 2014. In the past, Brooksource had challenges with cohesive imaging. According to Carlie Oakley, VP of Marketing and Brand Excellence at Brooksource, Everyone had their own look and feel, so we were trying to find a way to control the overall image from our Corporate office. The Brooksource team began using Sigstr as a way to increase their brand awareness and to ensure all employees had a consistent look and feel across their email signatures.
Sigstr lets Brooksource leverage the thousands of personal emails its 200+ employees send each and every day. By building an email signature template within Sigstr, Brooksource can now control portions (or all) of each employees email signatures to make sure each signature is individualized with employee-specific names and titles. A Brooksource administrator can then centrally manage branding, content, and information to make sure the signature is always on brand. In addition, with the Sigstr Campaigns product, Brooksource can automatically include a banner integration at the bottom of every single employee email, highlighting the latest marketing content with a compelling call-to-action, such as the below example.
Check out Brooksources most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date, which was created for their Internal Hiring Team, promoting Top Workplaces. This campaign was very attractive to students looking for their first full-time job after college and garnered a lot of attention, leading the students to the Brooksource website where they could learn more.
The Top Workplaces campaign generated a surge of visitors to their website and an increase in interested job applicants.
Carlie, an incredible partner to Sigstr who has been able to experiment with many different Sigstr campaigns, had this to say about the partnership:
Looking ahead, Carlie shares that, Brooksource has plans to activate a very targeted campaign that can drive client or contractor traffic to our website. Creating a compelling campaign to create interest outside of our normal marketing avenues will be a huge win in our book, and were excited for Sigstr to play an incredibly important role in that.
We look forward to seeing what results Brooksource will continue to experience with the power of an email signature generator. Want to do more with your organizations email signatures? Start your free 30-day trial here.
For more testimonials and case studies from other Business Services companies, check out our latest resource(with email signature examples):
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #1.
Business service companies do not have a tangible display of products that you can see, touch, and test out before deciding to purchase. As a service firm, your brand is mostly comprised of your people. As such, don’t underestimate the internal components of brand development.
To create a collaborative culture, communicate your brand message to the troops so that each individual becomes a true brand ambassador. This helps to ensure that every sales call, every client interaction, and every elevator conversation delivers the brand as intended. Don’t attempt to be Big Brother, but do provide a rallying point for the entire organization, because “speaking in one voice” is far more important for service firms who rely on direct, one-to-one interaction with clients.
Often times for business services companies, email is the main channel for communication and where your company branding is viewed most often. A single employee will send, on average, 10,000 one-to-one emails annually, and each email represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse offerings? Or win new logos by promoting a referral program to your happy existing customers.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Email signatures are a key part of every email your employees send. Many business services companies have caught on to the fact that email is the lifeblood of their company, and a huge opportunity to drive incremental awareness and engagement with their marketing content, as mentioned above. By automatically appending calls to action to your newest piece of content directly within your email signature template, marketers are finally breaking down the barriers of the employee email, and leveraging it to gain millions of brand impressions. With an email signature generator like Sigstr, showcase your most important content or company initiatives to the most engaged audience (those your employees are emailing with directly). And best of all, get the data to see exactly what’s working!
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Springbuk is a nationally-recognized resource for population health. Their team has worked alongside more than 6,000 companies that represent 60 million employee lives. With visibility into the largest corporate wellness programs in North America, they have an uncommon understanding of the challenges, trends and solutions for today’s employer. The Springbuk product team is comprised of wellness, benefits consulting & human resources professionals that work on the front-line of population health.
The company began using Sigstr, a platform for managing employee email signatures, in August 2015 as a way to deliver a compelling and consistent marketing message. They also use their email signature template to showcase the success of Springbuk’s customers. Springbuk’s employees are sending thousands of emails per day to the company’s most valuable contacts, including prospective customers, vendors, partners, customers, thought leaders, and media. Now, Springbuk is able to include the latest and most current customer success stories and case studies in every employee email that is sent, leaving an incredible brand impression.
Sigstr lets Springbuk leverage the thousands of personal emails its employees send each and every day. A Springbuk administrator can centrally manage branding, content, and information across its employee base through the email signature template. In addition, with the Sigstr Campaigns product, Springbuk can automatically include a banner integration at the bottom of every single employee email, highlighting the latest case studies and customer success stories with a compelling call-to-action. With the email signature generator within Sigstr, Springbuk can now control portions (or all) of each employee’s email signatures to make sure each signature is individualized with employee-specific names and titles.
Check out Springbuk’s most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date promoting their newest downloadable resource, “Broker Roadmap”.
The campaign generated 24,800 displays, 131 clicks in just 3 months, which resulted in resource downloads and landing page traffic. Visitors had the opportunity to download the resource by providing a few pieces of information, allowing the Springbuk sales team to follow-up.
Phil Daniels, Sprinbuk’s Co-Founder & EVP of Marketing is a huge champion of Sigstr, saying this about the partnership:
We look forward to seeing what results Springbuk will continue to experience with the power of an email signature generator. Want to do more with your organization’s email signatures? Start your free 30-day trial here.
