Since its debut in 1989, many things have been said about Seinfeld. Reviews run the gamut from “the greatest sitcom in history” to “I don’t get it,” and while certainly polarizing, there’s one thing that’s for sure: Jerry, Elaine, George, Kramer & their host of friends or enemies (looking at you, Newman) are certainly characters.
In this edition, we take a look at what the email signatures of the Seinfeld gang, their acquaintances, bosses, and roommates would look like.
Jerry Seinfeld
Our protagonist, Mr. Jerome Allen Seinfeld, is the kind of guy that probably hates emails. But, as we all know, in this day and age, email is as inescapable as Crazy Joe Davola after his script gets rejected. Jerry’s always been a ladies man (emphasis on the plural there). And sure, he’s still in the observational comedy game, but things aren’t quite as lucrative as they were in the Night Club days. However, not to worry, as we like to think that Jerry’s entered into the age of the side-hustle in style by starting his own dating service. While it’s unclear whether he can remember any of his customers’ names on his own (ahem, Deloris), we’re optimistic Jerry’s dating service is getting some serious benefit from Sigstr’s email signature marketing and relationship data.
Elaine Benes
Speaking of Jerry’s ex-girlfriends, we like to imagine that Elaine is much more email-friendly. After her stints at Pendant Publishing and J. Peterman (more on him later), Elaine finds herself in between jobs.
After some downtime, Elaine has examined what she’s really qualified for and turned to the entrepreneur life. If you guessed a school of dance, you’re right, as she likes to think “refined” and “classy” email signature marketing is the best way to promote her unique dancing technique. Her sender-based banners are super effective in promoting upcoming dance classes, and she’s even begun using ABM functionality to target past dancers for new classes.
George Costanza
In his lifelong quest for happiness, love, parental approval, and whatever else he actually wants in life, our dear friend George is certainly not short on resume entries. After stints (of varying levels of success and reality) as a latex salesman, a hand model, a marine biologist, and even a sales rep on the Penske file, George finds himself living the dream (again).
Somehow, even after faking another disability to try and get his own bathroom, the younger Steinbrenner has given old Georgey boy a second chance, and he’s back playing for the winning team in ticket sales. Luckily, the Yankees’ marketing team is killing it with their email signature campaigns, promoting upcoming games and special events at the Stadium.
Even better, their efforts have helped put George near the top of his sales team, bringing pride to the Costanza name and finally redirecting his classic realization: “Every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every walk of life, be it something to wear, something to eat…it’s all been wrong.” Play ball, Cant-Stand-Ya!
Cosmo Kramer
Ever the enigma, Kramer has shown that he has quite a few “professional” talents over the years. From golf, to acting, to driving a bus, the Seinfeld character who never seems to have a job at least makes one thing clear. Whatever Cosmo does, he does it in style. That’s why, after the gang disperses, he finds himself taking the entrepreneurial route and starting his own men’s clothing shop.
Just like the store’s stock, ranging from upscale undergarments (The Bro™) to everyday threads (puffy shirts) to formalwear (Technicolor Dreamcoat, anyone?), Kramer’s eye for style is exhibited in his email signature. He’s found great success with campaigns promoting upcoming sales and incoming inventory. The best part? He’ll never have to worry about being fired for missing work on Festivus.
Newman
After all his time in the “service” (the postal service, that is), Newman’s hard work has finally paid off! In spite of his inability to talk to people, his status as a company man has earned him a couple of promotions, and we find our fair villain in a desk job at the all-powerful USPS.
While he’d have never been able to install his own email signature by himself, the Postal Service’s marketing team has him covered with a handy, centrally-controlled email signature and dynamic campaigns to boot! Now, instead of sending terribly sinister emails with nothing but his name as the sign-off, Newman’s presumably diabolical and mail-zealous emails are brand standard and show off some the latest USPS best practices! Who would have thought Newman would actually help people ship things to their family and friends right in time for the holidays!
J Peterman
After Elaine’s old boss started feeling the decline of catalogs, Jacopo Peterman and his team resorted to some new-age marketing techniques. Competing with smaller boutiques (like Kramer’s) has been tough, but in an effort to rev up their strategy, team J Peterman has elected to get hyper-specific in their persona targeting.
Now, even from Burma or while meeting the bushmen of the Kalahari, J. Peterman can get the word out about new band-collar shirts, updated vests and, of course, the Urban Sombrero.
Art Vandelay
The ever-elusive importer/exporter (and, on the side, latex tycoon) has maintained his success all these years. But as content marketing has hit its stride (especially in the B2B space), Vandelay Industries’ bottom line has responded favorably to the influx of content being produced. While nobody has actually met the guy, his name is on everyone’s email, and he’s using the piece of digital real estate to promote ebooks, reports, and blog posts.
So there you have it. Even though the best email signatures of this post are about “nothing,” luckily, they all prove everyone has something worth promoting in their email signature.
This guest post is brought to you by the amazing team at OneCause. Joshua Meyer brings over 14 years of fundraising, volunteer management, and marketing experience to his current role as the Director of Marketing for OneCause. Currently, as a member of the OneCause sales and marketing team, Josh manages all of the firm’s marketing efforts. He has a passion for helping to create positive change and loves that his current role allows him to help nonprofits engage new donors and achieve their fundraising goals.
The end of the year brings a lot of things (hello Black Friday and holiday parties!), and for nonprofits, it also means deadlines.
When you’re working towards a goal, whether it’s financial, donation-based, or even simple brand recognition, nothing looms so large as the end of the year.
Luckily, the end of the year is also a time of incredible opportunity and generosity from donors. Thanks to a combination of advertised campaigns like Giving Tuesday and good old-fashioned holiday spirit, the end of the year typically means a spike in nonprofit donations: nearly 30% of all charitable donations come during the month of December.
While nonprofit teams have their donors and are ready to get started, the actual logistics of a year-end fundraiser are another thing altogether. With so many promotions, greetings, and messages hitting your audience from all angles throughout the end of the year, breaking through this noise can seem somewhat impossible.
We’ve rounded up a quick list of 5 essential tips for marketing your end-of-year fundraisers:
1. Know your audience
You’d be surprised how many nonprofit teams blindly assume people will donate or support their cause just because. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. You need to show your audience why your cause should be important to them. Ask questions like:
What is the value you’re bringing to your community?
What benefits are you providing?
What is a personal anecdote connecting you and your donors?
You can jump-start your personal messaging by leveraging a detailed CRM platform that houses all sorts of supporter information including how they heard about your organization and how they have been involved in the past.
2. Pay attention to location
When it comes time to reach out to donors (both returning and new) to promote a fundraiser or drive donations, you need to have a good sense of where these engagements are coming from.
While a local 5K might sound like a great idea, if a majority of donors are from out of town, then this might not make that much sense. Consider these location-specific aspects of your fundraise:
First, think about the location of your supporters, as well as the past campaigns and events you’ve hosted.
Then, go back through feedback and results to see what worked and what didn’t, and allow this to be the basis of your marketing strategy.
Make sure you’re a using top event management platforms designed specifically for nonprofits. More generic software might not provide easy access to data like past engagement metrics that you’ll need to plan an engaging, location-specific event.
3. Have a clear CTA
Too often, nonprofit organizations want (and need) so much from their supporters that they ask for it all instead of narrowing their focus.
While end-of-year giving is all about meeting goals, there should be a clear message in your marketing efforts to actually spark action from your supporters.
If you’re trying to drive ticket sales for an end-of-year gala, for example, then ask people to ‘Buy Tickets Now’ in your CTAs. Designing a bold, interesting design for your email signature banners will always be a smarter move than using vague, forgettable messaging like ‘Get Involved’ or ‘Learn More’.
While there are always ways to cross-promote your campaigns (such as providing a donation field on your registration page), choose a main CTA and stick with it across your marketing efforts. This will help streamline your internal team and keep all of your supporters on the same page.
4. Make it personal
While individuals crave an emotional, personal connection with a nonprofit, they also want to be able to share this personal experience with others. As you’re marketing your end of year campaign, share stories of donors and supporters who have created lasting relationships with your organization. Consider:
Showcasing how these special people got involved with your team and your mission to help hit on a personal note for others.
Making it easy for your supporters to help you out and share their stories with others.
Putting these tips into action involves becoming more active on social media, including share links in all communications (such as your email signature), and maintaining a candid public image.
5. Make it modern
When you think of an end-of-year charity event, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
If you’re thinking posters in a coffee shop bathroom, you’re not the only one. But, as technology and solutions for nonprofit teams have evolved, so too has the technology in place to help market and promote these campaigns.
Online giving is just the tip of the iceberg. There are solutions in place that make it easy for donors to get involved, to actually make donations, and even to promote your organization to their networks.
Nonprofit marketing channels have stepped their game up as well. From innovative direct mail to email signature marketing, there is nothing but opportunity. It’s just important to know where to look.
Take your nonprofit marketing to the next level
Emails aren’t just for sales anymore. As more and more businesses enter the world of corporate giving, email has become one of the most well-used (and well-received) channels to promote fundraising efforts. With the right segmentation, the right message, and the right design, your team can break through the noise this holiday season.
Don’t be afraid to share amazing content, drive your supporters to engaging, exciting landing pages, and really deliver unique nonprofit experiences. Whether you’re a nonprofit or corporate charity, email marketing can help take your fundraising efforts to the next level.
Santa came early at the Sigstr office! We’re thrilled to announce four new integrations, an updated end user experience, and expanded relationship intelligence features. Check out the details below.
Email Signature Marketing
PathFactory Integration
Link Sigstr campaigns to PathFactory content tracks with just one click! Identify who clicks on your email signature banners and track content consumption with no added effort. Using these insights, optimize your email signature campaigns and content offers, while simultaneously identifying highly engaged prospects.
Eloqua Integration
Enhance your digital efforts with the power of relationship intelligence and email signature marketing. Seamlessly connect Sigstr to Eloqua contact segments, landing pages and reporting through a new set of easy to use, point and click user interfaces.
Uberflip Integration
Connect your Uberflip-powered content to every email sent by your employees. With the Uberflip URLs automatically tagged with the appropriate parameters, you will be able to measure how many views, form submissions, contacts, and customers won are sourced from Sigstr.
Employee Banner Selection
Give employees the power to select their own email signature campaigns. Provide users with a number of choices as well as a recommended, default campaign. Employees can then choose the campaign that is the most relevant to the customers and prospects they are emailing.
Sender-Based Campaign URLs
Personalize your Sigstr campaigns even further by aligning URLs to individual employee links. By dynamically updating campaign URLs to reflect who is sending the email, you can ensure your employees are connecting with top customers and prospects through WhatsApp, Calendly, and more.
Signature Backup
For any new G Suite user, Sigstr will automatically save a copy of the user’s original signature before overriding it with Sigstr content. In the event that you would like to roll back Sigstr signatures for a specific user or group, we will be able to restore the original signature with no problem.
Sigstr Relationships
List Enhancement
Marketing programs are built on the backbone of meaningful lists – ABM lists, event invite lists, event lead lists, prospect lists, customer lists, and the list (pun intended) goes on. Sigstr Relationships lets you import lists directly into the application to instantly understand your relationships with every contact or account. Track account to account scores and see how relationships are trending. Specify list favorites to find your most important segments with ease.
Salesforce Relationship Integration
Enhance your Salesforce data with the power of Sigstr Relationships. Within Salesforce, leverage relationship scores to remove the guesswork around opportunities, see which coworkers provide the best path to every contact and account, and ensure all of the customers and prospects your teammates are emailing are captured in real-time.
Contact Activity Feed
The contact section of Sigstr Relationships has been completely revamped to provide a live feed of relationship activity. View and understand key connections to prospects and customers, understand how your efforts are influencing account penetration and development, and take action to drive key contacts through the sales funnel.
Sigstr Platform
SOC 2 Type 1 Certification
Rest easy with Sigstr’s increased data security! Sigstr recently achieved SOC 2 Type 1 certification which defines criteria for managing customer data on 5 trust principles – security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. This certification ensures that Sigstr has industry leading security protocols and procedures in place when it comes to data security.
Office 365 SSO
Tired of remembering lengthy passwords for every application in your team’s repertoire? Use our SSO feature, and login to Sigstr with just one click! The feature is available to all Office 365 users and simply requires employees to sign into Sigstr using their Outlook credentials.
Employee Preference Center
The Employee Preference Center now gives end users the opportunity to update notification and signature settings. Give employees the control they need to turn on or off click notifications, weekly relationship recommendations, personal email signatures, and campaign banners.
Outlook 3.0
Take advantage of Sigstr’s latest Outlook Agent! Once installed, employee signatures will continue to exist on each user’s machine, even if Outlook is closed, internet connectivity is not available, or the add-in is disabled. If an email is able to be sent, signature images will be visible to end recipients – even if they are not loaded for the sender.
Ready to put these new features to use? Request access here or by reaching out to your Customer Success Manager.
If you’re an Uberflip user today, or you’re at least thinking about making the investment, it’s safe to assume your team is committed to delivering a top-notch content experience for your customers and prospects. It’s a commitment we highly respect, and one we have made ourselves as Uberflip customers.
Once a team is confident in their ability to deliver a stellar content experience, the next priority is to direct more traffic to the Resource Hub and get their content in front of the right audience. (Clears throat)…allow us to introduce your new favorite channel for promoting content.
Everyday Email: The Perfect Channel for Personalized Content
Think of the billions of emails you and your employees send out of Gmail or Outlook every year. Not only are these brand impressions with your most important audience, they also represent thousands upon thousands of opportunities to promote your best content. Teams today use email signature marketing to turn these missed marketing opportunities into a brand new channel for content distribution. And with Sigstr, you can now connect your Uberflip-powered content into every email sent by your employees.
Easily Connect Uberflip Content to Email Signature Campaigns
While creating a new email signature campaign in Sigstr, users can select “Connect To Platform” and see their Uberflip content right within Sigstr. Simply select the stream you want the banner to promote and launch within minutes.
Deliver Account-Specific Content to ABM Targets
Shared customer, Snowflake, is using the integration for their award-winning ABM program. Their account-specific email signature banners lead to personalized content streams tailored to the target account.
A Trackable Distribution Channel for Your Content
By connecting both platforms, Sigstr will also automatically append UTM parameters so users can track traffic and conversions sourced from their employees’ email signatures in Google Analytics. For us, as everyday users of both platforms, email signature marketing has emerged as the third leading source of traffic to our Resource Hub (just behind search and direct traffic).
More on Today’s Big News
We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Uberflip’s great team and innovative platform. This integration has already brought tremendous value to our own email signature marketing strategy (as you can see in the GIF above). With the power of employee email joining forces with Uberflip’s Content Experience Platform, this integration is sure to become a game-changer for content marketers and ABM execution.
Uberflip and Sigstr Integrate to Bring Personalized Content into Every Employee Email
Leading Email Signature Marketing Solution and Content Experience Platform Partner to Provide Brand New Distribution Channel to Deliver Personalized Content
Toronto and Indianapolis, November 28, 2018 – Uberflip, the leading content experience platform, and Sigstr, the leading email signature marketing platform, today announced an integration that allows B2B marketers to easily and accurately deliver personalized content streams into every email their employees send. This integration gives marketers a brand new distribution channel through the corporate email system that personalizes content based on who’s receiving the email.
Billions of one-to-one emails are sent by companies every year, but too often these emails are overlooked as an effective content distribution channel. By assigning content streams to segments like target accounts, personas, or geographics, shared Sigstr and Uberflip customers can be sure that every email contains a relevant call-to-action, regardless of who’s sending it. By providing cross-platform click-through and conversion analytics, marketers can understand who’s engaging with Uberflip content experiences.
“Content is the fuel of every B2B marketing team, but all too often that content collects dust as distribution channels become saturated and segmenting becomes too time-consuming,” said Sigstr CEO, Bryan Wade. “I am so excited about this integration because it delivers Uberflip’s amazing content experiences to a massive audience via Gmail, Outlook, etc.— whether you’re promoting content to the entire world or delivering account-specific content through your ABM strategy.”
Shared customer, Snowflake Computing, is using the integration to deliver account-specific banners in employee emails that lead to personalized content streams tailored to their target accounts. “You can’t use mass emails in an account-based strategy. Personal one-to-one emails are the best way to deliver content and using Sigstr and Uberflip together has become one of our most effective ABM channels,” said Daniel Day, Director of ABM at Snowflake.
“Delivering personalized content experiences is key to any business,” said Yoav Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO at Uberflip. “Our customers will now be able to take their content a step further, by connecting these two technologies to distribute their experiences straight to the inbox in a very personalized, targeted way.”
At Sigstr, one of our core values is to “Believe Big”. This applies to everything we do. The leadership team awards us the freedom and encourages us to bring our big, crazy ideas to fruition.
In one of our weekly company meetings, someone said, “we should have Dog Days of November and let one employee every day bring in their pup. I think it would make everyone so happy.”
And so we did.
From November 1st to the 30th, we had dogs in the office almost every day. And guess what? It made everyone so happy. If you’ve been around this blog before, you know that we like to have a little extra fun with our content sometimes. This is one of those times. We wanted to do something special to commemorate all of the Sigstr pups that visited this past month, so we took a page out of the WeRateDogs playbook.
You can check out some of our favorite pictures from Dog Days of November on Instagram @Sigstr!
Day 1: Sonne
This is Sonne. She is the most well-behaved girl but she’s got a flair for the dramatics. 6-star performance. 14/10 good pup.
Day 2: Willow
This is Willow. Willow was a little shy but all she needed was a nap and to cuddle with her human to make her feel better. 13/10 extremely relatable.
Day 3: Toast
This is Toast. Toast came in because he heard we had good snacks. Then he had too many snacks. 13/10 for this snack coma snooze.
Day 4 & 5: Java & Mochi
This is Java. He’s half golden retriever and half corgi which equals one whole cute goob boy. 12/10 perfect combo. 100/10 smile.
This is Mochi. Mochi treats are notoriously hard on the outside but soft and gooey on the inside. A 13/10 perfect name to describe this perfect pup.
Day 6: Blue
This is Blue. We thought he would be so hyper that he would tear up the office. Instead, he was so sleepy and cuddly he tore up our hearts. 13/10 good boy.
Day 7: Tux
This is Tux. Tux wants to remind you that you are awesome and if you need him he’s only a pidder-padder away. 13/10 for Tux check-ins.
Day 8: Stretch
This is Stretch. Stretch was rescued from Utah, hiked some of the Appalachian trail with his human, and enjoys long walks in the woods. 14/10 for this adventurous and smiley pup.
Day 9: Nala
This is Nala. Nala’s dad raised her right and taught her the importance of a firm handshake. 12/10 for this professional pupper.
Day 10: Ramsay
This is Ramsay. This is clearly a fox, not a dog. We only rate dogs. It’s Dog Days of November not Fox Days of November.
Day 11: Lemmy
This is Lemmy. Lemmy moved here from sunny California. He gives Indiana -1/10 for weather. We give him 12/10 for manly facial hair.
Day 12: Willow
This is Willow. Willow had a really good day. She learned that coming into the office isn’t scary at all and even wandered around to say hi to everyone. 13/10 for this courageous doggo.
Day 13: Lucy
This is Lucy. Lucy was so happy to come with her dad to work that she couldn’t stop wiggling. 13/10 for this wiggle monster.
Day 14: Dug
This is Dug. Dug decided he wanted to help the custodial staff during his day. Although he didn’t communicate this with management, we do appreciate Dug’s dumpster diving skills and eliminating leftover bagels for us. 12/10 and 2 thumbs up.
Day 15: Ramsay
Ramsay again! We were wrong, he brought in his certification papers and he is, indeed, a dog. 12/10 for proving us wrong.
Day 16: Chloe
This is Chloe. Chloe wanted to show you that she can fit her whole tongue around her nose. 13/10 hopes you’re impressed.
Day 17: Cooper
This is Cooper. Cooper wanted to take a picture with his dad for their annual Christmas card. Cropped out his dad. 12/10 needs your address.
More and more marketers are realizing something we’ve known at Sigstr for a long time: employee email is a valuable marketing channel and email signature marketing (ESM) is the secret to unlocking this channel. For many teams, ESM has become a main source for promoting events, driving engagement, and bolstering initiatives.
Whether you’ve been following along with our content proving that email signatures draw attention and drive clicks, or you’ve come into the space on your own and are looking for tips, tricks, and best practices, we’re here to help you understand how to best drive engagement – but also help you know if (and when) purchasing email signature marketing is the right choice for your business.
Just by virtue of reading this, the great news is – you’re on the right track! It may be that you’re currently either using or thinking of implementing a manual solution for your company’s email signatures. This is a fantastic way to dip your toes into the world of ESM, and we encourage marketers to pursue this option.
Employee time = real money
If you’re sending an email to everyone in your company featuring the correct branding guidelines for the email signature and a banner to copy/paste at the bottom of messages, that’s a great sign that you’re on the right track for harnessing your employee email. But think about it – we’ve all seen the email that marketing sends to everyone at the company with 10 to 12 steps on how to update their email signature (which takes time away from the marketer’s day).
If it takes each employee 8 minutes to walk through that process of setting up their email signature and campaign, and they make an average of $30 per hour, what does that math look like? For a company of 1,500 employees, that comes to 200 hours, or a $6,000 hit in productivity to your company EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to make adjustments to that marketing message. Our best practices suggest switching out a marketing campaign every 4 to 6 weeks to keep the messaging fresh. If that 1,500-person company changes out a campaign once a month, they’re losing $72,000 in productivity over the course of the year.
That’s not to mention other time-wasters and hiccups with the manual process. If you’re looking to segment different email signatures based on teams or departments, that’s even more time spent changing out campaigns. And there’s always the inevitable employees who won’t follow directions and will be off-brand, even after countless follow-up emails and check-ins (time wasters themselves). In short – this process can get messy, and it can get expensive.
Save time for your employees while adding value
That’s why Sigstr is here to help. If you’re a marketer looking to implement standardized email signature marketing across your company – you’re clearly already a rockstar! We want to work alongside amazing people like you and help make the process simpler, less expensive, and more effective.
Sigstr gives central control of company-wide email signatures. We work with your IT team to deploy across your entire organization in a seamless implementation process. Once completed, you as the marketer have full control over the email signature and call-to-action banner. There will never again be the need to take your employees’ time (and your company’s money!) to ensure that your latest initiatives are being promoted.
In addition to the centralized control, Sigstr offers advanced functionality that simply isn’t possible in a home-grown solution. Our scheduling feature lets you plan out campaigns months in advance, and switch to a new campaign depending on when time-sensitive events begin and end. Targeted campaigns allow you to switch out campaigns based on recipients, so that you can ensure that your top prospects, key partners, and current customers are seeing exactly the right message at the right time. The level of personalization allowed with Sigstr is unprecedented, and adding a new campaign takes no end-user time. Think of a company like Lumavate – they’re using Sigstr as part of their ABM strategy, implementing hundreds of targeted campaigns to key accounts. Can you imagine them asking their end-users to switch out campaigns every time they compose an email based on the recipient? With Sigstr, the marketing team has full control over that messaging and targeting, and they’re saving time and money by centralizing the management.