For more testimonials and case studies from other tech-focused companies, check out these resources (with email signature examples):
Ah, the dreaded company-wide email we’ve all received far too many times. It usually goes something like this:
“Hi everyone, it’s time to update our email signatures. We’ve made some adjustments to our font and company branding, and we would like our employees to also promote our upcoming [insert event, webinar, press release, or whatever it may be] in all of our emails for the next 2 weeks. PLEASE take just FIVE minutes to follow the very specific instructions below in the next THREE days. If you do not, we will find you! PLEASE!”
That email probably includes a list of items each employee in your company needs to do, like illustrated below.
On average, it likely takes your employees about 5 minutes each to update their email signatures (that is, if there aren’t any questions). And think about that time spent across a company that employs 100, 200, 1,000 or even 1M employees. For a company of just 100 employees, that’s 500 minutes or 8.3 hours of precious company time just updating their email signatures.
Ouch! Not to mention, who is the poor “email signature administrator” that has to chase down every employee and manage the process Every. Single. Time. the email signature needs to change? Not to mention respond to the emails of employees who are utterly confused or lost?
If this process is all too familiar, can we suggest scheduling a quick demo with Sigstr? Bonus: if you book a time we’ll send you a pack of Sigstr sticker goodness.
What’s Sigstr?
Sigstr turns your company’s email into a targeted marketing channel that helps deliver your content to the right audience, drive event registrations, execute account-based marketing, and more.
With email signature marketing, teams can dynamically insert targeted 1:1 ads in the email signature section of every email your employees send. Learn more in the overview video below:
How Does It Work?
Sigstr can identify the sender and recipient of every email sent by your employees, allowing teams to engage email recipient with a relevant call-to-action. You can bring the power of email signature marketing to all of your go-to sales and marketing tools. This includes HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and more.
With Sigstr, marketers can run dozens of targeted banners at once, giving you control to:
Promote events by geography
Target current customers with up-sell opportunities
Promote your best content
Deliver training to your employees
Keep sales enablement top of mind
Target specific accounts and contacts
Request a demo today for more customer examples, features, functionality, and best-in-class use cases.
At Sigstr, we focus on email signatures.Sigstr Campaigns allow you to unlock the powerful marketing channel of employee email. Many of my day-to-day responsibilities revolve around designing these campaigns both internally and through our Services offerings where we design campaigns for our customers. That said, I thought Id share a few tips.
Step 1: Gather the Information
Every time I sit down to design a Sigstr campaign in the email signature template, I make sure I have all the information needed. Before I start digging in, I like to have brand assets (such as logos or brand colors), and if the campaign is promoting an event, a URL to the events landing page. Landing pages help provide context and guidelines to design around. Before I dive into the design, I take a step back and ask, ‘What is the main goal I want to accomplish with this graphic? or, What company initiative is this campaign helping promote?
These types of questions will only help your cause as you look to create the best email signature design that fits well with your company initiatives.
Step 2: Experiment with the Brand
Next, before I start laying out the information, I begin experimenting with the brand elements. This includes the color palette (in order to help me understand which colors would work better on top of others), the font, which colors work best with the font, and the logo. Understanding how your brands colors work together expedites the campaign design process immensely for your email signature generator.
Step 3: Putting the Pieces Together
The third and final step of my campaign design process is building out the format of the campaign. When I start to assemble my campaigns, I almost always start at 400 pixels by 96 pixels and adjust from there. I then take all the information that I know I want to include in the campaign and just throw it inside to see how much information I need to work with. Visual hierarchy is a huge part of how a campaign comes together for email signatures. Always be sure to prioritize the most information.
For example, I always start with the campaigns call to action being the brands boldest color. Here at Sigstr, we keep a close eye on the metrics we see within the app. Weve seen the best views to click ratio on campaigns with red call-to-action buttons.
Try including photography in your campaign. Images with overlaid brand colors at 60 – 80% opacity work really well as backgrounds (but be careful not to cause sensory overload). For the best results, combine your image with an on-brand accent color.
Sometimes with a campaign design I’ll find myself hitting a brick wall. Maybe the campaign just doesnt look right, or maybe Im missing some key details that need to be included. When I hit that point, I start asking coworkers what they think about the campaign. Receiving feedback is always the best for improving your campaigns.
Step 4: Next Steps?
So now youve got a fantastic looking campaign sitting in front of you. What do you do next? Try coming up with a second campaign design! Trust me, nine times out of ten the second campaign I end up designing is better than the first. Even if the second version isnt better, you now have some great optionsto choose from.
Hopefully these tips help you with your campaign designs. Here at Sigstr, we’re all about creating the best email signatures, and the campaign design is a big part of that. We’re here to help and be your source for inspiration! If you have any additional questions about your email signature, email us at interact@sigstr.com.
Also, don’t forget about our growing list of tutorial videos! These offer up some great tips and tricks and walk you through how to use certain features within Sigstr.
Its no secret that the marketing technology landscape is evolving (and fast). Marketers, especially those in the world of digital marketing, have the job of keeping up on the latest tech advancements (in addition to their own specific roles demands). And for anyone just getting started in digital marketing, the growth can be overwhelming and even daunting. How do you know what tools you need? Once you determine what tools you need, how do you determine the right partner? The search to find the perfect technology stack for your business is never-ending.
ChiefMarTec.com just released a graphic in conjunction with the 2016 MarTech USA Conference in San Francisco. And boy, this graphic is sure intimidating! The graphic depicts more than 3,800 technology vendors on a single slide. This is up from just 150 in 2011. So in just 5 years, the landscape has become entirely different for the world of marketers!