Additionally, Sigstr allows you to track concrete numbers, attribution, and ROI. If you’re doing ESM on your own, hopefully you’re measuring performance with UTM parameters to understand how valuable the space can be! We’re able to go beyond that, offering CRM integrations, recipient analytics, Google Analytics tracking, in-app analytics, end-user notifications, and more. We work hard to give you visibility into what Sigstr is doing for your business.
Free up IT resources
Building your own ESM solution is not one-and-done. As with everything in computing, there a million ways to get all your employee email signatures looking the same. If you’ve talked to your IT or engineering team about solving this, they’ve probably got some ideas! But as with anything in the IT world, a project is never truly done.
Email client compatibility, HTML, content rendering, template design best practices, email deliverability – centrally controlling email signatures is a deceptively complex task. If you choose to build your own ESM solution in house, your IT department should be aware that they’ll be expected to maintain it over time, fix it when it’s broken, and tackle new projects in the future when you want to improve things. Sigstr has years of industry experience building and supporting all of this for hundreds of customers – each with their own unique tech stacks and use cases – and we’re always adding more!
If you’re ready to take ESM to the next level, Sigstr is here to help
Of course, Sigstr comes at a cost, and we work hard to determine the best packaging and pricing for your company. We want to be sure to give you exactly what you need to succeed, at a price point that makes sense. And we’re confident that you’ll see a clear return on investment.
Experimenting on your own with ESM is great, and we highly encourage it! By setting up standardized email signatures and campaign banners, you’re already halfway there. We’re here to help take what you’re already doing and save you time and money, in addition to delivering more options for central control for your marketing team. We hope you’re ready to work with us – because we’re ready to work with you.
This post is brought to you by our friends at Sendoso, the Engagement Delivery Platform. Source, send, and centralize direct mail, swag, and gifts all from one platform with Sendoso. Guest author: Brianna Valleskey, Sr. Content Marketing Manager.
Strategic marketers aim to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
But rather than pushing a demo after three nurture emails or calling a prospect two minutes after downloading an ebook, I think we should interpret this idea to mean personalizing your outreach so that you’re talking to the right person about the right things at a time that makes sense.
And I’d venture to say that we should be instructing our sales teams about this level of personalization across the funnel. Our buyers are telling us they want personalized experiences, and we know that targeting them on a one-to-one basis increases response rates by 50% or more.
This doesn’t mean simply using a CRM field to add your prospect’s first name, company name, or title into an email subject line. That’s customization. Personalization is about connecting with them in ways that are relevant and meaningful—understanding who they are as a person, what their goals are in their role, where they are in your sales funnel, why they’re talking to you, etc.
More importantly, we can (and should) educate, reinforce, and equip our sales reps with methods for implementing this level of personalization at scale; turning them into micro-marketers, if you will. There are a number of ways to do this, but here are a few ideas we can use to start.
How to Turn Your Sales Team Into Micro-Marketers
1. Leverage Sales Email Touch Points
Your sales reps send and receive a whopping 10,000 emails a year. And every single one of those email touch points is an incredible opportunity to sprinkle in marketing messages. But we’re not talking about the email text itself. Research shows that when someone receives an email, the majority of their attention goes to the email signature! That means your sales reps can drive awareness for events, promote new marketing materials, share product updates, and more all without taking away from the actual email message.
Of course, you don’t want to have to bother your team to update their email signature every time you’ve got something new to promote. But an email signature marketing platform like Sigstr enables you to centralize the entire process and autonomously update email signature templates for your entire sales team. Plus, it works. Sigstr found that email signature marketing campaigns achieve 1,500 more clicks than traditional marketing email clicks. You can even add an extra layer of personalization to each email sent by your sales team with dynamic templates that automatically display specific banners based on a recipient’s industry, account, and even sales stage.
2. Initiate personalized Direct Mail Sends
A prospect’s email inbox is one way to drive personalized communication, but a package on their desk is an opportunity to engage them in a tangible way. So, complement your sales team’s personalized email sends with powerful and relevant direct mail touchpoints! After all, direct mail is more likely to drive behavior than digital media, and I don’t just mean postcards. Encourage your team to send physical gifts, handwritten notes, swag, wine, or even cupcakes. Studies reveal that even sending a small gift can significantly impact the success of a negotiation in sales (increasing revenue by more than 300% in some cases).
Direct mail sends have traditionally been a batch function run by marketing that could take up to 20 hours of work for a single campaign. But fully integrated direct mail and gifting solutions like Sendoso give individual reps the autonomy to send anything—including the examples listed above—at any time on a one-to-one basis (without all the grunt work). Salespeople can even use an Amazon integration to send hyper-personalized gifts specific to their prospects’ interests. Companies have seen up to 60% response rates for packages sent and generated $1,000 in pipeline for every dollar spent. Plus, there are hundreds of ways to get creative and rise above the noise with prospects.
3. Train Reps on Storytelling for Events
Live events can be a critical leverage point for your sales reps, both in terms of discovering new prospects and accelerating current deals. More than 91% of over-performing businesses place a greater emphasis on live events as a marketing channel than their counterparts. Conferences and trade shows account for one-fifth or more of planned meetings activity as well. But the key is to arm your sales reps who attend these events with a toolbox of powerful stories they can tell, personalized to each of your buyer personas.
Empower reps with the right stories: What is the most important thing each of their target prospects needs to know about your product or service? Why should they care? At events, they must be able to answer these questions on the fly. As stated in SmartBug Media’s SaaS Marketing Strategies report, this requires training and enablement. You can host your own internal training sessions on a regular basis (perhaps weekly or monthly, depending on your bandwidth), or consider leveraging a learning management system like Lessonly to train everyone in detail, but at scale.
Executing these small, yet powerful strategies doesn’t mean sales reps will be operating at the level of your actual marketing team, but rather supplementing the campaigns already in action. And you don’t need to stress over sales team adoption. Each of the tools mentioned will help streamline the process and make these interactions as easy as possible for your reps.
This is the first in a series of blog posts where we recount the Sigstr sales and marketing team’s transition to using relationships as our key performance indicator.
BFFs Are the New MQLs
Don’t get a marketer started on their lead scoring framework and qualification process. Setting them up is complicated and often require a consultant’s help to make them function correctly. After that, weighting the behavioral and firmographic attributes is guesswork at best, and they require constant tinkering to keep them consistent with their sales team’s objectives.
And for all that work, what do we get? A sales team that’s either complaining that leads aren’t warmed up enough because the MQL (marketing qualified lead) threshold is too low or they’re not getting enough leads because it’s too high. But that’s not the worst part. After all that scoring, nurturing, flow-chart making, and eyebrow furrowing, those MQLs only turn into customers 6.2% of the time.
While MQLs are important for managing your funnel, they’re statistically crummy predictors of customer win rates. A more predictive indicator of customer win rates is relationship development. 98% of sales and marketing pros agree that an authentic relationship is a critical element of customer acquisition, according to research recently conducted by Sigstr and Heinz Marketing. But you didn’t need a statistic to believe that developing relationships is important to growing your business.
The Importance of Developing Relationships
Relationships have been important to businesses ever since the first shiny rock was traded for a sharp rock. But in the past ten years, relationship marketing made a huge resurgence in the form of Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is, by definition, figuring out the people with whom you want to develop a business relationship with and then making it happen. A whopping 92% of companies consider ABM “extremely” or “very” important to their marketing program. To further the point, consider these additional statistics below:
81% of companies are going to be investing more in brand (which is the most difficult of all marketing ROI to track) over the next five years.
The number of SDRs in existence has quintupled over the past ten years.
Two thirds of companies are dedicating more than a quarter of their annual budgets to events and that amount is going to increase for 70% of companies next year.
What do all these things have in common? They’re all about developing relationships. Between your brand and your audience, and between your employees and the humans in your most important accounts.
This is why marketers need to spend less time driving MQLs and more time driving BFFs (best friends forever). But more than that, in an era where we’re oversaturated with brand messages and spammy communication, it just feels like putting relationships first is the right thing to do. This is something we put a finer point on in our Relationship Marketing Manifesto.
Measuring Relationships
Sigstr is beginning to orient our entire marketing program around relationships. Using our new B2B relationship intelligence platform, Sigstr Relationships, which leverages AI to quantify relationship strength based on recency, frequency, velocity and volume of communication. All with a dash of CRM data.
We’ll be monitoring relationship development across our 120 Tier One accounts and 1,500 Tier Two accounts, trying to understand what marketing campaigns move the needle across a variety of cohorts. We’ll be aligning sales and marketing efforts against these relationship scores to better understand pipeline development and to be more accurate around close rates. Lastly, we’ll be analyzing patterns and trends in relationship development to inform our ideal customer profile and account scoring framework so that we’re even better at making friends next time.
But first things first, if you’re going to scale anything, you need to know how to measure it. The Sigstr marketing team has identified four metrics to measure when trying to quantify a B2B relationship.
Spread
Definition: How many of “them” do “we” know (e.g. across all of Sigstr’s employees, we know 47 people that work at Oracle, so our spread is 47).
Why is spread important? Think of it as account penetration. The more people at a target account that know people at your company, the greater the mindshare, the easier to navigate the org chart, and the more influencers you’ll have in your corner.
How does marketing influence spread? Targeted display advertising through an ABM platform like Terminus lets you target specific companies (and even specific departments within those companies) with relevant messages to drive your awareness and lead gen efforts. A mass direct mail send addressed to a department or several specific people you haven’t contacted yet through a tool like Sendoso is also a sure way to gain some attention.
Scope
Definition: How many of “them” do “we” want to know (e.g. a buying committee or department within a target account).
Why is scope important? The average B2B buying committee has 6.8 people, which is up from 5.6 just a year ago. 84% of those committees have a “champion” who holds about 59% of the influence on that buying decision. Knowing who is in your buying committee and making sure you’re developing relationships with them is key. Fun fact: This topic was well covered in a Terminus webinar from last summer.
How does marketing influence scope? This varies largely depending on what your typical customer looks like, but let’s look at Sigstr’s case: We sell to marketing teams, so our champion is typically a marketer. However, IT also needs to get involved to evaluate and implement and there’s generally an executive or two that wants to be part of the decision. We spend a lot of time analyzing and understanding the various personas in our scope so that we can deliver relevant content to them (we automate this through Sigstr).
Depth
Definition: A count of how many of “us” know an individual “them”.
Why is depth important? The more and stronger the connections between individuals in target accounts have with your company, the better they’ll understand your culture, have an easier time communicating, and have more support.
How does marketing influence depth? Because depth takes dedicated time from multiple personalities, this is more challenging to scale. Rather than trying to operationalize depth across the entire funnel, start to build workflows that trigger tasks assigned to certain people at certain opportunity stages. For example, when an account reaches a late opp stage (“budgeting” for example), set up a simple workflow that assigns a task to key executives on your team requesting that they send a personal message to the champion or committee.
Strength
Definition: This is a subjective measure of leverage and influence “we” have over an individual “them”.
Why is strength important? This one should be pretty obvious, but the more influence and rapport you have between people, the easier it is to help each other get what we both want. Strength is arguably the most important metric, but also the most difficult to quantify. How exactly do you make it measurable? If you take a step back and think about what makes a relationship successful, communication is the answer more times than not. So, measuring the amount of communication is a good place to start. While we’re measuring all of these metrics in Sigstr’s relationship intelligence platform, this is the metric we’re most excited to track.
How does marketing influence strength? To be honest, we’re not sure. We know how to track relationship development with Sigstr Pulse, but the best practices around deploying marketing campaigns with the goal of influencing relationships is something we’re in the process of figuring out. Stay tuned as we learn more in this area!
We’re going to spend the next three months pouring over the metrics mentioned above as we compare their movement to the sales and marketing tactics we use to influence them. We’ll be updating this series with what we’re learning along the way.
In the interim, tweet us @sigstr and tell us what, specifically, you’d like to better understand about this experiment. What tech we’re using? How we’re attributing relationships to campaigns? How we developed our account scoring model? We’d love to share!
Effectively distribute your content in a high-volume channel and access valuable insight about how your audience consumes that content. That’s what the Sigstr + PathFactory integration is all about! Today we’re thrilled to announce this new integration and join forces with PathFactory, the Content Insight and Activation Platform.
Now marketers can take advantage of everyday email (think Gmail or Outlook) sent by their employees and turn it into a new channel that promotes their most important content. Then, after an email recipient clicks on the email signature banner, teams can see how their audience consumes and engages with that content.
Armed with data from both sides, marketers can then optimize their content strategy and future email signature marketing campaigns. Salespeople can deliver a more relevant and personalized buying experience. And customer success teams can identify adoption and up-sell opportunities.
See how else this integration provides value to marketing, sales, and CS teams by watching the overview video. Or, learn more about today’s big news in the press release below.
Today PathFactory, the Content Insight and Activation Platform, announced an integration with Sigstr, the leading email signature marketing solution, to allow B2B marketers to deliver personalized content experiences in every email their employees send, and access valuable insight about their recipients’ consumption of that content.
With the rise of privacy regulations like GDPR and the seemingly never-ending deluge of marketing emails flooding inboxes everywhere, 1-to-1 emails sent by salespeople and customer-facing teams are becoming an important channel through which B2B marketers can reach prospective buyers and current customers with content. This new integration makes it easy for PathFactory and Sigstr customers to link PathFactory Content Tracks to email signature banners within Sigstr with just one click, as well as deanonymize recipients who click on those email signature banners and consume content.
“People are more likely to engage with calls-to-action from someone they know than a broad-based marketing email. We’re excited to partner with Sigstr on this integration because it gives marketers new capabilities for personalizing email signature marketing like they do other channels, and better data about how prospective buyers and customers are engaging with their email signatures,” said Mark Opauzsky, CEO of PathFactory.
PathFactory tracks the email recipients’ content consumption to give the entire revenue organization insight into which senders, banners, and content offers generate the highest-quality engagement with key audiences. This insight empowers marketers to optimize email signature campaigns and content strategy, salespeople to identify fast-moving buyers and deliver a more relevant buying process, and customer success teams to identify adoption, advocacy, and up-sell opportunities.
PathFactory’s proprietary dataset and account-based solutions automatically updates Sigstr banners with personalized Content Track destinations based on visitor behavior and firmographic data, helping B2B marketers deliver a more relevant, on-demand experience expected by business consumers – even in 1-to-1 emails. The integration will also give customers the ability to kickstart the banner creation process in Sigstr with images from their PathFactory content library.
“Our team is excited about the marketing possibilities created by this integration between PathFactory and Sigstr,” says Jen Rios, Senior Manager of Demand Generation at Invoca, an industry-leading call tracking and analytics solution, who is a customer of both platforms. “We already distribute new content campaigns via email signatures with Sigstr, and now we can track the content consumption on the other side of those clicks and better align our email signature marketing efforts with our account-based marketing strategies.”
As a sales development rep slowly being introduced to field marketing responsibilities, I am learning firsthand both the awesome benefits and unique challenges of planning an event in a different city. Constantly changing circumstances, difficulties with prioritization, and (occasionally) unresponsive sales reps are all circumstances a field marketer has to deal with on a daily basis. When done right, however, putting your team in position to be face-to-face with your top customers and prospects can pay major dividends. I’m here to talk about how Sigstr can help with that.
Choosing Your Cities
Each organization, marketer, and salesperson likely has processes for deciding which cities are ripe for a field marketing event. Some of these are sure to be more effective than others, but an excellent place to start is by identifying which cities contain your company’s best relationships. Say, for example, you have limited budget and you’re unsure whether to send a rep to Phoenix, Vancouver, Boston, or Atlanta. With the “Top 10 Locations” feature, you can immediately see where your company’s strongest relationships lie to help you determine where your event might be successful.
Your Best Relationships by Location
You’ve identified the location of your next field event. You’ve booked a venue, plane tickets, and hotel rooms. Great work! Now how do you decide where your team will spend its time to drive the right people to your event?
Sigstr’s location intelligence helps align sales and marketing around which customers and prospects to invite to their next event by providing an idea of how strong a team’s relationships are, both at a personal and company-wide level.
But what if your opportunities in your CRM aren’t entirely updated? That’s okay, because Sigstr’s relationship data is based on email and calendar invites, too. Now you can ensure that you never miss an opportunity to strengthen these relationships face-to-face to help you close deals faster.
Targeted, Dynamic Email Signature Marketing
Your ideal city has been chosen, the venue is booked, and invites are out. You’re killing it! Now how do you maximize event promotion? Don’t worry, Sigstr helps with this one, too.
With email signature marketing, field marketers have the ability to segment and build lists around location, making sure that any time someone from your company emails a prospect or customer in that area, they’re seeing a targeted email signature banner. You can link your event registration landing page directly to these signature campaigns, helping you stay top of mind, drive registrants, and measure ROI.
Here’s an example from our own account, which is promoting our upcoming Indy-based “All ‘Bout Margaritas” party.
Go Rock Your Next Field Marketing Event
We just threw a ton at you, so let’s sum it up as simply as possible.
Step 1: Utilize the “Top Locations” feature to choose the best city for your next field marketing event.
Step 2: Strategically use “Location Intelligence” to find your top relationships in that city and ensure they get invited.
Step 3: Target your customers and prospects with an awesome, dynamic email signature banner inviting them to your event.
Step 4: Win more deals. Get promoted. Be loved by everyone at your company (okay, I can’t promise that, but you get the point).
When trying to convince friends and family that they should watch The Good Place, it can be a hard sell.
“It’s this show about these people who are dead, and they are in this place that’s like heaven, but not heaven. And there is a point system. And this lady named Janet who is not really a lady, but the source of all knowledge. And there are lots of philosophy discussions. And fro-yo. And that guy from Cheers.”
You end up sounding like a lunatic. But watch a few episodes, and you’ll be hooked. Now in its third season, The Good Place has achieved an almost cult-like following, and with good reason. It’s hilarious, smart, and well-acted. What’s not to love? So in an effort to get into The Good Place ourselves, Sigstr decided to honor our favorite characters by imagining the best email signatures of each character.
Warning… spoilers ahead.
Eleanor Shellstrop
Eleanor Shellstrop, our leading lady, may have been a selfish, rude, and dishonest person during her life on earth, but she’s grown into a kind and compassionate human being over the course of three seasons (and hundreds of resets). Although Eleanor is deemed the most morally corrupt of the four humans, she has shown the greatest ability to grow and improve herself. This is likely because she has no delusions of what kind of life she lived and is able to tackle her negative aspects head on. Selfishly, we hope Eleanor doesn’t lose ALL of her bad traits. They are too entertaining.
Chidi Anagonye
Chidi’s indecisiveness can give anyone an anxiety attack. JUST PICK A HAT ALREADY, MAN. While he’s kind-hearted and giving, Chidi is practically incapable of making quick decisions. As a philosophy professor, his need to analyze the moral implications of every decision he makes often causes him to obsess over whether even his most insignificant actions are deemed ethical. Luckily, Eleanor seems to be helping Chidi overcome his struggles. Can you say, match made in heaven? But literally.
Jason Mendoza
Jason Mendoza, TV’s most lovable idiot, may not offer the best ideas when it comes to getting the group into The Good Place, but he’s sweet and optimistic. He means well, and it could be argued that most of his bad decisions are the result of ignorance rather than malicious intent. Despite his lack of intelligence, Jason is the show’s heart throb. At one point or another, he earns the attention of every female character, including Janet’s! What a charmer.
Tahani Al-Jamil
Tahani Al-Jamil may be materialistic and egotistical, but you can’t help but love her. She exudes class and confidence. During her life, Tahani was overlooked by her parents and overshadowed by her younger sister, Kamila, which resulted in bitter jealousy and the need to upstage others. This is punctuated by the fact that she is a relentless name dropper. But honestly, can you blame her? Anyone that makes out with Ryan Gosling at the Met Ball has the right to brag about it.
Michael
Besides Eleanor, Michael has grown the most over the course of three seasons. In the beginning, Michael was the show’s main antagonist, putting all his time and effort into torturing Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani. Entertaining? Yes. But the show couldn’t have survived on endless reset attempts. Gradually, Michael’s interactions with the humans led him to care about each of them deeply. He’s now willing to sacrifice himself to help the gang reach the real Good Place.
Janet
If only everyone had a Janet in their lives. Janet is a supercomputer who is the source of all information and knowledge for humans within The Good Place. She is perpetually cheery, courteous, and non-judgemental by design. In seasons two and three, we’ve seen Janet start to develop emotions, a supposedly impossible feat. Because of this, she has grown attached to the humans, particularly Jason. We can’t wait for that weird love story to unfold.
Bad Janet
Bad Janet needs no introduction. She’s bad. You get it.
Trevor
If we didn’t already know that The Good Place had the same creators as Parks and Rec, they added Adam Scott to the character pool just to drive the point home. And we’re not complaining. Trevor may not be a series regular, but his cameos are always delightful. Like Michael, Trevor is an immortal being, however, he has zero compassion for the human race. He’s aggressive and rude and takes sadistic pleasure in torturing those sent to The Bad Place. He’s pretty much the best character ever.
Although we included a “vs.” in the title of this blog post, we first want to mention that we recommend doing both traditional email marketing and email signature marketing (ESM). As you may have noticed from our sticker collection, we’re big fans of email in general, no matter how you approach it with your marketing strategy.
This post, rather, is intended to show how ESM is a new innovative form of email marketing (and award-winning according to MarTech Breakthrough). As a marketing team here at Sigstr, we have strategies for both sides. And based on what we’ve seen so far this year, we had a “hunch” that ESM was racking up more clicks. So we put on our math nerd hats and crunched the numbers, and what we found was pretty amazing.
Collectively, our email signature marketing campaigns have achieved 1,500 more clicks when compared to traditional email marketing total clicks.
Before we determine the why behind the numbers above, let’s back up and start with the basics of marketing email.
“Any email sent that primarily contains a commercial message or content intended for a commercial purpose (i.e. nurturing leads through the funnel). Marketing email is generally sent to groups of contacts that are prospects or customers.”
For our team, this includes the following tactics:
Bi-weekly newsletter
Lead nurturing
Event follow-up
Customer-focused announcements
Webinar promotion and follow-up
New content promotion
New product or feature announcement
Traditional email marketing still has a place in our overall marketing strategy and is something we’ll still continue to do. However, we’re also adjusting to the recent trends. While open rates are currently trending up for mass email, click rates continue to decline (according to SendGrid’s Global Email Benchmark Report). On the flip side, everyday one-to-one email (think Gmail and Outlook) is a different story. That’s what separates email signature marketing from mass email marketing.
Why Email Signature Marketing Is Different
Think about the thousands of emails your employees send to your most important customers and prospects every year. For some companies, each employee averages 10,000 sent emails a year. If you start to do that math across all of your employees, you’ll quickly realize that everyday one-to-one email represents just as many marketing opportunities as traditional email marketing (if not more).
Unlike traditional mass email marketing, employee email provides your team with millions of continuous impressions to your most engaged audience. How engaged? Science proves that email recipients not only pay attention to your employees’ email signatures, the majority of their attention and focus shifts to that area.