But no fear, marketers. While this graphic and information can be overwhelming, its important to know that many of the categories remain the same. For instance, the Email Marketing category has grown significantly. This isa result of employee email continuing to be such a staple in todays business world. In fact, did you know that each employee at your company will send approximately 10,000 emails per year? If your company has just 100 employees, then collectively youre sending over 1M emails per year to your most important contacts. Of course that category has grown – theres so much opportunity!
Thats why Sigstr exists. What does each of those 10,000 emails each of your employees are sending out include? Thats right: email signatures. Sigstr powers smart marketing through the thousands of email signatures displayed to your most important contacts (your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, investors, and friends). Sigstr’s email signature generatordrives brand compliance and unlocks the marketing potential of your employee email signatures. With Sigstr, every employee email includes a consistently branded email signature template and graphical call-to-action. Marketers can easily update signature campaigns to drive awareness and engagement for any of the following key initiatives that are important to your company or Marketing team:
Events or conferences
Case studies or ebooks
Product updates
Company culture or job opportunities
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
When we saw the recent business.com article entitled, Leave a Good Impression: The Best & Worst Email Signatures of All Time, you better believe that we read it (and laughed a lot). And of course, we had to share it with our readers as it also offers up some great pointers, which well share below.
Weve all seen a few doozy email signatures, and maybe weve even been guilty of of some of the no-nos: Comic Sans font, multi-color rainbow colors, inspirational quotes, links to all 10 social media accounts or distorted headshots. But as the article reminds us, Email signatures are the John Hancocks of the digital age. Often times, your email recipients will never meet you face to face (at least in the business world), so every time you send an email, you are making an impression on that person. And the email signature template is the most consistent aspect of those touch points. What kind of impression are you leaving on your email recipients?
According to the article, heres a rundown on what not to include in your email signature format, along with some tips for creating the most efficient email signature template possible.
Run the Other Way From These Email Signature Examples
Inspirational Quotes
This is your professional email, not your high school yearbook, Ricardo Casas stated in the article. As such, its not the place to feature aphorisms like, Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. A worthy piece of advice, to be sure, but the person reading your email most likely doesnt care.
A Reiteration of the Senders Email Address (Often Hyperlinked)
Kevin Zawacki at Slate.com likens this to, Placing two return address stickers on an envelope. First of all, it feels like youre beating your recipient over the head with your contact information.
And, from a practical standpoint, its completely redundant. The recipient already has your email address; if they want to respond to your email they simply have to hit Reply.
Too Many Fonts
According to Ricardo, Using more than two different fonts (particularly novelty ones) in your email signature is a recipe for a design headache. It looks cluttered and unprofessional.
Additionally, if youre creating a text signature and end up using a novelty font, you cant guarantee your recipient will have that same font installed on their computer, so the result could be a jumbled mess looking nothing like the way you intended it.
Too Much Text, Period
You may be familiar with these types of text signatures, full of information stacked line by individual line, said Ricardo. First, you have the senders name. Then their title. Then their work phone number, then their extension, then their email address, then their fax number, and so on.
A slight exaggeration perhaps (mostly), but the point is this: nobody likes to scroll and scroll to find the information theyre looking for. The key is to keep it simple.
Take Hints From This Awesome Email Signature Template
Simplicity
You dont need to bombard your recipients with a plethora of information, Ricardo advises. Stay short, sweet, and to-the-point. Give them only the information that really counts.
Just the Basics
As earlier stated, its unnecessary to restate your email address in your signature. Ask yourself what information is actually crucial, and what could be omitted for the sake of clarity, said Ricardo. Your phone number is almost always important to include, along with the name of your company. Your job title is also helpful so the recipient can have a better idea of your role in the company.
You may also find it helpful to provide links to your social media platforms, but only if they are relevant and there arent a hundred of them.
Clean, Eye-Catching Graphics
Ricardo explains that if youve chosen to use a customized graphic for your email signature, make sure its not a mess of fonts and colors. Its best to eliminate distractions by using only one or two colors (and as many fonts) in your signature graphic.
Introducing Sigstr for Email Signatures
For marketers, keeping the brand consistent across all employees can be a major struggle. Sigstr‘s email signature generator helpsmarketers create the bestemail signatures for their employees, which can be easilyimplemented and automatically updated.
Sigstr offers marketers complete brand control of employee email signatures withfonts, formatting, color, social links and more through its integration with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Insert a Sigstr Campaign (graphical call-to-action) into your email signature templateto utilize every employee’s email signature as a targeted marketing opportunity. Sigstr gives marketers the opportunity to promote the companys most important initiatives or content, such as events, press, case studies, ebooks, job openings and much more.
With Sigstr, marketers can be sure that every employee email signature formatis on brand and updated across the entire company with just a few clicks. Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin experiencing the power of professional email signatures.
Last week, Gary Vaynerchuk shared a Snapchat story with his audience that detailed the importance of email signatures. And that simple Snapchat story sparked some great interaction on social media.
First of all, who is Gary Vaynerchuk?
Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college he took his family wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years. Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Along the way he became a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Birchbox before eventually co-founding VaynerRSE, a $25M investment fund.
In addition, Gary speaks at many events and is an all around super cool guy. And he believes in the power of a stellar email signature template – what could be better?
Gary’s Snapchat Story Success
Gary’s Snapshat story caused quite an outpouring of comments, feedback, and even support for Sigstr in the form of tweets, Snapchats and more.
What Gary Says About Email Signatures
“Snapchat secret. Your email signature…huge opportunity for a call-to-action. I change mine depending on what’s most important to me. The email signature is the easiest place to get full exposure continuously because you’re always using it and you’re interacting with business people and…there it is.” – Gary Vaynerchuk
That’s why Sigstr exists. Sigstr powers smart marketing through the thousands of email signatures displayed to your most important contacts (your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, investors, and friends). The best email signatures drive brand compliance and unlock the marketing potential of every employee email sent. With Sigtsr, every employee email includes a consistently branded email signature, and marketers can easily update signature campaigns to drive awareness and engagement for key events, case studies, product updates, news, and job opportunities.
In 2010, SteelHouse set out to change the eCommerce marketing space because they saw the obvious flaws in online advertising: channel confusion, a reactionary system to consumer trends, blind trust in black box algorithms, over-spending, waiting forever on creative and even longer to go live. And, of course, deciphering attribution for performance.
SteelHouse has one simple mission: To create performance marketing that actually performs. As a result, they have pioneered a cloud-based marketing platform that gives their customers complete control, access to marketing channels, and delivers audience, creative, and performance – all from one beautiful user interface.
The company began using Sigstr, a platform for managing employee email signatures, in July 2015 as a way to deliver a consistent marketing message to their most important contacts. This includes those who are receiving emails from SteelHouse employees, such as prospective customers, vendors, partners, customers, thought leaders, and media.
Sigstr lets SteelHouse leverage the thousands of personal emails its 185 employees send each and every day. By building an email signature template within Sigstr, SteelHouse can now control portions (or all) of each employee’s email signatures to make sure each signature is individualized with employee-specific names and titles. A Steelhouse administrator can then centrally manage branding, content, and information. In addition, with the Sigstr Campaigns product, SteelHouse can automatically include a banner integration at the bottom of every single employee email, highlighting the latest marketing content with a compelling call-to-action.
Check out SteelHouse’s most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date promoting their newest resource, “2015 Holiday Digital Marketing Guide”.
The campaign generated 1,839 clicks in 3 months, which resulted in an extreme surge of visitors to their website and an increase in downloads.
A true champion of the Sigstr platform, Christopher had this to say about the partnership:
We look forward to seeing what results SteelHouse will continue to experience with the power of an email signature generator. Want to do more with your organization’s email signatures? Start your free 30-day trial here.
For more testimonials and case studies from other Business Services companies, check out this recent resource (with email signature examples):
If youre a B2B Services company, then you know just how important your people are to your companys success. Dont get us wrong – employees are an important part of every business, no matter the industry. Without good people who do their job and treat customers well, your business will not be successful. But for a B2B Services company, your people are your product – theres just no way around it: you need to build the best team you can, or risk it all by having mediocre talent reflect poorly on your brand.
For B2B Services brands, such as design or ad agencies, executive recruiting firms, law firms, consultancies and others, company culture is likely a very important aspect of building a great team. How else do you attract good talent that will represent your brand well? Most of the time, good culture and great people are inseparable. So as a B2B Services company, you need to stand out from the crowd, showcase your culture in unique ways, and attract top-level talent by offering them something they cant get anywhere else.
Culture, People & The Power of Employee Email
What is something all of your employees do every single day without fail? Sometimes even on the weekends? You guessed it – they send email. A lot of email! On average, a single employee will send 10,000 emails per year. So if your B2B Services company has just 100 employees, simple math suggests your company is sending 1M emails per year! Thats a million brand impressions and engagement opportunities being sent out to your most important contacts: those your employees are emailing such as prospects, customers, partners, community members, and more.
Every one of those 1M emails can either be a positive or negative brand experience. And sometimes – especially for B2B Service companies – email and phone calls may be the only interactions your contacts will ever have with your employees. So every touchpoint matters a lot to your brands integrity.
Why not use this high powered channel to attract your dream team? Email is a powerful engine for business services companies use it for your brands advantage.
Here are a few examples of how your B2B Services brand can make the most of the employee email signature to promote your culture and attract your dream team:
1. Showcase Company Culture to Pique Interest
Do you have an amazing company culture where every opinion matters and every team member is expected to grow? Does your company have fun traditions or does your team volunteer for service opportunities around your community? How about an awesome CEO thats vocal about employee success? Use the email signature as a way to highlight your team and the rewarding culture youve created by sharing a video from your CEO, a picture of the team, or stories about serving the community.
2. Promote Specific Open Positions
Your company is always on the lookout for superstars – especially those that are already aware of your business and the unique services you offer. Why not use the email signature (which is already being viewed by your most important contacts: prospects, customers, partners and community members) to drive awareness for specific open positions?
3. Ask For Referrals
Your employee emails are far reaching, so include an email signature that incentivizes your contacts to refer their friends to open job positions. Point email recipients to a landing page where they can either browse the current job openings (like the Radious example below), or direct them to a landing page where they can nominate rockstars for your team – and get rewarded if their referral is hired!
For more information on how your business services company can attract incredible content and showcase culture, check out these recent Sigstr resources:
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you. With that, brand consistency is equally important. Whether you business services brand offers accounting, banking, consulting, advertising, design, education, insurance, or whatever it may be, you’re always looking for new and innovative ways to give your brand and your reputation a boost.