Some Sigstr customers call this “passively acquired attention” – which is a gold mine for marketers. Email signature marketing can yield better results because these are emails that are, for the most part, almost certainly going to be opened and read. Email signature marketing allows marketers to inject a call-to-action into an email in a non-intrusive way, and get a message in front of someone who is far more likely to open and engage with that CTA.
In addition to the volume, engagement, and attention employee email provides as a channel, it also represents the most pointed way of targeting (according to Sigstr customer, Lumavate) for account-based marketing purposes. Based on the email domain, teams can mix and match personalized banners with specific industries, vertical, accounts, and even sales stages (here’s a few examples from our own Sigstr account).
What’s Your Email Marketing Strategy for This Year?
How are you feeling about your 2019 email marketing strategy? If your open and click rates aren’t where you want them to be, we encourage you to test a new form of email marketing. An approach that is high-volume, super targeted, and for us, much more effective.
Founded in 2015, Lumavate is an enterprise platform for building progressive web apps (PWAs) at scale. Through the Lumavate platform, companies deliver highly-personalized mobile experiences throughout every stage of the customer journey.
With the knowledge that PWA is the future of mobile consumer engagement, Lumavate turned to Sigstr to not only help establish the company as a thought leader, but also reach key accounts with personalized messaging.
Establishing Lumavate’s Brand with Every Email Sent
When Lumavate was just starting out, the marketing team realized that in order to disrupt the mobile tech industry, they needed to establish a solid brand presence.
“PWAs was and still are a new concept,” explained Stephanie Cox, VP of Marketing, “We knew that in order to get attention, we had to establish credibility. And a consistent, recognizable brand was a great step in that direction.”
Lumavate wanted to establish a unified signature style with their entire team from the start so that as they continued to grow, their brand would remain strong. The marketing team started using Sigstr to create a consistent, professional brand presence through the employee email signature.
“Once we teamed up with Sigstr, we made sure that every new hire was set up with an email signature on day one,” said Jillian MacNulty, Senior Marketing Specialist, “It’s a practice that we still maintain to this day.”
With their brand gaining traction, the Lumavate marketing team started focusing on some of their more long term goals, most notably the need to find leads and drive them through the sales funnel. That’s where Sigstr’s ABM functionality came into play.
Using ABM Targeting to Connect on a Personal Level
One of the features that attracted Lumavate to Sigstr was the ability to align Sigstr campaign banners to specific accounts and contacts. Stephanie and Jillian wanted to be able to promote infographics, videos, case studies, and whitepapers to the right people at the right time.
“We were already taking an ABM approach in other marketing channels,” explained Stephanie, “Using Sigstr’s account-specific targeting was a natural extension of our strategy.”
Since Lumavate was already leveraging paid social ads, adding Sigstr to the mix didn’t create any added effort. “A lot of times, an ad someone sees on LinkedIn is the same one they’ll see in our email signatures,” said Jillian, “We think of Sigstr as an ad channel and being able to drive consistent messaging from multiple touch points gives us a huge advantage.”
Even though they were leveraging a multitude of marketing channels, the Lumavate team quickly realized that email signature marketing was by far the most pointed way they could expose their brand and message to target accounts.
“As a team, we’re sending over 300,000 emails a year,” said Jillian, “Each one of those emails is sent on a 1:1 level and promotes an ad that we, the marketing team, control. What more could you ask for?”
Analyzing the Results
Since implementing Sigstr, the Lumavate team has taken advantage of all the platform has to offer, running over 180 email signature campaigns at once and adopting new features like GIF campaigns immediately.
When asked about their best performing campaign, the marketing team called out their “Whiteboard Wednesday” campaign. The campaign promotes a 60 second video released weekly that discusses mobile technology, customer experiences, and general tech trends. With all the effort that goes into developing the content, the marketing team has been thrilled to see the amount of traffic Sigstr drives to their user channel. What they’ve found interesting is that when they re-launch the campaign banner every week, customers keep coming back and their subscriber base continues to grow.
But it’s not just customers taking notice. With the help of Sigstr, Lumavate has established a reputation of professionalism and care with prospects. In a world where mass email marketing rules, companies have appreciated Lumavate’s attention to detail and personalization.
“People really appreciate our approach,” said Stephanie, “The VP of Digital Marketing at a really large CPG brand told me that he gets 200 prospecting emails a day and that nobody reaches out to him in a more personalized way than Lumavate. We have Sigstr to thank for that.”
Teaming up with Sigstr turned out to be one of Lumavate’s best decisions as a young start-up in the mobile marketing industry. They were able to establish themselves as a brand and reach their targeted audience in a unique and personalized way. Most importantly, Sigstr is SOC 2 compliant and partners with AWS to provide a highly secure and available application, which provides even more trust for this successful partnership.
Alright ghouls and gals, it’s time to pumpkin spice up your life with a bit o’ Halloween cheer! From fake cobwebs to haunted houses, we are 100% into this haunted holiday. Creepy corn maze? We’re in. Costume party. What time? Hay ride. We’re driving. That being said, let’s Trick o’ Treat ourselves and imagine how fangtastic it would be if our favorite Halloween characters had Sigstr email signatures. Ok then! Let’s scary on…
Ichabod Crane
Let’s be honest, Ichabod Crane was the original substitute teacher. Unassuming and gullible, he looked like a scarecrow and couldn’t quite see that – in the end – the joke was on him. If it’s a been a hot minute since you read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, here’s the SparkNotes: Ichabod comes to town and falls for a pretty girl named Katrina. His affections are challenged by the town bro (Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt) who spooks him with tales of a headless Hessian soldier/ghost. The story ends with Ichabod having a dramatic meet up with this Headless Horseman who runs him out of town by throwing his “head” at him (99.9% sure this was just a pumpkin chucked by Brom Bones).
Scooby Doo
One part Nancy Drew, three parts scaredy cat, Scooby Doo is the answer to all your ghost, monster, or paranormal problems. Joined by a psychedelic team of teenage investigators and the flower power of the Mystery Machine, Scooby Dooby Doo uses a bit of dumb luck and canine courage to unmask creepy culprits and save the day. Need to rid your house of Casper? Who ya gonna call? Four guys with vacuums, or a snack-happy Great Dane?
Dracula
Ah-ah-ahhh…the Prince of Darkness himself. Equally aristocratic, refined, and fixated on your neck, this historical figure has ruled the night and costume aisles for decades. Inspiring endless classic films, and sparkly, swoony vamps alike, Count Dracula is synonymous with Halloween…and very much undead.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
We have very fond memories as kids on Halloween. Hopped up on sugar, surrounded by candy wrappers, watching Linus, and waiting excitedly for The Great Pumpkin. Here’s what we can’t remember…does the mythical pumpkin actually appear? Wikipedia is telling us no, so we must have been in too much of a candy cloud to stay focussed. Regardless, this classic Peanuts film plays every year to kick off the fall season (sorry, Charlie) and celebrate the magic of Halloween night.
The Addams Family
[Cue the synchronized snapping] This classic American family is – as they say – creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky. They love all things macabre, are blissfully unaware of their weirdness, and make no apologies to their neighbors. Before Gothic was a fashion trend, they rocked it. Not to be confused with The Munsters, The Addams Family is a staple for all things creeptastic and make disembodied hands, hairballs with hats, and awkward family photos unforgettable and all together ooky.
Jack Skellington – The Nightmare Before Christmas
Brought to you by the master of all things cinematically spooky, this claymation creation from Tim Burton centers on the King of Halloween Town, Jack Skellington, who longs for a world a bit less ghoulish. Thus begins his desire to jingle his way into the pure festivities of Christmas Town. In a Grinch-like twist, things don’t go quite as he envisions (cue the screaming children) and Jack inevitably returns to where he belongs, but with a sprinkle of snow and a bit of Christmas magic.
Frankenstein
Live. Live. LIVE!!! Halloween doesn’t quite seem complete without an ode to lightning bolts jolting an extra large creature to life. More gentle giant than monster, Frankenstein is really a story of “be careful what you wish for” and – sadly – loneliness. Not to be confused, Victor Frankenstein is the scientist responsible for the famous monster, and his creation is the sad soul just looking for love (we’re not crying, you’re crying).
Hocus Pocus
A cult classic that remains popular in its basic witchiness, Hocus Pocus follows a villainous trio of witches who come back to haunt a modern Bostonian neighborhood for a spell. Armed with enchantment, musical numbers, and 90s effects, this Halloween gem starts playing on October 1st and doesn’t stop until ABC Family starts up 25 Days of Christmas. So sit back, grab a spiked cider, and go amuck, amuck, amuck!
Here at Sigstr, we often get asked about our own bold, eye-catching campaign designs. Our bright colors, unique sticker-style illustrations, and cohesive branding have helped us “drink our own champagne” by achieving great engagement with our email signature marketing banners. Our designer extraordinaire, Anna Zimmerman, sat down to share a few secrets and tips on how she approaches designing campaigns. Her five-step approach is summarized in the infographic below.
Be in Tune with Your Marketing Team
Every piece of content I create starts with an idea or request from our Marketing team. I work closely with them to understand their needs and feedback as I design, and we collaborate on creating content to promote our most important initiatives – whether that’s a webinar, internal event, blog post, content piece, etc. Being in tune with their needs allows me to deliver high quality designs that will serve their intended purpose.
Start with the Basics
When I’m sitting down to create an email signature banner, I start with a blank art board and have our Sigstr company color swatches open. Having clear Sigstr brand guidelines makes my job that much easier. With our Sigstr colors available as a base, I start to look for ideas depending on the content of the campaign. I use a website called dribbble – a community of designers sharing their work – and search for keywords based on the content of the campaign. Sigstr’s Marketing team usually supplies me a few bullets, key words, or a quick summary sentence of what the campaign should convey. I also search Google Images to look for a spark of inspiration or to learn more about how to visually convey the content of the campaign. Icons, color combinations, and shapes give me ideas on how to create a stand-out banner.
Copy is Key
Clear messaging and purpose is essential for an email signature design. A strong headline is key, and as a rule of thumb I try to not go over 8 – 12 words. Any additional context can be placed in the subtext, but I try to keep that as concise as possible. I always have the copy as well as the call-to-action typed out beside my art board to guide my work.
Add Additional Elements
I almost always use an illustration or image to help draw attention to the campaign. Our State of Email Signature Marketing Report confirms that icons and illustrations are popular in helping drive engagement, and our fun icons and sticker-style illustrations have definitely become a key part of our own branding. I bring in the illustration or image as well as the text and place those elements inside the campaign, keeping in mind that the eye naturally reads left to right. The CTA usually goes on the far left side or bottom of the campaign layout, to keep in line with that natural movement.
Size, Finalize, & Export Your Campaign
We’ve experimented in the past with a few different campaign sizes and shapes (and our customers use a variety), but, as our Science of Email Signatures ebook proves, short and wide is the most effective shape. We design campaign banners to fit into a 384×96 container (with the original design exported as a 768×192 .png file since it will be uploaded as a hi-res image). I make sure to fit all content in the dimensions of my art board, keeping the design elements consistent and creating a cohesive, eye-catching banner to help drive engagement.
Infographic: Best Practices for a Successful Campaign
The Sigstr team is always here as a resource for ideas, inspiration, and examples. Just reach out to support@sigstr.com – we’re happy to help however we can. And be sure to read our new September Issue of Email Signature Marketing for even more ideas and inspiration from our most creative customers. Finally, we put together this infographic to summarize the five steps above. Feel free to use this as a guide when designing your next email signature banner, and check out my five quick tips at the bottom!
As the admin of Sigstr for Sigstr, I’m often asked about our email signature marketing strategy and best practices to drive engagement. Amongst customers and prospects, I’m most commonly asked this question:
“How do you drive higher engagement and click-through-rates across Sigstr’s campaigns?”
I actually love answering this question because that’s what we’re all about here at Sigstr. We don’t just hand over the keys after implementation and say, “good luck!” We’re here as a resource for every step of the way. Need campaign design ideas? Great, we can help with that. Want to talk through a specific use case? Happy to help there as well. We pride ourselves on doing everything we can to make our customers successful.
With all that said, let’s go back to the question above. Below is a summary of how I would answer this FAQ with recommendations and best practices. Within this list is an important first bullet point which is what this post will be focused on.
Use Sigstr’s ABM functionality with more targeted content, especially for specific accounts.
If you can, try launching a new campaign every two weeks. If that’s a challenge for your content or design team, at least try switching around sender groups with different campaigns every one to two weeks. We launch a new campaign or switch around campaigns and sender groups everyday.
Use Sigstr’s multi-banner campaign feature (upload 4 to 5 different variations of the same call-to-action banner) to keep your content fresh and extend the runtime of your campaign.
Include a headline that clearly explains the promotion with a strong call-to-action that prompts them to click.
Short and wide banners work better than tall and narrow. Eye-tracking tests prove this to be true.
If you haven’t already, try incorporating more photography into your campaign designs. The data says it’s a good idea.
We have always believed this to be true, but wanted to prove out this theory ourselves. So we ran the math within our own account and compared average click-through-rates between sender-based campaigns and ABM (targeted) campaigns. Before we dive into the numbers, here’s a quick refresher on what we mean by ABM campaigns.
Because Sigstr has the ability to recognize the sender and recipient of every email sent by your employees, teams can assign specific campaign banners to defined audiences. Whether it be by persona, industry, vertical, opportunity stage, or even location, teams today are using this functionality for many targeted use cases. Here are a few examples from Sigstr’s account:
The Impact:
Based on data from Sigstr’s own account across all 2017 and 2018 campaigns, we found that our ABM campaigns achieved 2x higher engagement compared to general sender-based campaigns. In this case, we define “engagement” as average click-through-rate. But wait…it gets better.
Account-Specific Targeting = Best Engagement
Amongst all of the ABM use cases you see above, the one we execute the most is account-specific targeting. This means every time we email a particular top target account, any Sigstr team member’s email signature will dynamically update to a personalized banner we have assigned for that account. For example, when we email Klowd Software, they will see this banner below. When they click, they are sent to a personalized microsite that shows how Sigstr can add value to their sales and marketing teams based on their goals and what’s most important to them.
The Impact:
After crunching the numbers on all of our 350+ account-specific campaigns, we found that the total average click-through-rate was 5x higher compared to our general sender-based campaigns.
What We Have Learned and What We’re Trying Next:
Targeted email signature marketing leads to higher engagement. And the more targeted you get, the higher your click-through-rates will trend. We proved this to be true with our own account-specific campaigns.
By now you have learned that Sigstr allows you to target personalized banners with defined industries, personas, sales stages, locations, and accounts. But did we also mention specific contacts?
Imagine what a click-through-rate could climb to when the email recipient sees an email signature banner that speaks directly to him or her? It could include their first name, favorite sports, team, or specific job title. For example, “Hey Brad! Just like the Chicago Cubs, we want to see your marketing team win in 2019.” I don’t know about you, but if I saw an email signature campaign like this, there’s no way I wouldn’t click.
Use every email sent by your team as an opportunity to stand out to the email recipient. Email signature marketing helps you do just this, and targeted ESM takes it to the next level.
With the recent devastation of Hurricane Florence, our team here at Sigstr has been reflecting upon how marketing technologies can help make a positive difference in the world around us. That being said, we’re proud to see so many of our awesome customers doing this already with email signature marketing. Whether it be philanthropy, fundraising, or natural disaster relief, there are many ways to use employees’ email signatures for a good cause. Below are a few of our favorites examples.
Holiday Philanthropy
With the holiday season fast approaching, companies all over the world are thinking like us and looking for ways to give back to their local communities. Brooksource, a staffing company also located right here in beautiful Indianapolis, used everyday email as an opportunity to do just that.
Giving Back on Another Continent
Herff Jones decided that they wanted to utilize the employee email signature to not only promote the sale of their frames, but also to plant trees for families in Africa. Their Sigstr campaign promoted that with every frame sold, one tree would be planted in Sub-Saharan Africa by the organization Trees for the Future. All-in-all, this campaign saw over 330,000 total views, a 300% return on their investment in Sigstr, and ultimately 84 new trees planted. Great work, team!
Disaster Relief Efforts
The aforementioned Hurricane Florence may have been the driving factor behind this post, but utilizing the one-to-one emails that employees send to raise money for disaster relief wasn’t our idea! In 2017, the staffing company Kforce (based out of Florida) had seen firsthand the damage that hurricanes can do to a city, state, and region. This prompted them to pledge one million dollars in hurricane relief donations, with the employee email signature as a main source of promotion. The awesome team at Net Health also had the same idea with Hurricane Harvey relief.
Internal Company Fundraisers
Here at Sigstr, we’re super proud of our culture and desire to do good in our community. Each quarter, our “Spread the Good Committee” chooses an overarching initiative for that quarter, with one flagship event surrounded by smaller events around that theme. With our focus in Q3 of this year being mental health awareness, we decided to make the Out of the Darkness Walk, a suicide prevention fundraiser, our main focus. Sending out constant reminder emails can be tedious and ineffective, so we decided to utilize our own internal email signatures to raise money and awareness for the event. Anytime a Sigstr employee emailed another employee of Sigstr, they saw this campaign banner. In just two weeks, our team was able to raise nearly $3,000 for suicide prevention causes as a part of the total $200,000 raised by the Indianapolis Walk alone.
Email Signature Marketing: Beyond ROI
Here at Sigstr, we’re proud of the fact that we have a unique platform that allows companies to promote awesome content and drive traffic to their website, events, videos, etc. All of this aside, I’m proud of the fact that I not only work for a company that places community service and philanthropy within its core values, but also that we have created a product that can help our awesome customers “spread the good” within their own community. Thanks for everything you do!
Also, seeing as Hurricane Florence was the catalyst for writing this blog post, you can find awesome charities doing great work with relief efforts here.
In the video above, Sigstr’s Relationship Marketing and Event Marketing Manager, Bailey Roberts, shares what relationship marketing means to her from the events side. Also, how our team approaches pre-event and post-event execution so we make the most of our time spent at the conference.
Learn more by watching the video above or reading through the script below.
When I think about a successful event, there are the tangibles and there are the intangibles. The tangibles would be number of leads, return on investment, awareness, social media interactions, or landing page visits. Things like that are easily measurable. The things that are not as easily measurable are people’s experience with our brand or their relationship with our brand. But those are the things that I really care about because I want people to walk away thinking, “Wow! That Sigstr team. Those are some amazing people.” It really gives you an opportunity to humanize your brand. But how do you really measure how human your brand is?
Events help brands connect with people and interact with people on an entirely different level. The hard part of events goes beyond just the logistics. We’re trying to figure out who we know that’s there, or who are our biggest targets, or who are our closest friends in that area. That’s really hard to do at scale, so it’s really hard to determine who are top prospects are in different cities and different locations. Or, who will be at the event? Or, who are the biggest influencers at events? Or, who are our buddies? If we want to throw a party in the area, who do we want to invite to co-sponsor?
So that’s the really hard part about the planning stages. In terms of when we’re at the event, it is still back to the relationship front. We’re making sure our team is meeting the right people, spending time with the right people, getting the right audience at any speaking opportunities, or getting the right audience to any field marketing event. We want them to be in the room and engaged.
In terms of after the event, it’s the follow-up. We’re making sure we stay relevant and that people walk away remembering our brand and wanting to learn more.
The long awaited May 25 enforcement date for GDPR has come and gone and the digital marketing world didn’t come to a grinding halt as some speculated. While marketers didn’t stop marketing, the landscape has changed — collecting any and all user data and storing it indefinitely is no longer permitted and can carry some hefty fines if companies continue these practices.
GDPR has presented challenges for companies by forcing them to trade development cycles of shiny new features for data management and GDPR features, but the tradeoff is worthwhile (and a competitive advantage) in the long term.
For those who think that new privacy and data laws won’t impact them, that is very likely to change.
California is already working on implementing new regulations around data privacy, and the rest of the U.S. will be likely to follow.
What does this all mean for marketers? After many companies sent out a re-opt in campaign and updated cookie policies, they are left with a smaller list of leads and less raw-data to manage.
Marketing’s Continued Challenge
Leadership still has the expectation that the marketing department will continue to produce valuable leads, so what can you do?
It’s important to first note that it is ok to still collect user data, as long as it is done in a transparent manner, is documented, and can be actively managed or deleted. Knowing the personas of the people in your lead pipeline and serving personalized and valuable content is already the way the industry is trending. This poses another challenge of understanding how to make the most of the data that you already have.
When recently speaking to some marketers at enterprise-level companies, the common theme of leveraging relationships in the sales pipeline came up. Leveraging relationships isn’t something new by any means, but giving marketers insight into relationships is where there is an opportunity.
Enter the Known Marketing Strategy
Pursuing a strategy of “known marketing” is not only a best practice from a GDPR perspective, it’s a best practice from a revenue perspective.
What most companies don’t know is the amount of untapped, owned data that they sit on — existing personal relationships across the company. Being able to map all the known relationships throughout a company’s employee-base and not just the CRM or MAP activity of your audience is a vital step in building your brands defense of GDPR practices.
There are several tools on the market that enable both marketing, and security and compliance departments to analyze the communications that can instantiate opt-in compliance. Everyone knows that healthy relationships are based on communication, and the ability to measure relationships through company-wide one-to-one communication, and not just the one-to-many communications so many marketers are familiar with, allows them to best understand their true, known audience.
What Can Known Marketing Do?
If leveraged properly, known marketing can help marketers and sales leaders predict which leads will convert into customers.
While many practitioners perceived GDPR compliance to be a database-demolishing hassle, there’s an abundance of upside. For a long time, marketers have employed practices to flood their funnels with volumes of unknown and ambiguously acquired personal records. That practice has led us to a world where fewer than one percent of leads become customers, prompting sales and marketing teams to waste cycles on nurturing leads that will not only never become customers, but compromise personal data compliance.
GDPR should be seen as a welcome catalyst to encourage teams to focus on known marketing. That is, identifying the accounts and contacts that are most important to a brand and are actively engaged with your company and its employees. The data around B2B acquisition metrics are pointing sharply away from the “spray-and-pray” inbound practices, towards a new focus.
Whether you call it account-based marketing (ABM), relationship-marketing, or simply business as usual, GDPR and the changes to marketing that followed are an appropriate response to the spammy practices that weren’t doing marketers any favors anyway.
“Eat your own dog food” (ew) or “drink your own champagne” (better!) are idioms that we often hear in sales, typically referring to an organization’s ability to utilize its own products or services. With Sigstr existing in the MarTech space, one may not consider how a sales rep can truly leverage the potential in their email on a day-to-day basis. So I, Sigstr sales development rep, am here to tell you how our team takes full advantage of our Relationship Marketing platform.
Email Signature Marketing
Email signature marketing (ESM) – the foundation on which Sigstr was started – is a simple enough concept. Give marketers the ability to centrally control their employees’ email signatures (no more of those “please copy and paste” emails? Hallelujah!) while using the email signature to turn employee email into a marketing channel.
Relevant, Personalized Content
The first key benefit of ESM in my role is simply knowing that each email I send every day is promoting content that will be relevant to my prospect. Our rule of thumb here at Sigstr is that the average employee sends ~10,000 emails a year. In fact, in the past year as an SDR, I have sent 26,000 emails. It’s comforting to know that each and every one of those emails featured consistent branding and a clickable call-to-action banner promoting various types of content. Not only that, it’s invaluable for event outreach.
Sigstr Engagement Data
Click notifications are another cool feature of email signature marketing. Anytime I send a prospect an email, I’m notified via Sigstr the name of the person that clicked on my email signature banner, along with their email address. Aside from real-time click notifications, I also receive a “Sigstr Engagement Report” every morning that sums up which accounts and prospects have engaged with my content in the days prior. It can be super helpful when keeping track of who is engaging with your content (which allows for effective follow-up).
Account-Based Marketing
The ability to utilize the ABM functionalities of Sigstr when doing quarterly account planning is incredibly helpful. It allows me as a rep to work directly with our marketing team to ensure that my priority accounts have targeted messaging in every email I send to them. The ability to provide a specific event registration banner or account-specific campaign turns each of these emails into a highly personalized marketing channel.
Sigstr Relationships
Before Sigstr Pulse, we had not yet found a platform that allowed us as sales reps to understand how to map the relationships that existed within our company. Now, we are able to leverage the relationship intelligence side of the Sigstr platform to make warmer, stronger connections which helps us be more efficient with our time. Warmer connections are always the best path forward, and Sigstr Pulse allows reps to see what relationships exist in their company like never before.
Territory and Account Planning
The first area we, as a sales team, were immediately able to identify as a key use case for Pulse was territory account planning at the beginning of each quarter. It allows my Account Executive and I to simply dive into the “Location Intelligence” tab, click the city I’m working in, and bam! Pulse is able to spit out a list of our company’s strongest relationships in that area while showing my best paths to a warm introduction.
Event Outreach
Whether it’s Dreamforce, INBOUND, or a field event that you’re planning in conjunction with marketing, events can be stressful. And identifying who to target can be tricky. With Pulse, we’re able to not only see what contacts we have in that city, but also upload event lists with company info and immediately see what our relationship scores with those accounts. This helps to streamline the prospecting and guesswork that goes along with pre-event outreach.
Warm Introductions
With open rates on emails generally under 40% on average, cold outreach can be painful and fruitless for reps. Decision makers are being bombarded with this type of messaging. And some of it may be relevant, but an overwhelming amount is generic and irrelevant to their role or company. With Sigstr Pulse, not only can I see my strongest connections in order to plan out target accounts, I’m now able to ask those within my company with the strongest relationships to provide a warm introduction. This allows for higher response rates, more relevant messaging, and ultimately more meetings.
Relationships and Email Signature Marketing = A New 1-2 Punch for Sales
In a world where folks are more bombarded with messaging than ever before, relationships have become more important than ever. Whether we’re targeting marketers, IT folks, or other salespeople, account planning can be incredibly difficult and getting ahold of the right person even more so. Now, with Sigstr’s Relationship Marketing Platform, reps are able to leverage the relationships within their own company to gain warmer and more meaningful connections while providing relevant content to every prospect. People drive relationships, and relationships drive revenue.
In the video above, Sigstr’s VP of Marketing, Justin Keller, talks through the meaning of relationship marketing. Also, how teams today are using authentic relationships for ABM success.
Learn more by watching the video above or reading through the script below.
ABM is all about focus. Focusing on the kinds of accounts that will ultimately be your favorite customers and engaging with people within those accounts. And really connecting with them on a human level so they understand and internalize your brand’s promise and that you are a trustworthy person that can bring that to life for them.
In an account-based sales and marketing program, alignment is really tough. It’s crucial between those two teams because marketing is there to try and engage and support the sales process but more than ever, marketing is involved throughout the entire funnel. They’re there to help drive that sale.
To do a really good job of it, you need to have a good set of metrics that you’re sharing with sales. Whether that be engagement metrics, sales metrics, or a relationship score. Then, it requires a lot of open communication between the leaders of those teams and the teams themselves.
Authentic relationships are everything when it comes down to it, in terms of ABM. It used to be like, “Hey let’s see how many people we can get into our funnel and count on closing one percent of them.” And now it’s really about finding the people that we really want to engage with and we can win with. At the end of the day, that’s all about relationships.
We actually recently ran a survey: 87% of the world’s best sales and marketing people believe that relationships are absolutely critical to their revenue success. Digital marketing for the past 15 years has gotten lost and now I’m really really glad that it’s coming back to the forefront for marketing teams to really focus on relationships.
We spend so much time building out lead scoring frameworks trying to understand the buying behaviors, firmographic, and demographic traits we really like to engage with. But at the end of the day, they don’t matter in a relationship-based sale. It’s really about how you’re communicating and engaging with the human. Sure, lead scores are helpful but measuring relationships is what I think is going to become really important for marketers.
It’s less than a week away. The leviathan of all tech conferences: Dreamforce. For most conferences contained in a convention center, coordinating meetings, creating buzz and awareness, and going home with a bunch of new business is a daunting but doable challenge. Dreamforce, though? Dreamforce brings in almost 200,000 attendees scattered across the Financial District and SoMa areas of San Francisco. This includes several “lodges” located blocks apart from each other, unofficial sub-conferences vying for attention, and companies trying to woo you to countless VIP dinners and parties. Dreamforce is impermeable for brands without hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend.
At Sigstr, we often say “if what you’re working on seems impossible, you’re probably on the right track.” So when it comes to a scrappy, midwestern startup running the table at Dreamforce, we have one thing to say: “Hold our beer.”
One of the reasons we built Pulse was to help marketers align with sales to fuel revenue. There are few other places where this collaboration is more essential than events. Here’s how we’re using Pulse to squeeze every last ounce of ROI out of events like Dreamforce.
Pre-Event
B2B event marketers obsess over the pre-conference. What’s booth draw? Is our swag cool enough? How do our promotions break through the wall of noise surrounding #DF18? We do it because we want to create awareness to meet new potential customers. Think about the amount of time, effort, money, and planning you’re putting into this part of your event journey. Now consider this stat: only 1% of leads typically become customers.
If your ACV on a 1% lead-to-customer conversion rate is higher than your event marketing spend, T&E, and human capital costs, you should be in good shape. But that’s not typically the case for most SaaS companies (Sigstr included). The net-new lead game is risky business and that’s why we start with our known universe of relationships.
Accounts
It’s pretty easy to spot what brands are directly or peripherally involved with Dreamforce. If you know which brands you want to meet, you can search for them directly in Sigstr Pulse and find out who from your network knows the contacts within that account. This is huge for warm introductions, which have 86% more favorable business outcomes. Rather than falling into the “spray and pray” approach, Sigstr gets very intentional about who we want to meet. Then we cut straight to the chase to meet them through people we both trust.
Locations
As a former San Franciscan, I know first hand that if you’re not directly involved with Dreamforce, you try to stay the heck away. Even still, we use Pulse to find our universe of friendships that live in San Francisco for a few reasons:
Which of our teammates has the strongest network of relationships in San Francisco? They’re probably who we should send out there.
Who are the local influencers that can help us promote our presence in San Francisco? They can help us make new friends.
What relationships in San Francisco do my teammates have that I haven’t explored? What relationships do I have in San Francisco that I’ve neglected and need to nurture?
Are there local friendlies that can give advice to our sales and marketing teams around events, places to stay, etc.
Lists and Contacts
Lastly, I can pull up the list of everyone we met at Dreamforce last year and observe how those relationships have developed over the past year. I know who at Sigstr has the best relationship with these contacts, so I can easily distribute this list to my teammates for outreach. We’ll then let them know where Sigstr will be, encourage them to stop by our booth, and maybe even invite them to dinner or a party.
Pulse makes it easy to analyze the universe of relationships Sigstr already has. By the time we’re done cruising through our target accounts, local contacts, and friends we met last year, the pre-event anxiety around driving new leads has decreased substantially because we already have so much opportunity with our existing friends.
Mid-Event
Sigstr’s Chrome Plugin
“Hey, it’s great to meet you! Oh – you know Tucker on our team. Yeah, I also know this person, and this person, and this person…”
Imagine having the ability to know not only everyone you’ve ever had a business conversation with, but also everyone your coworkers have had a conversation with. All in an instant. With our Chrome plugin, you can automatically understand your universe of relationships with every webpage or LinkedIn profile you visit. But, unlike LinkedIn, this actually tells you who you really know and how strong your network of relationships are. This is the perfect way to break the ice and establish a stronger connection with the people that come visit you at your booth.
Post-Event
The post-event follow-up strategy varies wildly for B2B Marketers, but it is always a top priority, and often times filled with ambiguity, best guesses, and ever-evolving processes. It is also one of the activities that illuminates the fissures (or lack thereof) in sales and marketing alignment.
In the past, this has been a major point of anxiety for me personally. I’ve gotten leads loaded into our CRM, assigned the appropriate person to do follow-up, maybe even added people to a nurture campaign, and then sat back hoped for the best. In this situation, the “best” meant that my sales team was hustling and scoring new opportunities sourced from the event. If you have ever gone back into an event list and realized that only half of your leads have been effectively followed up with, you’re not alone. I’ve gone through that horrifying scenario more times than I’d like to admit.
Now, though, I have Sigstr Pulse. It gives me a perfectly transparent view into our event follow-up. I sync my leads into our CRM, seamlessly pull that campaign into Pulse, and have an almost omniscient view of who we met and how they’re being followed up with.
Top Paths
By looking at the “Top Path” of the contacts in our post-event “Booth Leads” list, I know instantly who at Sigstr should be doing the follow-up. This is because I know they’ve got the highest relationship with that contact or that contact’s account.
Last Activity
When I’m looking at Last Activity, I can see if our sales team has actually followed up on leads since the event. It’s also super useful to our sales team as they’re able to see when the last communication was, and who it was with, so they can pick up the conversation where it left off.
Tying It All Together
Sigstr Pulse makes our email signature marketing side of the platform better than ever. Before our team begins their event follow-up, we’re going to align our various Dreamforce lists to custom, personalized email signature campaigns. We’ve seen our engagement rates skyrocket when we tailor our banners to an event, persona, funnel stage, or all three. Our founder, Dan Hanrahan, recently wrote more about how Pulse and Sigstr Signatures make each other better.
If you write me an email right now, and you’re a tech marketer, sales person, we met you at Dreamforce last year, or you live in San Francisco, I’ll write you back and you’ll automatically be targeted with this banner ad in my email. Sigstr Pulse gives you a unique and powerful way to look at your audiences, and Sigstr Signatures allows you to align them to perfectly targeted content.
On August 8, Sigstr made perhaps the biggest announcement since the company started back in 2015. With the launch of Sigstr Relationships, we solidified ourselves not just as an email signature marketing (ESM) product, but as a Relationship Marketing platform. Pulse is a game-changer for relationship-based sales and marketing, and its addition to our platform actually made us better at ESM!
We all worried that Pulse would distract us from email signature marketing. How could we build and introduce a new product to our customers without distracting our services, product, and go-to-market teams? How could Pulse actually make ESM better across all functions? In short, we wanted to be sure this was a 1+1=3 for our customers, and we worked hard to be intentional about the decisions we made to ensure that this launch would have that effect.
We asked these questions to smart people who had done what we were doing. Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot, offered advice that stuck with me. HubSpot became a platform very intentionally, and along the journey they wanted to be sure each new product had a few things in common with the existing products. This includes:
Unified brand
Same tech stack
Same buyer or ideal customer profile
The decisions we made for Pulse and ESM were always guided by these three criteria. It is so easy to get distracted, and I’m proud that our team made ESM stronger with the building of Pulse. Let me dig into each topic to provide some examples.
Unified Brand
Sigstr created the email signature marketing category. Other solutions existed for IT, but nobody was as determined to unlock marketing value from employee email like Sigstr has been.
Pulse builds further value on top of the channel Sigstr knows best: employee email. Your employees email the companies and contacts most important to your business everyday, and with ESM, marketing can deliver content at scale to the perfect audience. Relationships are built on communication. These same employee emails plus calendar meetings can also predict business relationships, which have been impossible to quantify (until now).
Former ExactTarget CMO and current Sigstr investor, Tim Kopp, describes marketing through your employees as “marketing from the inside-out”. Our team and culture are already committed to helping our customers do exactly that. The Sigstr Green has always been about putting the needs of our customers before our own – none of that is changing. We’re looking to help our customers win through human-to-human marketing, and the addition of Pulse to our platform allows our customers to take that even further.
Same Tech Stack
ESM and Pulse are built on a common tech stack. Customers can use either product independently or use them together. They share a single log-in experience and both build value on top of email platforms like G Suite and O365. Both products share common objects or themes such as customer segments, employees, accounts, and contacts.
Our next-level integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo (and more coming soon!) allow users to sync segmented lists of targeted contacts and accounts. These lists can be used both in the ESM product for account-based marketing targeting, and in Pulse for relationship intelligence.
As we’ve worked to make the product experience the best that it can be for both ESM and Pulse, both sides have benefited. Improvements to the user experience, such as “log-in with Google”, were built to simplify logins for Pulse. However, this also instantly made the lives of ESM customers easier. Enhancements like this will continue to make our UX best-in-class as we work to provide a seamless, easy-to-use experience for our customers.
Same Buyer
We wake up every day thinking about ways we can make our customers look like rockstars. We want to help them get a promotion or earn a bigger budget so they can help their sales team drive revenue faster. With Sigstr, marketers can market through their most valuable asset: their team.
As such, our ideal customers are those work most closely with sales. They are typically focused on events, field-marketing, account-based marketing, and marketing operations.
Think about these roles for a minute. Each is tasked to build relationships with the right accounts and contacts. Everyday these marketers, and the sales people they serve, wake up and think about relationships: “Which accounts and contacts should I focus on today?” Pulse and ESM together are a relationship marketing platform. We help marketers look like heroes for their sales and service teams. We give them powerful ways to provide air cover on key deals, drive more meetings at events, collaborate on lead follow-up, and promote new offerings to current customers.
Wrap Up – TLDR
The Relationship Marketing Platform provides a foundation to do more than we ever have before, and for our customers to do the same. ESM is stronger because of Pulse, and vice versa. With our two products working in tandem, the Sigstr platform allows marketers to to make their employees more productive, ensure that their marketing teams dominate their strategy, and blow away their personal and professional goals.
Our amazing customers were a huge part of making Pulse possible. Before our launch on August 8, we already had over 30 customers using the product and guiding us to build what was most valuable for them. We’re continuing to gather feedback and learn how we can take both products, and the platform as a whole, to the next level. Stay tuned – we’re just getting started!
Today we have the honor of announcing a $4m acceleration round led by rockstar investor, Edison Partners, and followed by all of our past investors.
In the past year, the Sigstr team has more than tripled its headcount and tripled its revenue. With the addition of our revolutionary app, Pulse, we’ve transformed Sigstr into a platform that helps marketers do more with their employee email. We’re using email signatures as a high-volume, precision-targeted marketing channel, and leveraging artificial intelligence to map, quantify, and segment every relationship that’s ever existed in a company.
Our flagship email signature product is the commanding leader in the space. We’re chomping at the bit to make it even better and bring it into the inboxes of millions of employees around the world. Paired up with Pulse, our AI-based relationship intelligence tool, Sigstr now gives marketers previously unimagined ways to understand and engage their most important audiences. These funds will help us build these solutions faster and capture the market quicker.
All of this is made possible by one of the fiercest teams in tech. Every single day our SigStars come to work ready to hustle, have fun, and “ring the bell” (or cowbell, airhorn, gong, etc. depending on their department). We’re all deeply grateful for the support of our customers and investors. Here’s to a bigger, faster and stronger Sigstr!
Read the full press release below.
INDIANAPOLIS — Sigstr, a SaaS platform for employee email signature marketing and relationship intelligence, today announced significant new growth milestones. The company’s annual revenue has nearly tripled in the last year, powered by new customer wins, strong retention and a three-fold expansion in staff. Sigstr has also secured $4 million in new growth investment led by Edison Partners, a leading growth equity investor. Funds will be used to further advance new product development and enterprise market adoption.
The company’s growth comes on the heels of the launch of its relationship intelligence application, Sigstr Relationships, which uses artificial intelligence to map and quantify the collective networks of all employees in a company, providing sales and marketing alignment and better account-based marketing. Adoption of Sigstr Pulse and the Sigstr Signature Campaigns solutions have also helped Sigstr to nearly triple its customer base with the addition of notable brands such as Amazon, Experian, Snowflake, AT&T, and GoHealth.
“Sigstr’s vision is to help marketing and sales unlock the value of employee email. The high-growth plan we’ve put to action isn’t slowing down, as we plan to hit one million Sigstr users by 2020. We have an incredible team in place to support the vision and growth plan,” said Bryan Wade, CEO of Sigstr. “People are waking up to the realization that they need to foster relationships with key customers and prospects to make a real business impact. Sigstr makes the process of building relationships easier and more efficient than ever. People drive relationships and relationships drive revenue. At Sigstr, we are bridging the gap between relationships and revenue.”
“For Sigstr, an exceptional management team, clear market fit for ESM and Pulse, and significant account-based marketing growth trends are all colliding to speed customer adoption,” said Ryan Ziegler, General Partner for Edison Partners, who led the investment. “Bryan and team bring a dynamic culture, competitive focus and intensity to the business, which is immeasurable. We’re excited to partner with Sigstr and apply our integrated investing and operating platform to continue to drive value and growth.”
Snowflake Computing is a rapidly-growing, cloud-based data-warehousing solution that uses Sigstr to harness the power of relationships in their sales and marketing efforts. “Sigstr has completely aligned with our belief that relationships should be at the center of sales and marketing decisions,” said Daniel Day, Director of Account-Based Marketing at Snowflake Computing. “With Sigstr Pulse, we receive a relationship score for every contact and account. This score shows us which employee has a relationship to get us in the door. Sigstr Pulse is taking our marketing program to the next level.”
In addition to current growth, Sigstr was also recently recognized as a marketing technology leader as a winner of the 2018 Martech Breakthrough Awards for Best Email Marketing Innovation, ZoomInfo’s “Champion Award” and “Best Pipeline Acceleration Campaign” at the ABMies.
Relationships are more important than ever. They shape the world around us, each one unique with its own intricately-woven web of connections. And as connections are made, those networks only continue to grow. But a network isn’t solely about quantity – it also relies on the quality. In fact, over 80% of sales and marketing professionals, and nearly 90% of those reporting strong revenue, understand that developing authentic relationships within target accounts has a direct correlation in revenue generation.
So how do you start bridging the gaps from relationships to revenue? Heinz Marketing and Sigstr put together this handy infographic to show the different stages of Mount Revenue and the best path to scaling Relationship Marketing.
Check it out below (click on the image for an enlarged version), and if you’re interested in seeing how Sigstr Relationships can help, find out more here.
When employees, customers, and key partners of LookBookHQ woke up on May 8th, a lot had changed. LookBookHQ had launched a brand new Content Insight and Activation Engine, a massive undertaking in itself. Additionally, alongside that launch – with the knowledge that the name “LookBookHQ” no longer reflected the value of their platform – the company was completely rebranded as “PathFactory”. The transformation was seamless and all-encompassing – the website was new, PathFactory signage adorned the office walls, employees had new on-brand email signatures and business cards, and a booth at SiriusDecisions Summit made the launch and new name official.
May 8th, however, was just the culmination of a long and exciting process to transform LookBookHQ to PathFactory. The rebrand took months of hard work and execution behind the scenes. We sat down with VP of Marketing Elle Woulfe, who spearheaded the initiative alongside her team, to discuss the main highlights from this successful project.
Question #1
Before we dive into PathFactory and the successful execution of this rebrand, can you provide a short history of LookBookHQ and the main motivation behind the transformation to PathFactory?
The idea of rebranding was always sort of lurking in the background. We knew that LookBookHQ no longer suited our vision or adequately reflected the value we provide our customers, but it also felt like a huge and daunting task. We had certainly talked about it on the leadership team, but we hadn’t considered it very seriously.
As we went through the process in Q4-2017 of refining our messaging, we started to develop the courage to believe rebranding was not only possible, but important. The rebrand was actually secondary to the launch of our Content Insight and Activation Engine. The new Engine redefines the value we bring to the market so we knew the name “LookBookHQ” and our playful branding just wasn’t going to cut it anymore – it was time to professionalize the brand and the image.
Question #2
What were the first steps you had to take as a team to start turning this idea into actual execution?
We worked with an amazing agency, Velocity Partners (VP), to help scope what rebranding would look like. We didn’t actually commit to rebranding in the initial stages – we just committed to exploring it.
We kept the initial group involved very small, but after we had explored a short list of possible names and the decision was made to move forward, it became important to keep the rest of the management team and our board in the loop. We were never seeking permission or even consensus on the rebrand but we did want to make sure everyone was really well educated about why we were doing it and how the process was going to work.
The initial list of names was endless and there were only three of us involved in coming up with the short list. I knew it had to be a manageable subset and nothing would be gained by trying to get a large group of people to align on a huge list of names. Once we narrowed it down, a list of about 20 names were pitched to our two co-founders, Mark Opauszky (CEO) and Nick Edouard (CPO).
I had everyone send me their favorite and least favorite names and I plotted them out so we could see where we were aligned. While we weren’t in 100% agreement, there was a lot of overlap in terms of the names we liked. We then did the same exercise with the rest of the Senior Leadership Team. That gave us a lot of confidence that we had selected a name that made sense for us.
Once we were settled on a name, we went through several rounds of identity exploration to make sure we really nailed what the brand would look like and even sound like to some extent. We ended up combining two ideas from the identity work to land on our final creative treatment and logo.
Question #3
From there, did you develop a timeline for the rebrand? And if so, what did that look like? How long did it take from the initial idea to the day of the announcement?
We knew that to make the launch of the brand successful, we needed to tie it to something big and for us, that meant SiriusDecisions where we were already planning to increase our presence and launch the new Engine. But, by the time we went through the arduous process of deciding on a name and fleshing out the brand identity, we only had about 2.5 months to get everything launched.
The first step toward executing on this new vision was to meet with stakeholders in every area of the company to create a giant masterlist of things that needed to be done. Then, we prioritized everything and created a 3-phased approach based on that. After all, we knew we couldn’t do EVERYTHING in just two months so we had to be very calculated in our approach and fairly ruthless in our prioritization. That master list became our Bible and we met constantly over the next 2 months to review where we were against the timeline. We did much of the execution in-house but we also worked with several outsourced vendors to bring many of the final launch deliverables to life.
Question #4
Walk us through the announcement day. What made you choose this particular day to announce the rebrand and what was your favorite moment?
SiriusDecisions Summit in Las Vegas was the perfect stage to showcase the new Engine, brand and message since the majority of our audience and B2B ecosystem would be there.
However, there were certain groups of people we wanted to loop in before the “big day”.
The first group to learn about the rebrand was employees. We wanted to get them on board early to give them time to warm up to the change and get excited about it since it would be impacting them significantly. We divulged new aspects of the rebrand at our weekly Friday all-hands meetings: Everything from the logo to reasons behind the name changes (and the names that ended up on the cutting room floor) to the SiriusDecisions Summit booth design to the new swag… this way, by the time launch rolled around, employees had their new branded swag and were pumped about becoming PathFactory.