According to a recent report in Select USA, a government agency, in 2012, the U.S. business services industry was comprised of about 760,000 firms with combined annual revenues of $1.5 trillion and employed 7.8 million Americans. The business services sector is growing rapidly. As a marketer promoting your services, it’s more important than ever to set your offerings apart.
We’re excited to share that, announced today, the Sigstr team has added Kevin Vanes as Vice President of Sales! Kevin will join the executive team, which now includes Dan Hanrahan, CEO, Dave Duke, Vice President of Customer Success, and Sam Smith, Vice President of Product. Sigstr has also doubled the size of its team making hires across marketing, product, sales, and customer success. It’s been a fast start to 2016 and we won’t be slowing down any time soon!
Our team is humbled to now serve over 100 customers and has a team of 20+ dedicated to the opportunity of email signatures. In order to keep up with our growing team, we’ve relocated to a new office overlooking Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis.
We’re continuing to aggressively hire top-level talent to support all functions of the business. For more information on open positions, visit: https://www.sigstr.com/company.
Want to see the power of Sigstr firsthand and try it out at your company? Sign up and start your free 30-day trial today. Create your own email signature template and start experiencing the power of email signature marketing.
Raidious is a content centric digital agency. They create all types of digital content for brands – everything from social graphics to video and blogging. Pretty much all of the “stuff” that makes digital marketing work – Raidious specializes in creating.
Through years of creating great content, the team has learned that the traditional methods of distributing content no longer deliver the same results that they used to. According to Craig Lile, Senior Director of Advancement at Raidious, “It’s a lot harder to get your content noticed – brands have fully bought in that content marketing is the way of the future, but getting content marketing to break through is a really tough task for brands to do.”
Raidious’ employees send email all day long to clients and prospects and vendors, and they saw these personal, one-to-one email communications as another way to create advocacy – another opportunity for up-sell and cross-sell within their clients.
“When I saw Sigstr, I thought ‘wow, what a great way to distribute content!’ – and it’s from people that are trusted. It gives our team an awesome way to serve content that has a high probability of getting digested because it’s from a trusted source – and best of all, we can measure everything and continually improve our campaigns”, said Craig.
Solution
Raidious began using Sigstr, an employee email signature management platform, in January of 2015 for their 25 employees. To date, Raidious has run 5 unique employee email signature marketing campaigns, including: hiring and open positions, video and expanded services, a general brand campaign promoting Raidious, and a very specific website campaign. Raidious has 2 default groups: Sales and Marketing, and split their campaigns accordingly.
Results
Raidious’ top 2 campaigns to date include a campaign centered around hiring new talent, and a “Welcome to Raidious” brand campaign:
The hiring campaign generated 26,000 displays and 41 clicks over a month long period, and helped Raidious fill its’ talent pool with well qualified applicants in the local Indianapolis area. The email signature marketing campaign was very targeted and helped bring visibility to the growing team at Raidious.
Meanwhile, the Raidious brand campaign, which was active for 3 months, generated 174,000 displays with 181 clicks and generated many new visitors to the website, along with increased brand visibility.
“The value of ~200,000 impressions is unparalleled,” commented Craig. “It’s a channel we already own promoting content we already have. You simply can’t find a better value for reaching this type of audience.”
Vision
In the future, Raidious plans to test out new Sigstr campaigns. First, the team plans to launch a campaign entitled “This Week in Raidious” highlighting all of the new content and announcements across the company for that particular week. They also plan to launch a culture-centered campaign highlighting the great work environment and promoting Raidious as a great place to work. In the future, they would also like to begin pushing relevant blog posts, as well as create specific guides, such as a social media guide, for their end recipients.
During my time at #Rainmaker16 this week, I had the opportunity to sit in on a breakout session that provided a unique perspective from the founders of 3 companies: Crystal, Datanyze, and Sigstr.
Drew D’Agostino: Founder & CEO of Crystal (helps professionals communicate more effectively with personality data). He previously co-founded and served as CTO of Attend.com (an event management software company in Boston).
Ben Sardella: Co-founder and CRO at Datanyze (an all-in-one sales intelligence platform that helps companies find and reach prospects). Ben previously served as VP of Sales at Kissmetrics.
Dan Hanrahan: Sigstr founder & CEO (previously lead go-to-market teams at iGoDigital and ExactTarget).
Alongside these 3 fine gentlemen, Sean Kester (VP of Product Strategy at SalesLoft) served as moderator and led the conversation.
The session started with how each founder uses their own solution to help their sales development teams, or more simply put, “eating your own dog food.” Each founder was then asked what they do to set up their SDR teams for success.
Ben: “We all want a lot. But we also want to be effective. I’ll take personalization over mass volume. Segment your audience into specific buckets, then build your templates around that and measure effectiveness.”
Dan: “Personalize content based on a specific vertical and equip your sales development team with that material.”
Drew: “Include screenshots of your solution and how it relates to the prospect by including their data. A strategy that is around personalization but that is also scalable goes a long way.”
Dan: “Look to your sales development team for feedback on what specific content will resonate best with that particular audience.”
Question from the moderator: “How has the landscape of a sales development team changed during your career?”
Drew: “The more you leave out the better (with email). It can come down to one line of information that triggers a response.”
Ben: “I’ve seen promotions and progressions into the most important titles of the company originate from the sales development team. Sean is a prime example of that.”
Question from the moderator: “What are some traits you look for when hiring for a SDR position?”
Dan: “Curious. Self-starter. A willingness to help. I’m looking for them to hit their activity benchmarks then do what interests them most.”
Question from the moderator: “What are you most excited about with SalesLoft’s announcement of the Sales Development Cloud?”
Ben: “The ability to use data to strategize your engagement.”
Drew: “It helps professional communicators accelerate their relationships.”
Question from the crowd: “What motivates you most as founders?”
Ben: “First off, I’m naturally just a competitive person. But I also want to make sure we’re doing all we can to ensure our sales development team (and any other team at Datanyze) is set up for success.”
Drew: “Relationships and people. To help people know others and to be known.”
Dan: “Seeing that growth of your team and seeing the culture form. It’s all about the people.”
A big thanks to all of the rockstars on the SalesLoft team for putting on such a great event. And thanks to all of those who stopped by our booth to say hello. The Sigstr team had a blast meeting many new friends and catching up with old ones. See you all next year!
About Datanyze: Find your perfect prospect information - Uncover, research, and connect with the right prospects and companies at the right time. Import target people and company profiles with one click into SalesLoft and create better alignment.
About Crystal: Communicate based on personality – Get access to millions of personality profiles and learn the best way to communicate with your customers. Use empathy and intentionality by tailoring your outbound messages to fit the context of the buyer.
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product – instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you – as is brand consistency.
Employee Email Is a Critical Branding Channel
Often times for business services companies, email is the main channel for communication and where your company branding is viewed most often. But are you leveraging the thousands of employee emails (sent from Gmail or Outlook) each of your employees sends directly to prospects, customers, industry influencers, and partners? A single employee will send, on average, 10,000 one-to-one emails annually, and each email represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse offerings? Or win new logos by promoting a referral program to your happy existing customers. Email is a powerful engine for business services company – use it for your brand’s advantage.
How Sigstr Works
Leverage Employee Email Signature Marketing at Your Business Services Company
Referrals:
Referrals, both to recruit employees as well as attract new customers, are important to your business services company. With no physical product, you rely heavily on the relationships your team builds, why not put those thousands of employee emails to work and use the email signature as a referral engine?
Newsletters & Social Media:
For many business services companies, monthly newsletters and social media followings are important so customers and prospects alike can keep up with new content, service offerings, events, and news. Grow your subscriber list and your social media following by enticing email recipients to sign up by using the employee signature.
Events:
Does your business services company frequently attend or host events? How about webinars? Ensure your most important contacts are aware of where you’ll be and when so they can make plans to attend. And best of all, track their registration or clicks via the email signature campaign to determine which events are most attractive to your recipients.
Upsell/Cross-Sell:
It’s likely your business services company offers multiple service options – many of which your customers may not realize (or may have forgotten). Use the employee email signature as a way to introduce new solutions with a call-to-action to visit a landing page, video, or data sheet with more information. Why not encourage your most important contacts to understand more about your business?
Studio Science Use Case
Studio Science is a world-class team of designers, technologists and strategists. Studio Science recognized that their customers spend the majority of their days in email as well. When launching new initiatives, Studio Science needed another outlet to spread the word as quickly as possible.The team began to use Sigstr to promote the company’s most important initiatives and to reinforce its brand through a visual, clickable campaign allowing them to bring design and visuals to the forefront – and control the content and signature itself – with just a few clicks. The Periodic newsletter is an important focus for Studio Science and is promoted through a number of different outlets. In just 1 month of promoting the newsletter via the Sigstr campaign, Studio Science saw 71,052 impressions resulting in 26 clicks to the sign-ups page of the weekly newsletter from the email signature call-to-action alone.
The world of employee email is evolving and growing on a daily basis, and Sigstr is working hard to ensure our customers have a seamless experience using our email signature marketing platform. Email is a critical component in our daily lives and it’s our mission to make employee email signatures more powerful, more effective and now, more efficient. As many of our customers use Google to run their businesses, it has been a top priority for our product team to develop an incredible user experience for those using the Gmail email platform. And now, we’re excited to announce it’s here: Gmail Signature Sync!
Backed by a powerful integration with Google Apps, the Sigstr install process is simple and efficient. The integration removes the need for employees to install the application individually. Instead, the Sigstr administrator has the ability to push campaign and signature updates to each employee through the application portal.
Does your company use Gmail to run your employee email? If so, the Gmail Signature Sync is as easy as the 4 steps below. Once you’re logged into your Sigstr account, simply:
1. Select the tools menu.
2. Navigate the Connectors page.
3. Select Connect to Google Apps and enter your Google Apps Admin credentials.
4. After authenticating, click Sync Signatures Now to push your Sigstr content to all users. Alternatively, enable Auto-Sync to instantly push out changes to Google Apps users whenever content is updated in Sigstr. The sync will push any signature or user signature field changes straight to users on your Google Apps domain. It will only affect users who are already provisioned in Sigstr.
WARNING: Make sure you have uploaded all employee data and are ready for a live launch before syncing.
Yep, it really is just that easy! We even put together this video tutorial below to prove it!
Still on the fence about employee email signature marketing? No problem! Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to experience firsthand the power of email signature marketing.