The next group we communicated the rebrand to was customer advocates and key partners and influencers. For this, we wanted to make a bigger splash than just an email communication. We took a more personalized approach. We turned our events manager, Kristen’s, garage into a PathFactory storage unit for a week and she hand-packaged about 100 swag kits. Each kit had a variety of premium swag and an insert card revealing the upcoming launch (and encouraging them to help keep the secret). Those were emailed to our VIPs and the kits were followed up by an email as well.
Lastly, we let our customers in on the exciting news. We did this in a couple different ways. For those who were at the SiriusDecisions Summit, we held an event the night before launch to share the news. For those who weren’t at the event, we sent an email the night before. We wanted to make sure they heard the announcement directly from us. The timing was perfect because we also hosted a customer event the day before SiriusDecisions so we got the chance to tell several customers in person. That event actually started with LookBookHQ branding and half way through, everything was flipped so customers could see the new PathFactory brand.
Launch day itself was a crazy and exciting time. Members of the product team along with our director of Content Marketing and Content Marketing Manager burned the midnight oil at the office until about 11 pm the night before making sure the change from lookbookhq.com to pathfactory.com went smoothly. We arrived back at the office at 6am the next morning to make sure the press release went off without a hitch, start migrating our social accounts, and prepare employee communications to make sure everyone knew what to do. When people arrived at the office on launch day, the website was up, we had new PathFactory signage on the walls, the announcement was out and staff emails reflected the new brand – including some beautifully branded signatures with help from Sigstr. That signature has still seen more engagement than any other we have ever launched.
There was a lot of exciting energy inside and outside the office. The day kicked off in Toronto with a little celebration and the team on-site at the event event beamed in to say hi and show off the booth. There was a ton of booth traffic at SiriusDecisions Summit with people curious about the colorful new old kid on the block and eager to discuss the new Engine that drove the launch. Social was blowing up with shout-outs, and employees were constantly coming through to congratulate us on the ease and success of the launch.
It mattered a lot to us that employees felt informed and comfortable with the rebrand. Getting social love from customers was also a highlight. You can have the best new brand in the world, but if it’s not communicated properly, your audience won’t digest it and your announcement will fall flat.
Question #5
Did you have a “checklist” of items to update? If so, what did that look like? What was your biggest challenges (if you had any)? And I’m sure it was a team effort – who was all involved?
Yes, there was a massive checklist of things to do! All the way from big projects like designing a new website, creating a new explainer video and shooting a bunch of new customer testimonials to smaller details like ordering a new nameplate for our office building, getting business cards for everyone at the show and writing new scripts for our BDRs to be prepared to talk about the news… the list goes on… and on…. and on. There were so many moving parts to manage and think about!
On top of that, we also had to build communications plans as to how we’d roll out the news to employees, customers, partners, and of course, the rest of the world. There is a long list of incredibly talented people to credit for all the hard work that went into this. Velocity Partners was instrumental in developing the new brand and vision and developing key pieces of content. Also, the amazing contractors and a stellar team of Pathies (which we now affectionately refer to ourselves as) that owned key tasks in each functional area.
It was also important to us that employees felt their voices were heard throughout the process. We circulated a Google Form so they could submit any suggestions, concerns, or questions anonymously and made sure everything was addressed.
Question #6
Which technologies or platforms did you use to help with the rebrand and announcement?
For project management we used Asana. It was essential to keep track of tasks, owners, timelines, and have an easy point of communication with everyone involved.
The announcement itself involved a coordinated effort across multiple channels including email, social, live events, direct mail, ads, and sponsored content – and of course email signatures with Sigstr. We assembled the press release and new content (including a blog post, videos, and an eBook) into a Content Track using the PathFactory platform and used the Content Track link anywhere we promoted the launch. This way, we could track visitors and measure how many assets they consumed as well as how long they spent with it.
The social strategy included both an organic and paid element. We used Sprout Social to monitor all the launch buzz and make sure every single message was responded to. We also purchased some third party media to distribute the news via email.
We used Marketo to send tailored emails to our customers, database, and partners and all emails featured a customized Sigstr email signature banner to promote the launch.
Question #7
Any advice or tips for teams thinking about or currently going through a rebrand?
Find an agency partner who really knows what they’re doing. We were incredibly fortunate to work with Velocity who just “got us” and felt like an extension of our team from the get go.
Don’t get stuck in the weeds. Adopt a “disagree and commit” mentality and make a conscious decision to commit to choices along the way. It’s rare you’ll ever get 100% buy-in and waiting for that will just hold you up and slow the process down.
Have a solid communication plan for employees, customers, advocates, partners, and the world. Make sure key people are brought into the fold early on for buy in and to help build buzz and excitement. You will rely heavily on them to help amplify your message when it’s time to spread the word!
From a content perspective, make sure not only to create net new external content but also internal content. Equip sales to ensure they know how to talk about the new brand and have easy access to talk tracks and new assets (so they can avoid using old ones).
Prepare for the unexpected. Have a back up plan for known ‘risks’ and expect some things to go wrong (they inevitably will and that’s okay). Just be prepared to handle it!
PathFactory continues to stand out as a platform that can have a massive impact for B2B marketers, and their new branding fully encompasses the power and professionalism of their solution. The path to that new branding took a lot of preparation, collaboration, and focus – and Elle and her team absolutely knocked it out of the park. Over at Sigstr, we can’t get enough of the new PathFactory branding, and learning the methodology behind the process only makes us more impressed with this strong example of a well-planned and well-executed rebrand.
Amber first began her career at Sigstr as our Office Coordinator. We envisioned the role being a little bit of everything and she was up for the challenge. She shared an interest in helping the business and applying her talents wherever needed, and with that, she was hired. Amber’s role has span the gamut of administration, legal redlines, collections, invoicing, HR, finance support, reception, event planning, moving coordinator and whatever else that has been thrown her way. In addition to her responsibilities, Amber has also become a trusted friend and resource to our team. Her willingness to support Sigstr and its employees is a true testament and perfect representation of our Sigstr culture.
During a one-on-one meeting we had back in 2017, she told me she wanted to become our Salesforce Admin and planned to get certified. I spent several years working at Salesforce, and fully understand the power of Salesforce Admins or “Trailblazers” as they like to call them. I also have a sincere appreciation for the career opportunities that are out there for those who are skilled Salesforce Admins. They can literally transform the way you run the business. We fully supported her decision as we agreed that it was an important initiative for the success of our business. Amber started doing research into the world of Salesforce certification, networked with other admins online, and started signing up for free training. In no time she was hooked. The role is a great match for Amber as she has always served as a “go-to” for SigStars, enjoys seeking out solutions to make others’ jobs easier, and has an incredible ability to figure things out.
She has worked hard over the past few months to obtain her Salesforce Administration certification. She put in hours of studying on her own, working with other local aspiring admins in the area, and partnering with our sales, customer success, and marketing teams to identify their needs. I have walked by her desk and witnessed her focus firsthand when building out workflows, processes, dashboards, and reports. She has done a phenomenal job of figuring out the best way for the system to be manipulated to accomplish our desired outcome.
Amber’s work allows us to maximize efficiency and capitalize on Salesforce features and benefits in a way we haven’t been able to before. She has stepped up her technical chops in a big way and proven her Salesforce expertise. With her effort, our sales team has been able to better follow deals in the pipeline, our customer success team has had better tracking, our leadership team has more accurate, readily available reports, and the operations team can rest easier knowing it is all in Salesforce.
Thank you, Amber, for all of your work and effort. You are a Trailblazer and SigStar at the same time! Happy Birthday and here’s to your continued success of helping teams run their business on Salesforce!
Sigstr is honored to be recognized today by MarTech Breakthrough, proving what Sigstr users have known for years. Employee email is one of the most powerful channels in a marketer’s arsenal! Typically people think of email marketing as one-to-many email blasts coming from an ESP– but when you’re marketing through every email that leaves your every employee’s inbox, isn’t that kind of the ultimate innovation in email marketing? MarTech Breakthrough thinks so and we’re delighted to agree with them as Sigstr accepts their award for Email Marketing Innovation of the year.
Even more thrilling, Sigstr is excited to be listed along valued partners and customers like Marketo, Uberflip, Cvent, AdRoll, HubSpot, Certain, and more who have won MarTech Breakthrough Awards this year.
Click here to see what kind of magic can happen when you use Sigstr to turn every email your employees send into a marketing campaign. Read the full press release below.
Sigstr Honored with 2018 MarTech Breakthrough Award for Email Marketing Innovation
INDIANAPOLIS, Aug. 22, 2018 – Sigstr, a SaaS platform for employee email signature marketing and relationship intelligence, today announced that it has been selected as the Email Marketing Innovation Award winner by MarTech Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global marketing technology industry today.
“The MarTech Breakthrough Awards have long been viewed as a credible judge of ability in the MarTech space, and we’re thrilled to be recognized as the 2018 Email Marketing Innovation Award winner,” said Sigstr CEO Bryan Wade. “Email marketers are always looking for ways to drive engagement, but as technologies evolve and laws like GDPR roll out, it’s becoming more and more difficult to fight for attention in the inbox. Little did those email marketers know that their most powerful, high-volume and engaging channel has been in front of them this whole time. Sigstr has given them the power to turn every email that every employee in their organization sends into an email marketing campaign.”
The mission of the MarTech Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of marketing, sales and advertising technology related categories, including marketing automation, market research and customer experience, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, content and social marketing, mobile marketing and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 2,000 nominations from over 12 different countries throughout the world.
“Sigstr captures the spirit of the MarTech Breakthrough Awards perfectly, providing an innovative solution that helps companies enhance their content marketing and account-based marketing efforts in what has traditionally been an untapped marketing channel,” said James Johnson, managing director at MarTech Breakthrough. “Sigstr’s solution empowers not just marketers, but all employees, with the ability to insert dynamic call-to-action banners in their email signature – a truly innovative email marketing solution worthy of our 2018 MarTech Breakthrough Award. Congratulations to the entire Sigstr team on their well-deserved industry recognition.”
In addition to email signature marketing, Sigstr recently announced the newest application of their relationship marketing platform. Sigstr Pulse uses artificial intelligence to map the collective networks of all employees in a company, putting the power of their relationships at marketer’s fingertips. With email signature marketing and now relationship intelligence, Sigstr is continuing their mission of helping customers do more with employee email.
About MarTech Breakthrough
Part of the Tech Breakthrough Awards organization, the MarTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in marketing, ad and sales technology companies, products and people. The MarTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough marketing technology companies and products in categories including marketing automation, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, CRM, content and social marketing, website, SEM, mobile marketing and more. For more information, visit http://martechbreakthrough.com/
What separates today’s most successful account-based marketing programs from those that are inconsistent and unpredictable? And more importantly, how are those organizations training and arming their sales and marketing teams to drive meaningful, scalable results with their most important accounts?
The answer lies in their ability to build, nurture, and leverage their business relationships.
Though technology has made it easier to connect with others than ever before in history, it comes with the caveat that we must also try harder to make a good first impression. Gone are the days of sifting through directories and company profiles, setting and forgetting automated sales and marketing tools, and relying solely on a social media connection to generate pipeline. In an age of automation, one needs to bring more to the table: the power of a relationship.
So the question is: how are today’s organizations developing, nurturing, and leveraging their business relationships to drive more meaningful engagement, more predictable pipeline, and more consistent, reliable revenue? That’s what we wanted to find out.
To better understand how today’s organizations bridge the gaps between relationships and revenue, and more specifically how they do so to find success in their ABM programs, Sigstr and Heinz Marketing conducted a survey over two weeks in June 2018. The responses gathered came from 256 sales and marketing professionals from organizations that range from SMB to large enterprises.
Key Findings
The Power of Authentic Relationships
Relationships are more important than ever before. Where technology gives us the ability to connect with people across the world in an instant, it’s up to us to build and nurture those relationships in a meaningful way.
From our research, over 80% of sales and marketing professionals, and nearly 90% of top performing companies, agree – developing authentic relationships is very important to generate revenue.
A Stalled Relationship
Leveraging and developing relationships are foundational to any successful organization, extending their advantages well-beyond the initial steps to get your foot in the doors of high-value target accounts. The right relationships with the right people have the potential to accelerate the sales process, facilitate buy-in from other buying committee stakeholders, and reinforce the value you bring to the table from the inside.
While it’s not always easy to ask for favors, it was surprising to see that less than 20% of sales and marketing professionals are very confident in how they move prospect relationships forward at-scale, and only 29% of respondents with an ABM program report the same level of confidence.
Tools, Technologies, and Measurement
While new tools and technologies can make our lives a whole lot easier, it doesn’t mean that everyone has the same access to these tools – plus, having a tool is very different from having the right tool.
While 56% of sales and marketing professionals may have a tool that helps identify the network of relationships within a target account, only one-third of those tools can actually measure the strength of those relationships, and less than half of the people who use them are very confident in their accuracy.
And for the remaining respondents without a tool? Less than 9% are very confident in how they manually measure the relationships with their prospects, leaving over one-third of respondents who are not confident at all in how they manually measure their relationships.
Knowledge is Power
Knowing who you’re targeting, especially in ABM, is critical to your success. However, just 15% of respondents are very satisfied with the level of information they have on their targeted accounts and prospects, with only one-quarter of respondents with an ABM program echoing this confidence.
When it comes to moving a deal forward, or even getting your first meeting set, lacking those relationships, and more importantly, the insights and knowledge about your targets, their needs, wants, and pain points, presents a mountain of challenges to overcome before success can be achieved.
Let Me Introduce You
Introductions are a powerful tactic when it comes to relationship-building in sales and marketing, and rightfully so. Think of the quality of a message when it comes from someone you’ve been formally introduced to. It’s likely you actually read it as opposed to a cold email from a name you don’t recognize at all that you probably sent right to the trash.
Yet while 46% of all respondents, and 1 in 2 ABM users, reported that their outreach is very effective following an introduction, 84% of people reported they sometimes or never make those introductions on behalf of their team members.
While there’s something to be said about being connected to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, if they don’t actually know who you are, you might as well be cold calling.
Meet Your Champion
A relationship with a key stakeholder or internal champion can facilitate your sales process tremendously, and 96% of all sales and marketing professionals agree that a strong relationship with key stakeholders plays a major role in the outcome of a sale. However, only 36% on respondents report being very reliant on these champions to actually move the deal forward.
While there’s something to be said about not wanting to be reliant on others to get the job done, the reality is that no deal happens in a vacuum. Having an internal champion to rally the buying committee and vouch for you and the value you bring to the table can be the deciding factor that determines whether you win or lose.
So What?
The ability to develop, nurture, and leverage relationships are what separates today’s most successful account-based marketing programs from those that are inconsistent and unpredictable. It’s not just being able to understand the importance of relationships, nor is it being able to identify them that brings success. Rather, it is the capacity to build authentic, meaningful relationships that bring success.
While the core of a relationship might not have changed – trust, value, authenticity – the number of ways in which we’re able to form those connections has multiplied. But while new tools and technologies make meeting new people easier than ever, it also means we must do more work to ensure that we don’t misplace quantity for quality.
We each possess a vast network of relationships. How will you use yours?
INDIANAPOLIS – August 8, 2018 – Sigstr, the leading email signature marketing solution, today announced the launch of its new relationship marketing platform, Sigstr Pulse. The platform uses artificial intelligence to map the collective networks of all employees in a company, putting the power of their relationships at marketer’s fingertips.
With Sigstr Pulse, marketers can monitor sales’ engagement with marketing leads, review which accounts have growing relationships and measure how tactics are assisting sales teams in garnering new relationships at key accounts. By tracking and scoring the strength of relationships through analysis of employee email, calendar patterns and CRM data, business leaders can gain valuable and scalable insight into how their marketing and sales efforts are performing at the contact, account, and geographic level. Sigstr Pulse makes it easy for individuals to find and request warm introductions from trusted peers through a global search tool. Additional upcoming integrations with CRMs, marketing automation platforms and account-based marketing platforms like Terminus, allow marketers to easily target specific audiences and analyze how business relationships flourish.
“Sigstr Pulse gives our team a new way to calculate the most important metric in business: relationships,” said Sangram Vajre, co-founder of Terminus. “As marketers, everything we do is in effort to create authentic connections with our audiences and Sigstr Pulse helps provide guidance on the best strategies to accomplish that. Sigstr Pulse is ABM on steroids.”
In addition to the launch of the relationship intelligence application, Sigstr released today new research on the importance of 1:1 relationships in sales and marketing in partnership with Heinz Marketing. The findings show that less than 14 percent of marketers are satisfied with the level of information they have on account-based marketing (ABM) targets and contacts — and although relationships are most important to ABM outreach, only 30 percent of companies use their existing network to mine relationships.
“Relationships are the lifeblood of every business, and no other system tracks who has relationships with whom better than a corporate email system. Sigstr Pulse allows marketers to effortlessly solve a problem everyone knows they have; making it easy to understand your organization’s complex web of relationships and take action on them. One practical example is in event marketing, as brands can send invitations to potential attendees based on the hierarchy of relationships within an organization,” said Sigstr CEO Bryan Wade. “Our platform is already in the email flow of hundreds of thousands of employees at some of the world’s largest brands, which means they can flip a switch to turn on relationship marketing via Sigstr Pulse. As we’re marketing in the era of GDPR, tapping into coworkers’ existing business relationships means less cold calling and more productive marketing.”
The report also found that 87 percent of respondents from high-performing companies cited authentic relationships as critical to their business success, but only 30 percent feel confident in their ability to develop authentic relationships at scale.
“Sigstr has expanded the opportunity for marketing and sales teams by allowing them to make the person-to-person connections they need through existing relationships within the organization,” said Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing. “Email is at the center of nearly every professional’s daily workflow, and now they can use those interactions to build their business beyond just the conversations they’re having.”
Sigstr CEO, Bryan Wade, shares more in the video below
People drive relationships. Relationships drive business.
A simple question: “What would B2B marketing and selling be like if we were able to understand and quantify all of our company’s relationships?”
Would we prioritize accounts differently? Would our sales teams change their outreach strategies? Would we run marketing campaigns entirely differently? Could we better forecast sales based on relationships? Would our field events take us to different locations? Would we factor that data into our fit, intent and lead scoring frameworks? If we focused our business’ collective energy on helping relationships flourish, would revenue follow?
We think the answer to all of those questions is a resounding, “yes.” If we could put the power of relationships at our fingertips, it would catalyze a much-needed change to traditional B2B sales and marketing.
B2B marketing has become noise.
The practice of B2B marketing has forever transformed because of our access to an abundance of data. Data has single handedly transformed marketing from the Mad Men days of “art and copy” to one of revenue performance and optimization. And with marketing teams responsible for revenue, it means that they’ve used any and all data at their fingertips to build defensive walls against missing business goals. Out of this, a vicious cycle begins to surge…
Marketers need more channels to generate more revenue, followed by more budget to spend through those. With more money gushing out through channels, marketers have turned to the arcane arts of attribution, sacrificing significant amounts of time at the altar of a spreadsheet in exchange for an opaque view into performance. It’s led us to a world where marketers spend too much time analyzing the performance of leads that become customers less than 1% of the time and too little time creating meaningful experiences for our audiences.
To be clear; measurement is vital, but not at the cost of the customer experience. Our audiences have turned into CRM records, their value defined by demo/firmo/technographics, and their experiences being delivered on our terms, not theirs.
Relationships matter most.
Truly successful marketers realize that in order to stand out from the noise, they need to create meaningful connections that lead to authentic relationships. Their obsession with the customer journey puts brand, experience, and authenticity first. Even though it runs counter to everything marketers have been doing for the past decade – they’ve proven it works. Tim Kopp of Hyde Park Ventures refers to this kind of marketing as not Business-to-Business (B2B), but rather Business-to-Human (B2H).
Shifting the focus from B2B to B2H is the key to relationship marketing. Marketers must get back to the root of what they are hoping to achieve; creating a meaningful, mutually beneficial relationship with the human on the receiving end of their brand. Lead scores and conversion analytics have become the primary focus for too many marketers when they should equally be thinking about how to create something magical for their audience (their human audience). We need to stop treating leads like numbers, and start treating them like they have souls.
Businesses don’t buy products – people do.
Today’s buyers want to feel connected to the company, the brand, and the humans with whom they do business. This is terrifying to marketers because responding to this leaves them without a shield of data to defend themselves. But a business that fails to connect with their audience on their terms and their turf will fail to turn them into customers, leaving all that funnel data for naught.
Scott Dorsey, co-founder of ExactTarget and High Alpha, recognizes the importance of investing in these connections. “Marketing is a relationship game,” he says. “Companies need to programmatically build and leverage their relationship networks to win in the digital age.”
Your audience is more omniscient than ever. They know they’re being cookied, they know what phone calls to avoid, and their bullshit detector is more finely tuned than at any point in history. A marketer’s only defense, then, is authenticity and developing relationships. Deeper, meaningful connections require time, care, and investing in relationships. Prospects and customers will only give their valuable time and engagement to companies with whom they have emotional connections and relationships.
Welcome (back) to the era of relationship marketing.
It’s time to acknowledge that the landscape has shifted and adjust the approach to growing business. The tools and tactics necessary to scale relationships don’t all exist yet – and maybe they never will – but the need for them is apparent. What’s old is new again– and it’s time for marketers to be the beating heart of their brands, focused on building meaningful experiences that translate into the ability for your employees to develop authentic relationships.
People drive relationships. Relationships drive business.
Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Baltimore HubSpot User Group thanks to the fine folks at Groove Commerce. After touring the Groove office and meeting a few team members, I jumped on stage and shared more about employee email, email signature marketing, and how they can both impact account-based marketing.
Check out the presentation’s main highlights below or watch it here thanks to Groove’s Facebook page.
A New Channel for ABM Engagement
After a quick intro to account-based marketing and what’s typically required from a team with the strategy and execution, we dove into how employee email can help. You see, employee email is the perfect channel to use when starting your ABM journey. It doesn’t disrupt what you’re already doing (sending email and promoting marketing initiatives) and is a quick-win in a sometimes overwhelming ABM world.
What makes the “perfect channel” for ABM? As discussed during the presentation, it starts with volume. Then teams need to consider attention, engagement, and targeting opportunities. If a channel can check off all of those boxes, you have a winner. Here’s why teams today are achieving ABM success with employee email.
Volume
Employee email is big. Like, really big. When compared to other channels, there’s no question to who the winner is in terms of daily interactions. 274 billion emails are sent and received everyday! Not only that, the average time an employee spends in their inbox is 6.3 hours.
After learning about the magnitude of employee email, we encourage customers and prospects to think through some math with this question.
“How many emails do my employees send every year?
A Sigstr customer recently went through this exercise and realized they were sending 96 million emails a year as a company. 96 million! And what do each of these emails include? The email signature of course. Once teams see how email signature marketing can unlock this high-volume channel, their thinking shifts from “96 million emails sent” to “96 million marketing opportunities that we may be missing out on”.
Attention and Engagement
Volume? Check. But what about attention and engagement?
Look no further than the “Science of Email Signatures” report. According to dozens of EyeQuant experiments and tests, not only do recipients pay attention to the employee email signature, it can actually make a big impact during one-to-one email interactions. Prominent colors, specific dimensions, calls-to-action, and other design elements can help catch the attention of your email audience. Who knew the employee email signature represented so many layers of engagement?
Targeting
With all that said, what good is an account-based marketing channel without targeting? ESM actually offers a number of targeting opportunities for sales and marketing teams to reach their most important audience. This includes:
By vertical
By account
By persona (pictured below)
By opportunity stage (by syncing Sigstr with your CRM)
Syncing any other smart or static lists found within your marketing automation platform of choice
Because Sigstr understands the sender and recipient of each email, teams can ensure relevant and personalized content is delivered in every email sent.
Thank You, Baltimore HUG!
As you can see above, Baltimore HubSpotters learned how employee email checks all of the boxes required for an effective ABM channel. Volume, attention, and even targeting.
A big thanks to the Baltimore HUG for showing up to the Groove office to learn more about this new ABM channel. I sincerely enjoyed the discussion. And a special thanks to the Groove team – I hope to see you all again soon!
One year ago, Sigstr launched account-based marketing functionality. With the ability to use Sigstr Campaigns based on recipient email domain targeting, marketers began to target their most valuable accounts or contacts with personalized content. Soon after that, we announced new integrations with CRMs and MAPs, allowing marketers to get even more dynamic with their targeting and timing capabilities with Sigstr Campaigns.
Today we’re opening a new chapter of account-based targeting to marketers. Now Sigstr can deliver custom content to all of your target accounts (and the contacts within) through every stage of their buyer’s journey.
Why Employee Email for ABM?
Before we dive into that, let’s set the stage. Email is the highest volume channel, ever. Even if you bought out Google’s entire inventory of display ads, it would only be a drop in the ocean of emails that ebb and flow out of organizations every day. Email is also arguably the most engaged channel ever. It’s easy to disregard, or even block, a display ad. Social media is great, but not everyone is active or involved. Email is the workhorse of every company with open rates approaching 100% for your most important contacts and accounts.
The scale and targeting of employee email makes it a vital ABM channel for marketers. Sangram Vajre recently talked to us about that and told us the following:
“Every single organization is using email. The question for marketers is: what are you really doing with it? The ability to get the right message internally and externally to the right audience is immensely helpful and game-changing for a lot of organizations.”
Sangram is right. The ability to consistently but passively engage your audience through Sigstr Campaigns is game-changing. Imagine turning on a firehose of Campaigns, perfectly timed and targeted to your most important audiences. That’s what you get with Sigstr’s new ABM functions. Here’s a look at what you can do when you turn your employee email into a high-volume ABM channel.
Multi-Campaign Creator
Align personalized banners to your target accounts list (no matter how big it is) with our new Multi-Campaign Creator. Using this feature, you can upload your target accounts and associate them with customized banners in a single click.
Multi-Dimensional Targeting
Take your targeting a step further with multiple dimensions. Now you can hit your target accounts with custom content and target specific individuals or personas within those accounts with customized banners as well.
Progressive Sigstr Campaigns
Accelerate your pipeline with progressive Sigstr Campaigns. By aligning your Sigstr Campaigns to campaign and opportunity stages, you can progressively promote content that will speed up your sales cycle with every email your employees send.
Sigstr + The Rest of Your ABM Stack
Sigstr is an official Marketo Launchpoint Integration Partner, HubSpot Connect Partner, and Salesforce AppExchange partner. When you’re able to target and track every email your employees send, you acquire thousands of useful data points for automation. Are you investing in your content activation and experience? Sigstr is the perfect way to consistently direct your audience to them. Are you using targeted display networks? Duplicate that creative for Sigstr to create a seamless brand experience.
Your company is already engaging with your target accounts thousands of times every month. Sigstr gives account-based marketers the ability to transform every one of those engagements into a targeted marketing campaign that speeds up your pipeline velocity.
Two years ago the average B2B buying committee was 5.4 people big. Skip to today, that number is 6.8, according to Harvard Business Review. On its face, that’s not a particularly big increase, but in the age of ABM where personalization and intense focus are everything, it’s a massive jump. At Sigstr, we target roughly 600 accounts at a given time, which means over the past two years, there are an additional 840 people we need to consider in all of our account-based sales and marketing efforts. We’ll let Maya Angelou tell you exactly why those 840 people matter so much.
All the feels
As marketers, we obsess over every single word on our website, in our email blasts, and in our tweets, but people will forget what was said. We stress endlessly over our event strategy, our swag, our follow-up campaigns, but ultimately those things will go unnoticed. However, the overall feeling you’re able to create when you demonstrate that you care about every individual through a beautifully orchestrated ABM campaign creates an indelible brand impression. That’s why every member of that buying committee matters. And as those buying committees scale, so too does our need to scale ABM content and campaigns.
The elusive ABM quadrant
The most impactful things your marketing team can do aren’t scalable and they’re seldom measurable.
Given all the time and money in the world, we could all put together phenomenal campaigns that filled our pipeline to the brim. Unfortunately, lack of resources is the biggest obstacle to success for B2B marketers, according to BrightTALK, which is why we all spend too much time in the lower left quadrant.
Occasionally sales and marketing will, with herculean efforts, pull together a top-right quadrant campaign. The holy grail for ABM marketers is how to land in that bottom right quadrant.
Choosing the right type of ABM
According to ITSMA, most teams start begin their ABM journey in the middle tier – “ABM Lite.” I would posit that the reason is because of bandwidth constraints. “Strategic ABM” requires large investments of both time and money. And “”Programmatic ABM” requires a heavy reliance on well-integrated (and typically expensive) tech stacks.
No matter where you are on your ABM journey, it’s imperative you consistently spend time in the “Strategic ABM” quadrant. The more time you spend there, the more you’ll develop the calisthenics necessary to make those efforts more scalable and more measurable. To be sure, this requires a little leap of faith and it may not even work the first time you run a super targeted and tightly orchestrated campaign. Here are some tips we’ve learned at Sigstr to help you get where you need to be.
Data, data, and more data
Doing some serious research on your top-tier accounts – and the people within them – can feel a little unnatural. Understanding the firmographics, initiatives, and brand values of your target accounts requires a lot of hard, manual work. Understanding the demographics, personalities, pain-points and passion-points of the individuals in each account requires even more hard work. At Sigstr, we take two hours a month enriching our account and contact data with information that we use to inform our personalized campaigns and to help our Sales team craft more engaging communications.
Create a content matrix
Here are some amazing stats from B2B Marketing: 84% of all buying committees have a “champion” and that champion holds 59% of the purchasing influence over their committee. Fully two-thirds of every champion cites “content, research, and expertise” as their primary consideration when making a purchase. Juxtapose that with this stat, from that very same study, that shows that 97% of champions have already made their purchasing decision before the committee is even formed!
That means B2B buyers are pulling together their coworkers, pouring over your content, and looking for your sales and marketing team to make them believe that the decision they’ve already made is the correct one. If you can provide a well tailored content experience that directly addresses their needs and roles, you’ll come off as an expert that the committee – and especially the champion – can trust.
How do you provide that tailored content experience? We obviously use Sigstr for it and align our content to the recipient’s persona (tracked in our CRM) and their sales stage (also tracked in our CRM). With these two known dimensions, Sigstr is able to intelligently and automatically insert a call-to-action banner in any email that any employee sends to the target account’s domain.
Sigstr is great for this because it persistently but passively promotes the right content, so you can be sure that your audience is seeing it but they’re not getting spammed. For those not lucky enough to have Sigstr though, here’s a workaround: Create a multi-dimensional content matrix that you can share with your sales team. Align your content to the dimensions most important to your company, for example, “Role” and “Industry”.
With your content organized this way, you take the guesswork out of sales’ hands and show where your content gaps are so you can write or repurpose for them. One other benefit is that it focuses the content to be the right piece for the right person. Don’t be that person that sends five blue links to content that may or may not be relevant – that’s a good way for none of your resources to be consumed.
The time is now
If you’re wondering when the right time to start scaling your ABM efforts is, the answer is now. Getting it right isn’t the most important thing, getting it started is. Put the contacts in your target accounts on a pedestal, become obsessed with the journey you’re about to take them on, and find out what happens. The more you do it, the better your ABM campaigns will be and the faster you’ll be able to execute them!
And so begins the season of sweaty backs sticking to lawn chairs, families grilling out, and the neighborhood kids firing off a few too many fireworks past bedtime. We are reminded of the historic figures that helped get us to where we are today and their iconic contributions. But what if these Founding Fathers had the power of email to spread the word? Our team took a stab at what those email signatures may have looked like.
John Hancock
John Hancock (not to be confused with Herbie Hancock) was the President of the Second Continental Congress and is well known for his absurdly large signature. When John wasn’t busy overshadowing his fellow signees, he was serving as an immensely popular Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Fun fact: John Hancock was actually the founder of the modern-day email signature.
Thomas Jefferson
Tommy Jeffs, often best remembered for the phrase “all men are created equal” proves that NOT all email signatures are created equal. As the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had a monumental impact on the language used within the document and penned most of it himself. To date, many countries have looked to this document as a partial framework with which to form their own, so we thought his signature should reflect that.
Alexander Hamilton
When not being the star of Broadway, Alexander Hamilton (of “Hamilton” fame) is notorious for founding the U.S. financial system as the first Treasury Secretary. The “ten dollar founding father” who “got a lot farther by working harder” was instrumental to the founding of the United States before his untimely death at the hands of sitting Vice President Aaron Burr.
James Madison
Standing at 5’4” and approximately 100 pounds, Madison was the tiniest president in U.S. History to date. His impact on our nation, however, was no small feat. Madison was one of the only presidents to go into battle, was the last-living signer of the Constitution, and for a brief stint appeared on the $5,000 bill (petition to bring that back, by the way!). Finally, his contributions to The Federalist Papers ultimately helped lead to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
George Washington
The big man himself, George Washington, needs no introduction. Well…not today anyway. But back in the days of the Revolutionary War George needed all the help he could get! As the supreme commander of the Continental Army, Washington would’ve loved to have had a way to bring more fresh troops to the cause. He may have lost more battles than he won, but he’ll always be a winner in our eyes (much like his email signature).
Ben Franklin
Big Ben (no, not the clock) had more knowledge crammed into his head than you could shake a stick at. He was a polymath excelling in many areas and studies, and perhaps the most well-known experiment was Franklin’s foray into electricity. Believing that lightning in storms was electricity, Benjamin took to the skies with a kite, a key, and a dream. After sailing the skies and confirming his series, we thought it only natural that he would want to share his newest area of expertise.
Dan Hanrahan
Last but certainly not least, our very own Founding Father: Dan Hanrahan! Without his vision, drive, and passion, Sigstr wouldn’t be here today. He may not have crossed the Delaware River, but we’ve seen him traverse the rush hour traffic on Delaware Street and that is impressive enough in it’s own right.
Our founder, Dan Hanrahan, put it best in a blog post way back on St. Patrick’s day of 2017: “Family comes first – always. To take care of our families, we pour our hearts, minds and resources into building an incredible product and company to delight our customers.”
We work hard every day to make our customers successful, to make each other successful, and, as Dan mentioned, to take care of our families. At the same time, we owe so much to those families – families who care for us, love us, make the tough days better, and make the good days great.
Whether it’s our significant others who have stood by us through the years, our kids who can bring a smile to our face at any time, or even our pets who are always there for a snuggle (no seriously, Sigstr employees have the cutest, fluffiest, goodest dogs in the world), these groups make all the difference. Working at a fast-growing company isn’t always easy, and we pour a lot of heart every day into making our product the best that it can be. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of working at Sigstr, but it’s always important to take a step back and recognize the bigger picture reason for why we’re doing what we’re doing.
So much of who we are, and, by extension, what this company has become, is because of the people (and dogs) that we come back to each night.
Sigstr’s First Annual Bring Your Loved Ones to Work Day
Last Friday, we had the chance to gather our families in the Sigstr office and celebrate our first ever “Family Day.” That morning, our office was bursting at the seams with dozens of kids, significant others, and pets. Our lobby buzzed with activity – and overflowed with food – as we enjoyed donuts, coloring, conversation, and even the chance to name our ABM piñata mascot (details coming soon on the winning submission). It was an incredible morning, and it was a reflection of our larger culture.
Here at Sigstr, we often talk about our core value known as the “Signature Rule” – we intentionally place the interests of our customers, our communities, and each other before our own. We put each other first. We work hard to make our clients, and each other, successful. We hold each other accountable, and we celebrate together when we’ve succeeded. We share in the ups and the downs, and we are united under a common goal. In short – we are a family.
Looking around at the joy and excitement of that morning, it was easy to see that bigger picture. It was easy to see the love everyone had for their own families, and the way that our employees have come together to form a family of our own. The Sigstr family isn’t confined to the walls of our office, or to the business relationships we’ve formed. It runs much deeper than that – we care profoundly about each other, about our clients, and, especially, about the people that stand by us every day.
Thank you to our families, to everyone who makes our jobs worth it – you are the reason we do what we do. Join the Sigstr family today.
Last week, ZoomInfo held their annual Growth Acceleration Summit where a lineup of incredible thought leaders shared insights and inspiration to hundreds of marketers and salespeople. If you weren’t able to make it, you can live vicariously through 42 tweets from the event.
While speakers like Magic Johnson, Jay Baer and Neil Patel were surely high points of the three days in Boston, our favorite moment came towards the end of the summit during the ZoomInfo Growth Awards. Sigstr was nominated for – and won – The Champions award, which highlights organizations who have demonstrated exceptional growth over the past year.
“The ZoomInfo B2B Growth Acceleration Awards were created to recognize B2B salespeople and marketers that are making significant contributions to revenue growth and business success,” Hila Nir, CMO, ZoomInfo, said. “We are pleased to award Sigstr with The Champions Award and are excited to see their continued excellence in driving growth in their organization.”
Sigstr is humbled and honored to receive this recognition. Our team nearly doubled in size last year and over tripled our number of customers. ZoomInfo was instrumental in our sales growth and we’re also very grateful for the partnership we’ve developed. Especially for helping us bring to life the first ever SDR Wars, where, alongside 14 other remarkable companies, we set out to challenge our sales dev teams to knock their goals out of the park and share best practices and learnings along the way.
You can get the Top 10 Takeaways of the Modern-Day Sales Development Team here. And it’s not too early to start getting ready for ZoomInfo’s 2019 Growth Acceleration Summit. You can get updates on that right here.
80% of marketers believe that live events are critical to their company’s success. What’s more, nearly one third of everyone surveyed said that it’s their single-most effective marketing channel, according to this study. Whether it’s tradeshows and conferences, field events and meetups, or webinars and hangouts – marketers are insisting on more and bigger live events and are dedicating more and more budget to them every year. And therein lies the challenge.
With more marketers throwing more money at more events every year, savvy marketers are going to have to find different and better channels to promote their events in order to maintain their edge. That’s why Sigstr is thrilled to announce our next-generation set of event marketing capabilities that will help you drive awareness, registration and attendance better than ever before.
Using Sigstr to promote events has been a longtime favorite amongst our customers. Why? Because they’ve seen such a tremendous boost in performance when using employee email as an advertising and awareness channel. According to our recent State of Email Signature Marketing report, 38% of all campaigns deployed last year were focused on promoting events.
Event Marketing Rockstars: Invoca and SalesLoft
For example, call center intelligence vendor, Invoca, ran a five-month Sigstr campaign to promote their 2017 Summit. Invoca’s Marketing Operations Manager, Jen Rios, said, “Before the conference even began, Sigstr had already influenced much more in pipeline, which ended up translating to a 477% increase over the previous year.”
Likewise, sales automation leader, SalesLoft, ran a similar Sigstr campaign to promote their annual conference, Rainmaker. Over a five-week period, their Sigstr campaign racked up 271,000 impressions. Salesloft CEO, Kyle Porter, told us that “One out of every eight clicks on a Sigstr campaign turned into a new registrant for Rainmaker.”
Some of our customers even use animated GIFs to drive meetings at conferences.
With customers already seeing such phenomenal success using Sigstr to promote events, we’re absolutely ecstatic to introduce Sigstr’s next generation of event marketing capabilities that will bestow even more powerful tools and tactics to event marketers. And it will give them the edge they need to stand out in an increasingly cramped channel.
Countdown Timers
Keeping anticipation and excitement for an upcoming event is tough for event marketers to do without becoming spammy. With countdown timers, you can schedule campaigns to progressively display event deadlines within every employee email that’s sent. This passive campaign keeps the cadence of reminders going without ever become annoying. In fact, the world’s leading event management software vendor, Cvent, uses this functionality to promote discounted early-bird registration for their own live events.
Registration Segmentation
It’s bad form to keep promoting an event to those who have already registered for it. Now you can use Sigstr to display “Register Now” messaging to people that haven’t signed up yet and “Reminder” or countdown timers to those who have registered. Similarly, you can easily make your post-event promotion more targeted by assigning people who registered and attended your event with “Thank You For Attending” campaigns. For those that didn’t make it, use “Sorry we missed you!” messaging that promotes your event recap or webinar replay.
Sigstr Viral
Combining forces with other companies to host events is a great way to lower event costs, mitigate risk, and create a bigger presence and registration list. When you’re creating an owned event with partners, however, it can be challenging to ensure they’re doing everything they can to help promote the event.
Sigstr Viral easily allows you to make sure that every person at your partners’ company is promoting the event – and they’re getting the proper attribution for the registrations they’re driving. Create a single page where your partners can copy and paste the HTML code to drop directly into employee email signatures or your ESP. The HTML code comes complete with the configurable parameters you need to track registration attribution. Your partners – who don’t need a Sigstr subscription – will love you for it, and you can rest easy knowing they’re promoting your event with every email sent.
Geographic Targeting
Let’s say you’ve got an upcoming field event in Denver. Why on earth would you want to promote that event to everyone in the world? With geographic targeting, you can align your regional events promotion to only those people in a given area (you’re welcome, everyone that doesn’t live in Denver!). Even if you’re doing a multi-city roadshow, you can run multiple geographic campaigns at once to keep your promotion targeted to those areas while still promoting other content everywhere else.
Industry and Persona Targeting
Like Geographic Targeting, keep your event promotion ads limited to only the individuals in a particular role or industry to ensure the content is relevant. This targeting isn’t just limited to events – your vertical-specific content can be targeted to your industry segments as well! You can count on your click-through and conversion rates peaking way up when you’re delivering hyper-targeted content with Sigstr.
When you combine ad targeting functionality with scheduled countdowns and registration segmentation, you’re able to create highly personalized campaigns that touch every point in the event’s lifecycle. Learn more about how Sigstr can help your events rock, see more promotion examples, and get in touch with someone from Sigstr.
Employee engagement affects every team member inside your organization. And every team member inside your organization affects your bottom line. When employees feel connected to their team and the larger organization, are self-guided, and have opportunities to invest in personal and professional development, good things happen! And according to this McKinsey Global Institute report, the most engaged employees are the most productive.
That’s why it’s important to effectively promote internal initiatives and company news with the whole squad. But besides the “all@” email (which may or not be read half the time) – how are teams doing that today? They’re using employee email in a different way.
Email signature marketing allows corporate communications and HR teams to promote internal announcements within every email sent from one coworker to another. How is this all possible? With employee targeting, Sigstr recognizes when you are emailing a coworker and when you are not. So if you send an email to someone with your company’s email domain, an internal banner will appear. When you send an email to a prospect, customer, or someone outside of your organization, the banner will default to an external promotion (like a new case study, video, or upcoming event). Pretty cool huh?
We’ve been using this functionality within our own account for over a year now and have quite a few examples to share. If you’re looking for ideas or design inspiration for your own internal campaign strategy, feel free to use the list below to get the creative juices flowing!
Company culture
Culture is important to us, no doubt. And we do whatever we can to cultivate this culture into a family-like environment where you’ll find warm welcomes, team member recognition, and of course pictures that capture all of the above. Email signature marketing definitely plays a big part in this (as you can see below).
Side note: If you want to learn more about Sigstr’s culture, check out this blog postwritten by our Founder and President (you’ll learn to appreciate the St. Patrick’s Day campaign even more after reading).
Company meetings or events
Much like how we use email signature marketing in our webinar promotion ideas we do the same for internal events! Company outings (like a baseball game at Victory Field), quarterly meetings, holiday parties, and dinners are all popular use cases for us.
Philanthropy or fundraising event
If there is a fundraising opportunity or philanthropy event that is near and dear to a Sigstr team member’s heart, we use ESM to encourage other employees to join! All the way from donations and haircuts to volunteer sign-ups.
Enablement and education
We take content seriously around here – as you can see in this post . Not only do we use employee email to deliver relevant content to the appropriate external audience, we also use it for enablement with internal team members. Any time a new case study or ebook is published, we launch an internal campaign that brings employees straight to a library of resources. That way they can become familiar with the new content first – then comfortably and confidently talk about it during demos and customer calls.
Other
In addition to the examples above, there are many other use cases for internal campaigns. This includes payroll, benefits, brand guidelines, an employee blog program, Glassdoor reviews, and more!
A new way to rally employee engagement
Up to this point, corporate communications teams have relied on social media, company-wide emails, and even the kitchen thumbtack board to get the word out about company news. But if your team is looking for a new and creative way to promote internal initiatives – email signature marketing might be your answer.
It’s been a tremendous asset for our own team and culture so we’re always happy to share any ideas or designs for inspiration. And if you’d like to see even more banner examples, check out Net Health’s story and their collection of internal campaigns (jump to 5:19).
Most marketers have a love/hate relationship with marketing technology. On one hand, it allows us to do our jobs better by improving communication methods, providing comprehensive tracking and performance metrics, opening up new channels to reach prospects and customers, and so much more. On the other hand, it’s sometimes difficult and leads to overlapping and competing priorities. With so many marketing technologies at play, it can be hard to establish a cohesive, integrated marketing program. The good news is that with the right strategy in place, marketing technology is not only manageable, but game changing.
One of Sigstr’s priorities is to fit in seamlessly with your overarching marketing program. Whether you use HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, or any other combination of CRM and marketing automation platforms, Sigstr can easily align with your marketing team’s goals and objectives. With HubSpot in particular, you can not only track the performance of email signature marketing efforts, but you can use Sigstr to trigger specific actions in HubSpot and vice versa. Intrigued? Just wait until you see how this all comes together.
Using Sigstr to Trigger HubSpot Workflows
One of Sigstr’s main analytics features is the ability to tell you which email recipients have clicked on your Sigstr campaign banners. This is better known as “recipient analytics”. Recipient analytics are tracked in the native application automatically, but with the help of the HubSpot integration, you can push recipient analytics directly into your HubSpot environment. If one of your HubSpot contacts has clicked on a Sigstr campaign banner, that activity is tracked in the same way as any other engagement. You can even create new contact profiles based on Sigstr engagements.
What’s great about this functionality is that you can use Sigstr clicks to trigger specific HubSpot workflows or to move contacts to the next step in a workflow. Need an example? Think about your marketing content. Perhaps you’re running a Sigstr campaign that promotes your latest case study. You can build out a workflow in HubSpot so that in the instance that someone clicks on your campaign, they are entered into a workflow that (1) looks to see if that person did indeed download the case study and (2) based on that answer either alerts a sales representative or enters the person into a nurture stream. It’s a marketing nerd’s dream come true.