Still undecided? Check out the lastest Sigstr resources to learn more:
Emails are one of the most common forms of communication today. In fact, there are 2.6B email users worldwide, with each user holding more than 1 account. Just in the business setting alone, it’s estimated that each employee will send 10,000 emails annually! So for a 100 person company, that’s over 1M emails per year. And while the email signature may not seem all that important, think about how your company’s most important contacts are perceiving your employee’s signature: your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, influencers, thought leaders, and so many others. Often times, an email is the very first interaction an individual will have with your company directly (outside of perhaps your website, blog, or social channels managed by your marketing team).
So how can your employees represent your brand well, while also providing an opportunity for your company’s most valuable contacts to engage with your most important initiatives?
We ran across a recent infographic in a Business2Community post, authored by Danny Ashton and we love it so much we just have to share it.
First of all, we love Danny’s definition that so accurately describes what an email signature is:
“At its simplest, your email signature is an electronic business card: ‘here’s my message, and here’s how to reach me’. Identifying who you are and what you do is a no-brainer. Adding a professional-looking headshot (hi-res and appropriate to your brand) can be a nice personal touch – and potential memory-prompt to sometime acquaintances with handshake fatigue! Phone numbers and email addresses should be kept to a minimum (no more than one of each), and all this information should be neatly divided and spaced out so it’s easily accessible to your busy client.”
But more than that, according to Danny, your email signature can be a very powerful marketing tool:
“Brand consistency is a key element, whether you’re emailing on behalf of your own business or you’re part of a bigger organization. Ensuring the fonts, colours, and tone are aligned with that of your colleagues and your broader web and print marketing makes you easily identifiable and contributes to your company’s strong image.”
Danny lists out 7 ways to improve your email signature:
Make it simple – avoid the use of too many graphics, colors and fonts
Keep it short – include vital information and cut out needless information
Inform your recipients – include information on any upcoming promotions, product launches, events or latest blog posts that might be of interest to the recipient
Be consistent – your signature should reflect your company’s visual identity
Break it up – make use of pipes (|), colons (:) or dividers to condense the number of lines
Get social – include social media links to your company’s main accounts, unless you’re happy for people to reach out to you via your personal accounts
Include additional details – include additional details such as your title and department so your recipients know whom they’re talking with right away
Did you know that there is actually an entire company devoted to employee email signature marketing? Sigstr allows marketers to showcase the company’s most important initiatives via call-to-action campaigns to the most engaged audience – those your employees are emailing with directly. In addition, Sigstr allows your company to gain control of employee’s email signatures to ensure proper formatting and branding on every single employee email signature. No longer will you have to worry about outdated signatures, formatting issues, or wrong uses of colors or fonts. And best of all, get the data to see what’s working!
Ready to get started with the power of employee email signature marketing? Check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Every SaaS marketer understands the power of marketing as it relates to filling the funnel, progressing opportunities through the pipeline, and improving brand impressions. For several years, digital marketers have relied upon the trusty “paid, owned, earned, and shared” channels that have proven to be successful: boost website traffic with SEO, attend tradeshows and host field marketing events, use digital advertising and remarketing, implement a PR strategy, use social media, and on and on.
Digital marketers are open about sharing these tried and true channels with each other, and it’s true – they’ve proven successful and have gotten many SaaS companies to where they are today – along with a lot of hard work, trial and error, and sales velocity.
As a high growth SaaS company, your marketing team cares a LOT about retention and account growth for your current customers, as well as scaling your MRR and ARR growth rates of attracting new customers and logos. In order to accomplish your lofty goals each month, quarter and year, you’re likely investing heavily in the traditional channels above as a way to capture interest and educate your audience about your technology.
Check out our newest ebook and explore in depth 4 emerging channels every SaaS Digital Marketer should add to their marketing mix:
Email Signature Marketing (Owned Media)
LinkedIn Sponsored Updates (Paid Media)
Video Marketing & YouTube Video Cards (Earned/Shared Media)
Content Recommendations (Paid Media)
For more information on how your SaaS company can accelerate in the digital marketing age, check out these recent Sigstr resources:
As a high growth SaaS company, you care a LOT about retention and account growth for your current customers, as well as scaling your MRR and ARR growth rates of attracting new customers and logos. In order to accomplish your lofty goals each month, quarter and year, you’re likely investing heavily in mass email marketing, digital marketing channels and event marketing as a way to capture interest and educate your audience about your technology. But how are you leveraging the thousands of one-to-one business emails (such as Gmail or Outlook) your employees are sending directly to prospects, customers, industry influencers, and technology partners?
Did you know each of your employees likely send about 10,000 one-to-one emails annually? Multiple that by how many employees you have, and that’s a LOT of personal email. And best yet, each email sent represents an opportunity to drive awareness and engagement for your events, content marketing assets, and marketing campaigns to your most engaged audience: those that are interacting with your employees on a 1:1 basis – not through a mass marketing play.
Top SaaS Brands Trust Sigstr to Power Email Signature Marketing:
Leverage Email Signature Marketing Campaigns at Your SaaS Company:
Account Growth & Retention:Keeping your current customers happy is key to success for SaaS companies.Use email signature marketing campaigns across your customer success, services and account management teams to shareproduct release notes, new product or service announcements, and inspiration and best practices on how to be successful using your SaaS product
New Customer & Logos:New customer acquisition is critical to your company – and every month and every quarter your targets keep increasing, but your number of sales reps may not be.Include email signature marketing campaigns for your new business sales and sales development teams to showcasenew customer case studies, ebooks and reports, upcoming educational webinars, infographics, and explainer Videos
Talent Recruitment:Your HR and talent recruitment teams are competing against many other SaaS companies – some maybe a lot larger than your company with a greater history of success. Your HR team is on the front-lines and need as many tools as possible to showcase your awesome company culture, growth, and vision for the future. Make sure your recruiting team is using their email signatures to showcase your brand, culture via a video by your CEO or other employees, and press releases and company growth stories.
As a SaaS company, you know how important events and relationship building is to your industry. You invest a lot of dollars and time into booths, hosting customer events, and putting on webinars. But none of that matters unless you’re able to connect with the right attendees. Did you know that the promotion of events is actually the highest converting kind of Sigstr campaign? We’ll show you how Return Path uses Sigstr to promote their important company events below, or check out the full case study.
Return Path Use Case:
Return Path needed a solution that would allow one person to easily manage all employee signatures, while also tracking and optimizing the success of email signature marketing campaigns. Return Path began using Sigstr as a way to control branding on all sales and marketing emails, as well as promote the company’s most important initiatives and content. One of the first campaigns promoted the Return Path World Tour – Return Path hosted events taking place around the world. The Sigstr campaign directed those who clicked on the image to a specific landing page with further details about the events. During the 3 months that Return Path promoted the events, the campaign was displayed over 150,000 times and resulted in over 1,900 clicks with several registrations a direct result of the Sigstr campaign!
Want to check out the power of employee signature marketing for your own SaaS company? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sigstr.
“Employee email represents a tremendous, and largely untapped, opportunity for marketers, and we are just getting started unlocking that potential. We can’t imagine being better positioned for the future, and the decision to scale our business in Indianapolis is a huge part of our competitive advantage.”
The Sigstr office is completely open, adorned with a bright green wall, trendy artwork, and an assortment of desks that are frequently rearranged to make room for our growing team. The thought of cubicles lining our walls is almost laughable. Personal space is not a concept we are particularly familiar with.From my seat, I can easily communicate with anyone in any department. While distractions are frequent, we benefit immensely from the increased level of collaboration.
At the end of last quarter, Sigstr hosted our first ever Sigstr Field Day. The company spent half of a Friday playing whiffle ball and other miscellaneous games. It was glorious. That evening, I told a friend about my day at work. She rolled her eyes and joked about the “difficulty” of my job. While the teasing was lighthearted, the problem was that my friend didn’t know the whole story. Sigstr Field Day was created in celebration of the fact that we had exceeded quarterly goals. Ironically, the day was the RESULT of hard work and dedication. The Sigstr team may have a lot of fun, but the company’s success is always our number one priority.
Beyond the hard work, there’s also a high level of uncertainty in working for a start-up. Sigstr has proven it is a viable business, however, there is a certain level of ambiguity in ongoing strategy and direction. Hard-hitting questions are asked every day. What’s our next step? What features are the most important? Are we targeting the right people? Should we go in a new direction? As a result, big decisions are made that impact the whole team. Anxiety certainly ensues. The only solace is to have faith in the vision and experience of our leadership team.
SalesLoft: “One of the best use cases for Sigstr has traditionally been event marketing,” explained Dan. “As 
The Sigstr Campaign for Lesson.ly includes a fun ‘Meet the Team’ image, which points to a blog post that talks about the Lesson.ly culture and how important that is to their mission. Just a few weeks after launching the Campaign, the sales team already had 3 companies raise their hand for that initial conversation, as tracked via the Sigstr Campaign.
The awesome people at HubSpot preach the importance of landing pages and how each one should be connected to a HubSpot campaign – which is what we do here at Sigstr. And so, by connecting my Sigstr campaign to the right HubSpot landing page, I can connect the two and see the impact of employee email signatures within a specific HubSpot campaign.
“Building an exceptional and easy-to-use product is incredibly important to the Sigstr team,” said Sam Smith, VP of Product at Sigstr. “Our customers are replacing their manual and time consuming ways of updating signatures, and we have built a product to make this process seamless. These new product updates are critical to our users, and we are hard at work building further integrations and product updates that will deliver incredible ROI and brand cohesion.”
Weve all been victims. A well-intending colleague sends out a company-wide email about leftover pizza in the breakroom and all hell breaks loose. One person unintentionally asks the entire office if there is left-over pepperoni at the same time the office jokester replies with a GIF of stampeding elephants. All of a sudden, inboxes are full and everyone is annoyed, confused, or best case scenario, entertained. Whatever the situation, do not be tempted to reply-all to tell everyone else to stop replying-all. You are part of the problem.
If any email signatures in your company look like this, youre doing it all wrong.
The third and final step of my campaign design process is building out the format of the campaign. When I start to assemble my campaigns, I almost always start at 400 pixels by 96 pixels and adjust from there. I then take all the information that I know I want to include in the campaign and just throw it inside to see how much information I need to work with. Visual hierarchy is a huge part of how a campaign comes together for email signatures. Always be sure to prioritize the most information. 
For marketers, keeping the brand consistent across all employees can be a major struggle. 
Check out SteelHouse’s most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date promoting their newest resource, “2015 Holiday Digital Marketing Guide”.