Also worth mentioning – you don’t have to have a Sigstr engagement trigger the start of a workflow. You can also use a Sigstr click to simply take a contact to the next step in a workflow. Anything is possible!
Using HubSpot to Trigger Sigstr Campaigns
On the flip side of the coin, you can also use HubSpot workflows to trigger specific campaigns in Sigstr. Sigstr’s ABM functionality allows you to target email recipients with content tailored to each individual. How? You can either import a list of recipients you’d like to target or – the easier method – import contacts from a third party platform. The HubSpot integration allows you to import smart and static lists straight to Sigstr to align to campaigns now and in the future.
So how does this tie into workflows? You can build workflows to automatically move contacts on and off HubSpot static lists and those lists can be aligned to specific Sigstr campaigns. A great example of this is tied to opportunity stage. Most marketers align their content strategy to the stage of an opportunity a prospect or customer is in. For example, at Sigstr, we know a new prospect is likely more interested in an overview video of our application while a customer cares more about product enablement. Your Sigstr campaigns should reflect these differences and using HubSpot workflows, they can! Let’s see how it’s done.
In HubSpot, you can set your enrollment trigger* and then specify which static list the enrolled contacts should be moved to. As long as that static list is tied to a campaign in Sigstr, everyone on the list will automatically start seeing new Sigstr campaign banners in your employee emails. You can specify the period of time you’d like the campaign to show by moving the contacts off of the list after a certain number of days. Or if you really want to go wild, you can automatically move them to a new static list.
If using the opportunity stage as a trigger doesn’t excite you, don’t worry. There are countless activities you can use as enrollment triggers. We’ve even compiled a list to get you started.
Potential Enrollment Triggers
Attended Event
Completed Demo
Downloaded Content
Met with Sales Team
Completed Implementation
Upgraded Services/Product
Watched Video
Attended Webinar
Main takeaway? The opportunities are endless! Evaluate your various marketing initiatives and think about how email signature marketing should fit in. Once you have a strategy in place, building out the workflows is easy!
Connecting your assorted marketing platforms can be a daunting task, but the results are worth the added effort. If you can create a true marketing ecosystem where all your platforms are connected and working together, you’ll magnify your marketing efforts exponentially. Plus, with all that automation, you’ll have some extra time in the break room!
You can learn more about the Sigstr + HubSpot integration here. And let us know if you have any questions about tying Sigstr, HubSpot, or any other platform together! Our team would be happy to chat!
*If you’re using the HubSpot/Salesforce integration to dictate the opportunity stage, make sure contacts are listed within the Salesforce opportunity.
We have mad respect for you, Silicon Valley fans. And we want you to know there are some spoilers ahead – so proceed with caution if you aren’t through season five yet. For those of you who are 100 percent caught up – please enjoy! We hope we made you proud (and lol) with this blog post.
From TechCrunch Disrupt to the official launch of a decentralized internet, the Pied Piper boys have been through a lot in five seasons. They’ve made many friends, a few enemies, and countless mistakes along the way. But that’s what we’ve come to love about this hilarious crew. Even when the odds are against them, they find a way to make it work.
With the conclusion of season five a few weeks back, we wanted to honor our favorite cast members the best way we know how. These guys are in tech, so we know they send their fair share of emails. Yet the show has never revealed an email signature for any of these characters. So we thought we’d take matters into our own hands…
Richard Hendricks
Much like his character in the show, Richard’s email signature is sort of awkward yet comical. He asked Erlich back in season one to design his signature based on what a CEO’s email signature should look like. As you might expect, it’s a little much. At least his campaign has been updated since then as he’s using it to promote the PiperNet announcement. Within the banner you’ll find a hilariously weird mashup between new tech and the “folktale” theme of Pied Piper. Richard insisted on using this font for the headline because “everyone loves it” – along with the old Pied Piper logo.
Gavin Belson
Gavin Belson represents many traits of a stereotypical Silicon Valley titan. He wants to make the world a better place (better than anyone else) and is always seeking spiritual council while trying to demolish the competition. The top half of his email signature aggressively promotes his personal brand (because that’s what benevolent leaders do). Gavin also uses the real estate below that to showcase the Box III Gavin Belson Signature Edition. He personally stands behind the SAS/SSD/NVMe drive bays, 24-core processor, ECC DDR4 SD-RAM LR-DIMMs…and email signature marketing.
Laurie Bream
Laurie’s email signature describes her personality perfectly. All business, not much flash, and professionally stiff. Although we don’t see much emotion from Laurie (like ever), she surprises us at times with admiration towards her colleagues – like calling Monica her best friend. She’s using email signature marketing to teach others her ways in what we can only assume to be a very exciting and uplifting workshop.
Monica Hall
Not bad, Monica! Pied Piper’s newest CFO put together this email signature template for the entire company to adopt as they continue to add more and more employees. It’s clean, sharp, and up-to-date with Pied Piper’s current brand. However, there is some backlash from the guys (mostly Gilfoyle and Dinesh). Mainly due to the politically correct yet aesthetically unpleasant disclaimer at the bottom.
Dinesh
Season four and five are the main sources of inspiration for Dinesh’s email signature. It pays homage to PiperChat and his days as CEO of Pied Piper. At the same time, it also represents a few of his new obsessions. He insisted that his name be in the Tesla font and colors (even though it clashes with the green). And he’s still out to prove that he’s a better coder than Gilfoyle.
Gilfoyle
As you can imagine, Gilfoyle likes to keep things simple and isn’t keen on being too flashy with email signature marketing. He did however use a gothic style font for his name to represent his dark side. And although he isn’t big on titles or providing contact information within the signature area, he’s excited to promote the PiedPiperCoin announcement with a campaign banner that shows the trend line and current value.
Jared Dunn
Jared always means well and did put together a relatively professional (and somewhat normal) email signature template up top. But the campaign is where things go severely wrong. Remember that awful-looking jacket he debuted in season three? It lives on in his email signature! Buy yours today!
Erlich Bachman
RIP, Erlich. Although he is “technically” dead on the show, you can’t write a post about Silicon Valley email signatures and NOT include him. As you can see below, the theme of Erlich’s signature area still revolves around Bachmanity Insanity (and yes that is a palapa in his name). The campaign banner resembles his Aviato car and is a call-to-action to watch the new “success story” documentary. Hopefully the “Phoenix that shall be known as Bachmanity” will rise again.
Let’s keep this party going! Check out Sigstr’s best email signatures from the “If [Blank] Had Email Signatures” blog series:
According to Kapost’s B2B Marketing Playbook, 65% of content goes unused in B2B organizations. 65%! Getting the use out of every single piece of content is incredibly difficult nowadays. Your audience sees hundreds if not thousands of marketing messages every single day, so ensuring you content call-to-action stands out is difficult to achieve. If your team uses the same channels and messages as your competitors, how is your content differentiated?
That’s why content marketers are now using employee email as their new go-to channel. And email signature marketing is the secret weapon to unlocking the value of this channel. Teams today are using ESM to deliver personalized and relevant content to the right audience (and at the right time). This includes ebooks, white papers, reports, case studies, videos, infographics, one-pagers, and blog posts.
Data from The State of Email Signature Marketing report revealed that “resources and collateral” is one of the most popular use cases for ESM. For our own account, we found it to be THE most popular use case. We take content seriously around here, and use employee email to get more eyeballs on that content. This includes any of the resources you see in the blue list below.
Within this category, we have a few favorite banners to share from our own Sigstr account (okay more like 34). This includes campaigns for case studies, ebooks, reports, videos, press releases, and blog posts. If you’re looking to up your content distribution game with email signature marketing, use the list below for some ideas or design inspiration!
Case study
For every new case study that we publish we launch a Sigstr campaign to get the promotion started. You’ll find CTAs like “Read it here” or “Download now” in the majority of our case study banners. The main goal here is to clearly communicate who the story is about and put them in the spotlight. We love sharing how awesome our customers are and all of the cool things they’re doing with email signature marketing.
Ebook or report
Resources like white papers, reports, and ebooks usually take the most time and energy to create. They’re longer reads that include a fair amount of research and data. We challenge ourselves every quarter to publish content like this so we can continue to build up our credibility as a thought leader and go-to source. At the same time, we’re just as thoughtful with the promotion because we want to capitalize on all of the hard work put into the resource. We make sure we’re using every channel possible to deliver our newest piece to the right audience. This includes employee email!
Video
I’m sure our friends at Vidyard agree with this statement: Video is a powerful form of content. It might be the most powerful. We use video primarily for customer stories and product tutorials. And when we promote video content with email signature marketing, we always try to include a play button as a part of the call-to-action.
Press release
A consistent stream of press activity can help build up a brand and boost team morale. Whenever we have a big announcement coming up, we publish a press release to provide more details. ESM is a standard checkbox in our press promotion to-do list and is an easy and quick way to get the word out to your audience.
Blog
Blog content can be useful a number of ways. SEO, product education, thought leadership, and connecting with customers are the big ones for us. Sometimes we’re serious and down to business (example: this blog post), and sometimes we’re more casual and fun (example: this blog post). A balanced variety of topics and types of posts is important – and it does take some time to build up a blog program. That’s why we view every published blog post as an opportunity to share something new in our employees’ email signatures.
The sales development representative (SDR) role is arguably the most important job in sales. And according to The Bridge Group’s Sales Development 2018 Metrics and Compensation Research Report, demand for SDR candidates continues to rise. There’s no denying that the importance and demand of this position is high, but so is the difficulty. SDRs are tasked with generating new opportunities for their sales team and representing the company’s brand as a whole. That’s a lot of pressure, and sometimes it can be a grind. That’s why SDR teams are always looking for tips, tricks, and common trends to better themselves.
To find the top trends from the modern-day sales development team, you have to go straight to the source. The SDR Wars presented that opportunity, bringing together a community of teams and leaders to compete in a bracket-style tournament for bragging rights as the best SDR team in the land (and a pretty sweet trophy). The competition was fierce, no doubt, but it also cultivated a network of like-minded SDR all-stars who have an appetite for constantly improving and a willingness to help others.
With this in mind, all competing SDR squads (and even a few thought leaders) were open to being interviewed after the tournament. Each individual interview included a series of questions about the team’s experience in the SDR Wars and how they see the sales development landscape today. The group then put together a plan to turn these interviews into a new go-to source for all SDR teams and leaders.
Introducing – “Top 10 Trends of the Modern-Day Sales Development Team”
This new ebook includes trends and sound bites from the best of the best SDR teams in B2B. 16 teams. 28 sales development leaders.
The official list
Some takeaways are tactical, while others focus on the bigger picture. However, all of them offer nuggets of SDR gold that your team can start using tomorrow. The top ten include:
Consistent personalization and being relevant
The phone isn’t dead – calling still works!
The importance of coaching, role playing, and team feedback
The SDR’s tech stack
Team motivation and knowing your why
Common KPIs and going beyond the numbers
Account-based marketing in the SDR world
Personalization at scale
Video takes personalized outreach to the next level
Account Executive and SDR alignment
Thank you to those who participated in The SDR Wars and provided insight for this report! It was amazing to hear from so many motivated sales development teams who are all doing phenomenal work. Download the full report here or check out the preview below to get a sneak peek!
Engagement is the bread and butter of account-based marketing. Not only that, measuring the touches happening with an account is vital for assessing the effectiveness of your strategy. But it’s not always easy. Teams are constantly trying to break through the noise so the right people engage with their brand. And it’s not always successful, as passively acquired attention is a gold mine for marketers nowadays.
That’s why teams are considering a new channel for ABM engagement. Employee email presents a huge opportunity for ABM marketers. They can now add personalized, but scalable, content resources into the billions of organic conversations that are already happening. How? Through each employee’s email signature.
Email signature marketing makes a dent in the “Engage” section of an ABM operation. Most interactions with targeted accounts will be in either Gmail or Outlook. Now each exchange from your email domain can have powerful banners that are relevant and personalized.
Sigstr ABM functionality
Sigstr is able to identify the sender and recipient of each email, allowing marketers to execute crazy cool targeted campaigns. Teams can import lists directly into the application or connect to the smart and static lists in other platforms. Sigstr provides simple and reliable targeting so the right content is delivered to the right audience every time.
Audiences can vary from industries and verticals all the way down to specific accounts and contacts. Recipient lists can even be built by triggers from your CRM or marketing automation platforms. This includes opportunity stage.
There’s a lot you can do with this functionality and some might be asking, “Where do I even start?” That’s why we’re showing you how Sigstr uses Sigstr for ABM targeting! The highlight reel above and full list below shares ideas and inspiration for your own ABM email signature marketing campaigns.
Industry or vertical
We promote our Pacers case study with the “Sports Franchises” list we built within Sigstr. This includes the Miami Heat, Chicago Cubs, or Detroit Red Wings (you get the picture). When someone from Sigstr emails these domains, recipients will see this relevant resource that highlights what’s most important to them.
We use the same playbook for nonprofits. Email signature marketing is a great use case for recruiting volunteers and asking for donations, so we wrote a blog post about it and use this banner to promote it. This time, we built our target list via a Salesforce campaign, which then we synced to our Sigstr account.
Rinse and repeat for digital marketing agencies. We have a blog that highlights a few of our agency customers and use this banner to promote the post to our list of other digital marketing agencies.
Net Health is a rockstar customer and best-in-class example of a healthcare technology company using email signature marketing. We want to make sure other healthcare tech brands see their story, so this case study shows up when we email a domain included in our “Healthcare Tech” target list.
Sales stage
Top tier accounts (with three engagements or less) will see this banner introducing Sigstr in a personalized way while inviting the email recipient to learn more.
Other top tier accounts (with four or more engagements) receive this message as the relationship continues to build. At this point, we know their business a little bit better and can map certain features of Sigstr with their pain points or goals.
Once a prospect has seen a demo, our Account Executive will send a follow-up email recapping the call and laying out next steps. And within that email, the recipient will see this message. To make this happen on our side of things, the Account Executive just adds the contact to a HubSpot workflow (via the contact view of Salesforce). The recipient will then be removed from the workflow ten days later and see a new campaign banner when the next email is sent.
Similar to the demo stage, contacts will see this banner if they are a part of an opportunity that is currently in the “Technical Evaluation” stage. At this point their IT team is involved so we want to show them how serious we are about security.
If a qualified prospect “goes dark” or we haven’t engaged them with in a while, they will see this campaign. It leads them to a personalized microsite that shows them how email signature marketing can bring value to their business (based on their top priorities and goals).
Finally, we want to show our customers how much we appreciate them choosing Sigstr. Especially new customers! Emails to those contacts tied to an opportunity in the “Closed/Won” stage will see this banner. We want them to know they’re not just starting another vendor partnership. They’re jumping into a community of like-minded marketers who are constantly sharing ideas and stories about this new owned marketing channel. It’s a great way for new customers to learn about other current customers and read about Sigstr’s core values.
Current customers
In addition to in-app messages and customer emails, the Sigstr Support twitter is a great way to stay up-to-date with new Sigstr features and releases. All customers may not know this, so we target them with this campaign to get the word out.
Whenever we publish new release notes or write about a new feature, we use a banner like this to share it with our “Current Customers” recipient list.
We also share with customers which specific features they can expect in the coming months or quarters during “Roadmap” webinars like this one.
G2 Crowd is a great way to gather customer feedback and showcase positive reviews with current prospects. We use email signature marketing to help build up our collection of reviews and ratings.
Tech stack
Prospects who use HubSpot are added to the “Tech Stack: HubSpot” recipient list so they can see this message. It leads them to a resource page that shows all of the cool ways you can use HubSpot + Sigstr together for inbound greatness.
We teamed up with the fine folks at Uberflip and Terminus to show our audience how you can use these three platforms together for ABM success. The webinar registration and recording targets our “Tech Stack: Uberflip” and “Tech Stack: Terminus” lists.
See a theme here yet? We use our “Tech Stack: Salesforce” recipient list with campaigns like this one.
And finally, our “Tech Stack: Marketo” list pairs up Marketo-specific content, like this press release.
Event, conference, or trade show
We launched this campaign and assigned it to a list of contacts attending this year’s HubSpot partner day. If you have a good idea of who will be attending a specific event, this is a great way to schedule a meeting before it even starts.
This strategy also works for large conferences. We hosted a happy hour to catch up with Sigstr customers and friends during SaaStr. We got the word out to those within our network who were planning on being in San Francisco.
Whether it be a conference, trade show, regional dinner, or webinar, all types of events are essential for engaging customers and prospects. According to Endless Events, an overwhelming majority of C-Suite executives (87%) plan on investing in events more in the future. 86% of event marketers believe technology can have a major positive impact on the success of their events, and 40% agree that email is the most effective channel for promotion.
Statistics aside, there’s no denying this growing trend: more and more teams are using email signature marketing to drive registrations, increase attendance, and improve post-event follow up. Employee email presents a huge opportunity for event promotion ideas within the billions of organic conversations that are already happening. How? The employee email signature.
Events is the perfect use case for email signature marketing. After analyzing 1,000+ campaign banners from Sigstr’s top 120 customers, we found events to be the most popular use case (check out the graphic below) and one of the most effective (read the full report here).
In addition to our customers, it’s also a very popular use case for our own account (only second to content resources). So we decided to share all of the event-related campaigns we have launched within our own Sigstr account up to this point. That way, if you ever have an event coming up and need some ideas for an email signature design, we have you covered!
Check out the highlight reel and full list below for some design inspiration.
Regional event or happy hour
Our sales and marketing team coordinates certain events around defined territories, which is why we invest a lot in regional happy hours or dinners. They’re great for building relationships with current customers and starting a dialogue with new prospects. For teams who don’t have territories, these types of events still work great when you’re in town for a bigger conference. Why not host your own micro event after hours?
Bonus: We use Eventbrite, HubSpot, and Sigstr together to sync our registration lists with specific email signature banners. So if you’ve already registered for our ABM party, you’ll see a new banner with a “thanks for registering” message that also points you to relevant content.
Conference
We also sponsor larger conferences like INBOUND and Dreamforce where we’re always looking to make the most out of our investment. This means getting the right people there and making sure they stop by our booth. We use email signature marketing to let our audience know who from our team will be there. Most of our banners also include a call-to-action that prompts the email recipient to schedule time with our team.
Webinar
Face-to-face time with prospects or customers is at the top of our list, but sometimes that’s not always possible. So we host digital events, like webinars, as another way to engage with our audience. When thinking about webinar promotion ideas, it’s important to include key pieces of information. This includes the topic, a sub-header, date, and time of the webinar. A call-to-action is also important so they click on the banner to learn more and register.
Internal or company event
Email recipients with our domain receive internal campaigns, while those who don’t see external content. That’s how we’re able to intuitively align internal events with HR and marketing. This includes company outings (like a baseball game at Victory Field), quarterly meetings, holiday parties, and dinners.
This post was originally published on the ABM Leadership Alliance blog.
Decision committees are on the rise and they’re only growing, according to Harvard Business Review. The number of people involved in B2B buying decisions has increased from an average of 5.4 two years ago to 6.8 today. Not only that, those within the group have a wide range of roles, functions, and geographies. All of this is making life tough for both your sales and marketing teams.
Marketing has plenty of challenges in supporting an account-based sale, but the account executives have the steeper task of developing relationships, understanding group dynamics and managing personalities in ever growing buying committees. Marketers should keep this in mind, trust their sales counterparts, and set them up for success before and after handing off warm and engaged accounts.
Here are four ways marketing can help sales rise to those challenges:
1. Focus on the individuals, not the group
Remember, you’re selling to a company, but it’s actual human beings that are doing the buying. And each human being has a unique ego, so keep track of each one and figure out how to service these aspects. That means focusing on an individual’s needs while not losing track of the group’s needs. That’s why marketing should support sales with personalized content, a variety of case studies and customer examples, and developing a brand that individuals can identify with.
2. Know your champion
84% of all buying groups have a champion and that person is the key influencer in 59% of the cases. This is the very reason you need to focus on all of the individuals because the balance of the buying group holds half of the influence.
That said, 66% of champions cite content, research and expertise as the primary considerations in purchasing. If the champion trusts that you are the expert in the room, you can get the group to follow along.
3. Right target, right time
Persona-based content is crucial for successful account-based sales and marketing. Different industries and personas have different ways of talking, and the ways they define success can vary. Make sure you’re taking the time to talk to disparate audiences differently. A helpful way of identifying what content you need to produce is a matrix with your target industries on one axis and the buying committee personas on the other. Are you able to check off every combination?
Once you’ve developed your set of content, being able to deliver that content at the right moment is crucial. One thing the Sigstr team does is trigger content based off of sales stages in our CRM. When sales changes a stage, marketing automatically updates our email signature banners. Sales and marketing alignment is great and automated alignment is the best!
4. Don’t be afraid of emotion
You’ll probably be surprised to learn that 95% of purchasing decisions are done subconsciously. Not only is great research and content crucial to your account-based sale, it also helps your buyers justify their emotions.
That might be why 97% of B2B marketers say that their decision is made before the buying committee is even formed! People want to buy from brands they trust and enjoy. They rely on your expertise, content, and fellow committee members to help convince themselves that the decision they’ve already made is the right one.
Build a brand that prospects identify with and respect. That’s how marketing can help with all of the above. Of course this doesn’t happen overnight and isn’t something you can learn from a single blog post.
However, this final thought might be a good starting point. Forget B2B and B2C – never sell to an account. All marketing is H2H, so always sell to a human being.
We’d love to keep this conversation going in Las Vegas and discuss how your team is using H2H marketing. Mix and mingle with very savvy marketers and the ABM Leadership Alliance at the ABM Royale party on May 9th. See you there!
Karrie Wozniak is an expert on mobile fundraising. She is Vice President Marketing at OneCause, the leading mobile fundraising software company that helps nonprofits engage more donors and raise more money. Since 2008, OneCause has helped nearly 2,800 organizations raise more than $1 billion and connect with over one million unique donors.
2017 was an instrumental year for our company, OneCause, as we undertook a comprehensive rebranding project. After a decade, we felt our name (BidPal), limited us as a mobile bidding company, and we wanted a new brand to better reflect the full suite of fundraising solutions we offer nonprofits. The rebrand project took just over 12 months, and involved everyone in the company.
A successful rebrand project starts with getting buy-in; galvanizing everyone around the new brand takes good planning, excellent communication and finding innovative ways to bring your new identity to market. Having gone through this process, there are core lessons learned to help guide any rebrand initiative.
Here are seven tips for creating a successful new brand launch.
Tip 1: Start with why and get executive buy-in
Rebrands by nature are high profile efforts, so it’s necessary to get the support of the C-suite and the board. Involve key executives, build alignment and secure the strategic support you’ll need to rollout the rebrand company wide. Start by asking management to confirm the “Why”: 1) why we exist as a company, 2) why we think we add value, 3) why the rebrand is important to the business?
Tip 2: Gather input and keep an open mind
Next get your teams involved. Use discovery exercises to ask stakeholders for their views on the current name, what they think your brand stands for and what is limiting you now in sales, product innovation, recruitment, and employee engagement. Keep an open mind; you can’t be sure what feelings or feedback your employees will have about the rebrand. Listen, acknowledge input and provide clear timeframes for key brand milestones to keep everyone aligned and bought into the rebrand project.
Tip 3: Listen to your customers
Next take the time to talk to customers. Customers can help clarify what they value and perceive in the current name, what they see as the company’s strengths and weaknesses, and how the company compares with competitors. It’s important to understand the level of customer loyalty and intimacy with your existing name.
We found that our original name BidPal was viewed favorably by our customers; it was a brand they recognized, trusted and identified with, so we decided to keep it as the brand name for our flagship product.
Tip 4: Crystalize the new vision
Next, it’s time to turn the discovery feedback into a new brand vision. Develop position statements and reasons to believe that detail who the company is, what it does and why it matters. Present these findings along with potential new corporate names and taglines to all stakeholders. Listen to their reactions, emotional commentary and feedback. From here, you can begin to refine your top choices.
The vision phase takes patience, multiple iterations and can last months. Hearing what people like and don’t like in new names, is important to moving closer to a final decision. It can be challenging but this is where you need to rely on the strategic vision, the why and the consensus you’ve built in the organization. Stay the course!
Tip 5: Create the new brand
Once a name is chosen, the new brand comes to life. Work with your creative team to finalize the new brand elements, the style, voice, key identity markers. On the design side, this is the time to finalize color palettes, type fonts, logos, taglines and marks. If someone doesn’t like part of the logo or creative design, probe to find out why. That person may see something in the design or color palette that you never considered.
Tip 6: Develop a strong rollout plan
A company name and logo touch every department in the company. It’s important to have representatives from each department involved in the rollout planning and launch. The rollout needs to be coordinated, launching internally first to get your teams comfortable with the name and then training them on the new brand guidelines. Aligning your teams prior to public launch ensures that everyone in a customer facing role, is prepared to support and champion the new brand. At OneCause, we used an Operational Readiness Plan to detail each step, deliverable and team involved in the rebrand initiative.
Tip 7: Employees – Brand Ambassadors & Email Marketing
Finally, employees are front line advocates for the new brand. Find ways to engage your employees as brand ambassadors. One way we created individual brand exposure and a broader reach quickly was through Sigstr, ouremail signature marketing solution. It provided us a unique way to increase new brand awareness through individual personal email interactions. By using email signature marketing, each employee email became a mini-rebrand announcement. Every communication from our marketing, support, customer success and sales teams created a customer rebrand touchpoint. The callouts were an easy and effective way to create brand visibility by using personalized call-to-action banners in employees’ email signatures. These callouts also allowed customers to redirect to our new website and interact with OneCause. This simple communication strategy was important to our public rollout.
Finally, realize that a rebrand takes significant resources and time to complete. If done right, you will come away with a brand that all your stakeholders can rally around. Using a methodical approach that involves stakeholders and employees from throughout the company will help ensure a successful and seamless transition.
Sigstr is at it again! From exciting campaign creative enhancements to needed updates in compliance and security, we’re thrilled to announce our latest product release! Check out the details below.
Animated GIF Support
Ready to liven things up? Sigstr’s campaign functionality now supports animated GIFs! Using an animated GIF adds an element of surprise to email signature marketing that typically isn’t possible with static campaigns. Beyond engagement, you can also use GIFs to explain or demonstrate a new product or service. It’s an excellent way to illustrate complex concepts in an easily digestible manner.
Now if only we could all agree on the pronunciation…
Multi-Banner Campaigns
Ensure your content never goes stale! Upload multiple banners under a single campaign to ensure your email recipients stay engaged. Promote the same call-to-action using numerous tactics and compare the results! The first version of multi-banner campaigns will drive all banners to a single landing page. In future versions, we will introduce the option to link each banner to an individual landing page.
Multi-Campaign Creator
Manage your ABM efforts seamlessly with Sigstr’s Multi-Campaign Creator. Import contact data from a single CSV file to create multiple recipient lists at once. Cut time by streamlining data management and email recipient segmentation. Deliver personalized campaign banners to hundreds of accounts with a single click!
Google SSO
Tired of remembering lengthy passwords for every application in your team’s repertoire? Use our ‘Sign in with Google’ feature, and login to Sigstr with just one click! The method uses Google’s OAuth 2 to ensure your connection is safe and secure.
Enterprise Workspaces
Manage multiple brands, branches, and regions under one, unified Sigstr account. With enterprise workspaces, dictate multiple organizations under a single parent account. Each organization functions independently and has its own campaigns, signatures, and user base.
To manage the various aspects of enterprise workspaces, account owners are able to assign two different admin roles – Parent Admins and Organization Admins. Parent Admins have access to all underlying organizations while Organization Admins only have access to a single organization.
HubSpot Meetings
Alleviate the confusion of scheduling by automating the process with HubSpot. Use HubSpot Meetings to include a link below your signature inviting email recipients to “Schedule a Call” or “Schedule a Meeting”. It’s an easy way to ensure human connection outside of email.
Click Notifications
Get real-time notifications in your inbox anytime someone engages with one of your Sigstr campaigns. Click Notifications let you (and perhaps more importantly, your sales team) know when customers and prospects are interacting with your brand, allowing you to reach out when it’s most relevant!
Click notifications are available to all customers on the Advanced or Professional plans. Sign into the Employee Preference Center to opt-in and get started! If you have yet to install Sigstr’s Chrome Extension, you will need to do so in order to enable the functionality.
GDPR
Establish GDPR compliance! Aside from an increasingly popular buzzword, GDPR is a sweeping change to Europe’s out-dated privacy and security policies. The new regulations require companies in the EU (or companies that have customers in the EU) to meet new regulations around the methods of collecting, securing, and deleting personal information.
Sigstr’s new data management features can be configured to meet GDPR and specific customer needs, including tools to view and delete user information on demand. Sigstr also appointed a Data Protection Officer (DPO), which is a requirement for data processors. The DPO is responsible for being the main point of contact for data privacy needs, and for ensuring that Sigstr is following best practices.
Every month, the team gets together and recognizes a team member that went above and beyond in the previous month. Today, we celebrate our awesome Data Protection Officer & Director of QA, Brent MacKay! #SigStaroftheMonthpic.twitter.com/ARAxqKJk5P
Understand who in your organization has Sigstr’s Chrome Extension installed! The Chrome Extension enables Sigstr ABM and recipient analytics. A user’s extension is marked as active as soon as his or her campaign has been clicked on by an end recipient. In later versions, the active status will be dependent on campaign views.
Ready to put these new features to use? Log in to your Sigstr accountand get started! If you’re new to Sigstr, let us know! We would be more than happy to provide a demo of all the above features and more!
Event season is upon us. That means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some people love conferences because they give them extraordinary opportunities to meet and connect with other like-minded professionals. Others love attending sessions and nerding out over data and content. But, most love the evening networking events – especially when that conference is theSiriusDecisions Summit that’s being hosted in a city like Las Vegas. Finding the best networking events to attend always involves a level of guesswork. So we’re going to make it really easy for you.
All ‘Bout Margaritas Party
If you’re a planner and like getting to town a little early to get settled before a big conference, you’ll be in good company. Grab some good grub and amazing margaritas with the most fun people at Sigstr, Terminus, Brightfunnel, PFL & Uberflip on Monday, May 7th.
If you’re interested in ABM (Account-based Marketing or All ‘Bout Margaritas – whichever you prefer), come join in on the fun. No sales pitches. No presentations. Just a room full of like-minded marketers getting to know and learn from each other. Want to talk shop? Go for it. Just want to come and snack on some chips & guac and throw back some margs? Great – we’re here for that, too. You can join in on the margarita-fueled funhere.
ABM Royale Party
We’re all about ABM here at Sigstr. It’s a core part of our sales and marketing strategy, and if you didn’t already know, ABM targeting functionality is available within Sigstr.
Because of this, we’ve made friends with a lot of other marketers that are very passionate about Account-Based Marketing, like theABM Leadership Alliance. This group includes 11 industry-leading technology partners who educate B2B marketers about ABM. The ABM Leadership Alliance is throwing an awesome party on Wednesday, May 9th calledABM Royale.
The event is being hosted atSkyfall Lounge – so if nothing else, come for the view. Same deal as with the All ‘Bout Margaritas Parties – no sales pitches or presentations. Just killer cocktails and gourmet grub. You can register for thathere.
These are the top two events that are on our radar now – we’ll be sure to update the post as we learn more!
Fearless (def): without fear; bold or brave; not afraid at all.
A fearless marketer is daring, heroic, courageous, and confident. They’re also creative, and find ways to extend the power of marketing automation across multiple channels. Enter: Marketo.
The theme of Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit this year is “The Fearless Marketer.” A pretty cool theme, if you ask us. And we think a certain integration can help fearless marketers become even more…fearless. Enter: email signature marketing.
Imagine every single email your employees send suddenly becoming powerful, targeted data points that can inform your smart lists, lead scoring frameworks, nurture campaigns, and more. Employee email is a channel worth connecting to your marketing automation platform, and it can easily be done with Marketo + email signature marketing.
The power of Marketo + Sigstr together
What exactly happens when you hook up Marketo to email signature marketing? So glad you asked! We’ve colorfully illustrated a few of the thousands of amazing things you can do when you connect these two in Sigstr’s Guide to Marketing Automation.
Watch the video below for an overview on the Marketo + Sigstr integration.
A perfect integration for your ABM operation
What’s better than intelligent account-based targeting with employee email? By aligning email signature banners with Marketo smartlist memberships, marketers can ensure timely and personalized content in every email sent to targeted prospects. This makes a dent in the “Engage” section of an ABM operation. Most interactions with targeted accounts will be in either Gmail or Outlook, so why not take advantage of the conversations your team is already having?
Align your Marketo lists to email signature banners by specific contacts, account, industry, or even sales stage.
The example below illustrates how a trigger in Marketo, like sales stage membership, can sync with Sigstr to populate a specific banner in the account executive’s follow-up email.
We’d love to keep the conversation going at Marketing Nation Summit! How else are you fearlessly connecting Marketo to your digital channels? Are you already using email signature marketing for other initiatives? Swing by Sigstr’s booth or grab some margs with our team!
Here at Sigstr, we wake up every day thinking about how to do more with email signatures. That often underutilized space at the end of an email can be a powerhouse for brand consistency, marketing, employee engagement, and scheduling meetings. We’ve unlocked incredible value from email signatures by turning them into ways for you to segment messaging across departments, promote events or increase pipeline, and target specific recipients with catered messaging. Our rich integrations – and partnership with HubSpot – have taken our product to the next level. And we’ve helped power 52 million marketing impressions per month by allowing marketers to unlock the employee email channel.
Sometimes, however, it’s good to get back to the basics. The email signature, in its most simple form, has always been a way for the recipient to learn more about you, the sender – your name, title, your company’s website, and, crucially, ways that they can reach you. Phone numbers and social profiles allow them to reach out to you outside of the world of email, to connect in other ways and to build relationships. And now there’s one more element to add to that list.
Schedule More Meetings with HubSpot + Sigstr
One of the most obvious but underutilized uses of the email signature is giving recipients the opportunity to schedule a meeting. How many times has an entire email thread been devoted to just finding time on calendars that works best for everyone? A button below the contact information in an email signature inviting recipients to “Schedule a Call” or “Schedule a Meeting” alleviates all of that confusion.
To that note, we’re excited to introduce yet another new feature of the HubSpot + Sigstr integration! In addition to directly connecting landing pages, tracking conversions, and syncing lists to Sigstr Campaigns, teams can now add the HubSpot Meetings feature directly within Sigstr.
Sales teams can now get on the phone with prospects without spending their day coordinating times. Support teams can set up a troubleshooting screen share with zero hassle. HubSpot Meetings makes it easy to streamline scheduling and encourage more frequent engagement.
It’s so simple, but so effective and important. Now long back-and-forth emails of throwing out times and navigating schedules can be avoided. All by typing a few simple words: “feel free to click the ‘Schedule a Call’ button in my email signature to find a time that works best for you!”.
The HubSpot Meetings field is available in every Sigstr account. Not only does this feature make employee’s lives easier, it drives success across the entire organization. People build relationships, and those relationships drive business – and as big as email is, it’s the touch points formed outside of it, on calls and video chats, that drive the powerful connections that make an organization successful.
Don’t miss out on those touch points. Use HubSpot + Sigstr together to schedule meetings more frequently and more efficiently – because those are the engagements that make your business grow.
Aside from an increasingly popular buzzword, GDPR is a sweeping change to Europe’s out-dated privacy and security policies. GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation and it’s going into effect on May 25, 2018. The new regulations will require companies in the EU (or companies that have customers in the EU) to meet new regulations around the methods of collecting, securing, and deleting personal information.
Some other main themes of the new regulations include data transparency, increased scope of responsibility for those who process personal information, and consent to collect and process personal information. GDPR empowers its residents to better understand who is processing their data, why their information is being processed, and the ability to have their information deleted from specified sources. Failure to comply can be met with very steep fines.
In a nutshell, if your company (or your company’s employees) email EU residents or companies, these regulations may apply to you.
How GDPR Applies to Sigstr
Part of the GDPR is increased scope of responsibility. Companies who process data (like Sigstr) are jointly responsible for following the new regulations’ practices. This is why Sigstr is taking a proactive approach to help educate and prepare for the new changes.
Under GDPR, there are two different entities – data controllers and data processors. Data controllers own and control what information is being collected, and why the data is being processed. Processors are responsible for exercising control of the data they process and the security of that data.
In the case of Sigstr’s email signature marketing platform and its customers, Sigstr acts as the data processor and customers act as the data controllers.
What is Sigstr doing to prepare for GDPR?
Over the past several months, Sigstr senior leadership has consulted with experts, hired a Data Protection Officer, and conducted thorough reviews of its processes and documentation to prepare for the new GDPR.
Under GDPR, it is no longer acceptable to store more personal information than what is needed (of EU residents), or to store information indefinitely. Sigstr is developing data management features that can be configured to meet GDPR and specific customer needs.
The “right to be forgotten” is one of the more talked about key changes – it states that users can request to have their information deleted at any time. Sigstr will provide tools to view and delete user information on demand to fit this requirement.
Sigstr also appointed a Data Protection Office (DPO), which is a requirement for both controllers and processors. The DPO is responsible for being the main point of contact for data privacy needs, and for ensuring that his/her company is following best practices.
Data Protection Agreements
A large part of GDPR is documenting what data is being processed and why. Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) outline and set expectations between Sigstr and its customers when it comes to processing data. This allows for transparency and, as a data processor under the new GDPR, Sigstr is willing to sign DPAs with our customers. Every industry has a different set of regulations and Sigstr will ensure that we align to those requirements.
Not sure what a DPA should look like? Reach out to us at security@sigstr.com and we can help provide examples of what one should look like.
Why is this important to you?
One of the biggest changes under GDPR is joint responsibility for data processing and privacy. Companies are now responsible for the data they send to their third party vendors, and what the vendors do with that information. Sigstr’s GDPR features and transparency make us one less thing to worry about with the sweeping privacy changes outlined by GDPR. As the new regulations continue to evolve, Sigstr will be ready for them!
If you have any questions for Sigstr’s Data Protection Officer or Security Team, email security@sigstr.com.
Joshua Meyer brings over 14 years of fundraising, volunteer management, and marketing experience to his current role as the Director of Marketing for OneCause. Currently, as a member of the OneCause sales and marketing team, Josh manages all of the firm’s marketing efforts. He has a passion for helping to create positive change and loves that his current role allows him to help nonprofits engage new donors and achieve their fundraising goals.
Your nonprofit organization already works hard to optimize its campaign marketing and continuously refine its donor outreach strategies. You even take the time to segment your donors and target their communications in specific ways.
If you also host major events for your donors, members, or community at large, though, it’s crucial that you take a look at your overarching marketing strategies and continually think about ways to amplify their impact.
That’s because nonprofit event marketing requires a more unified and comprehensive approach to spreading the word and engaging potential attendees.
You can find the perfect new fundraising ticketing system, for instance, but its ease of use won’t make a difference if your event attendance is low anyway! Good nonprofit event marketing revolves around finding effective tools and incorporating them into your marketing messages.
Follow these 5 tips and best practices for boosting the impact of your nonprofit event marketing:
Offer and market comprehensive registration tools
Create intuitive email marketing engagement
Fully connect your event to your campaign
Market diverse giving channels and options
Use integrated software to market and manage your event
Read through these best practices for some actionable advice and useful resources that can help make your nonprofit’s next major event an unprecedented success!
1. Offer and market comprehensive registration tools
The very first stage of your attendees’ experience should be perfect.That means that you have to offer an intuitive registration platform.
Importantly, though, top-notch event registration software will include features that can greatly simplify or augment your marketing strategies for the event as a whole.
If your organization has never used a dedicated registration platform for its events, or if it’s time for an upgrade, definitely check out this event fundraising software guide by OneCause.
For instance, the ability to create and publish dedicated microsites can be extremely important for your event marketing strategy. These sites will give you an organized place to host all your important event information, social media sharing tools, ticketing systems, and seating arrangements.
Most importantly, your event site will be a single, dedicated outlet to include in your event marketing material. Streamline your marketing by directing readers to this unified online destination for information and tools.
Additionally, great event registration platforms will give you ticket package customization options, which can become important marketing elements in themselves. Think of the ticket packages your different types of donors might find appealing:
Standard admission packages with options to buy extra food or drink vouchers
VIP of member packages including special receptions and promotions for other events
Early promotional packages that encourage early registration and ticket upgrades
Always keep marketing in mind when considering how you’ll let attendees register for your event since great registration tools will not only create an immediate positive impression but also include features that double as strong marketing assets.
2. Create intuitive email marketing engagement
Even in the age of social media dominance, tried-and-true email remains the most effective communication and marketing tool for nonprofits.
We’re all used to quickly deleting spam ads and clickbait emails from random companies without giving them a second thought, but emails from nonprofits are different. When a recipient recognizes your nonprofit, either through their past involvement or awareness of your work, they’ll take the time to fully read your subject line and then act from there.
Nonprofit email marketing tends to be effective, but smart nonprofits know that fully optimizing their emails that promote upcoming events or confirm registration means they need to implement email engagement best practices.
Embedded content and optimized email signatures with direct links to registration forms or event microsites provide intuitive ways for your readers to immediately act.
When optimized with embedded content or an email signature marketing platform like Sigstr, your event marketing emails will become extremely useful for converting potential attendees into registered donors.
You already follow general email marketing best practices, like segmenting your communications to different types of donors for different purposes. Now think about how you can best optimize your event marketing messages for each particular type of email you send, including:
General mailing list newsletters
Personal messages with major donors
Invitations to new prospects
Member and volunteer updates
Targeted campaign appeal messages
Email marketing, especially when promoting an upcoming event, is all about brevity and efficiency.This includes providing intuitive ways to immediately convert recipients into registered attendees or upgrade their involvement in your event. Write compelling calls to action and track your conversions to amplify the value of every email you send about your event!
3. Fully connect your event to your campaign
Organizations and business that conduct marketing of any kind must always remember to keep their messages human-focused. At this point in our digital culture, it’s a major turn-off for consumers or donors when they’re never given a human-oriented face or voice of your work.
Striking the perfect balancebetween marketing efficiency and human experience can be difficult, certainly, but nonprofits marketing their events typically have an easier time of it.
This is because, by continuously reconnecting the purpose of your events to your overarching campaigns or projects, your messages will stay entirely donor, volunteer, and stakeholder-oriented.
The purpose must not only be consciously connected to your organization’s campaign and mission, it also needs to be clearly communicated to your attendees and prospective attendees. Sure, your event looks fun in and of itself, but why are you hosting it?
Using your event marketing to remind donors of the real human connections that define your organization is the key to successful nonprofit event marketing. For instance:
Campaign competition events and grand finale ceremonies should all be clearly tied into the goals and progress of that specific campaign when you market those events. For ideas on the kinds of campaigns that lend themselves perfectly to engaging, small-scale events, check out the ultimate guide to peer-to-peer fundraising.
Major galas are typically held for annual fund drives, as year-end wrap up events for major donors, or as kick-offs for major new campaigns. Always clearly communicate the scale of your new projects or your gratitude for donor support for your completed campaigns when marketing these events.
Auctions and raffles are often elements of ongoing campaigns. As extremely engaging events for donors of all types, make sure to segment your communications and clearly communicate how your auction fits into the overarching fundraising campaign and its goals. Auctions are fun, but remember to explain why you’re hosting one.
Remember, human-centered (not donation-centered) events drive continuous donor engagement. Your event marketing strategies should reflect this fact.
4. Market diverse giving channels and options
Let’s face it, no matter how flawlessly you market and promote your nonprofit’s upcoming event, some donors or members will simply not want to attend. They don’t have any ill will towards your organization, it’s just that they have a prior commitment or perhaps couldn’t resist having a quiet night in.
Since this is a fairly unavoidable element of any event planning, be sure to highlight all of your giving options in your event marketing material.
This way, you can provide channels for those invitees unable to attend to show their support while your organization is still on their mind. Particularly dedicated supporters will likely even feel guilty that they won’t be in attendance, so be sure to give them some options.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to include intuitive links to your event site or ways to give page in your marketing emails. Always ensure that any links in an email direct to a well-designed landing page. This will greatly reduce the bounce rate of visitors looking to learn more about how to support even without attending an event.
Provide and market your other unique giving channels, too, like:
Text-to-give. Supporters who won’t attend your event but still want to show their support can very quickly text you a donation. Letting them donate impulsively and efficiently is the key to making the most of the donor’s attention that your marketing has earned.
Mobile bidding. This solution is perfect for organizations that regularly host auctions. Set up mobile bidding capabilities for your events so all your supporters can participate through their mobile devices without necessarily being present at the auction itself.
As with other nonprofit tools, these giving options double as excellent marketing assets and unique features to incorporate into the live events themselves.
Giving both present attendees and remote supporters the ability to donate in new ways is a great way to build engagement and market a fun twist on your events.
5. Use integrated software to market and manage your event
Staying organized is key not only to a successful event but also to simplifying your entire event marketing strategy.
Having all your data and plans right where you need them goes a long way to keeping your marketing messages consistent and on brand.
You likely already use an event management system of some sort. Larger fundraising events would be logistical nightmares without them, after all. However, it’s important to find management software that can work seamlessly to incorporate all of your donor, attendee, and marketing data.
For example, check out Fonteva’s guide to Salesforce event management. In a comprehensive CRM like Salesforce, you can find the apps and tools you need to cover every aspect of your event planning and management. Plus, since the management is native to your CRM, all your donor and marketing data will be easily accessible.
Simplifying your event management process is crucial for successfully marketing your event.That’s because streamlining the event’s planning and logistics gives your team more time to consider the best ways to target invitees and tailor communications.
A top event management software solution will include a number of features that will boost your event marketing efforts, both directly and indirectly:
Salesforce or other CRM integration
Native registration and seating arrangement tools
Event microsite hosting
Automated email marketing and messaging
Customizable forms and donation pages
If your organization is in the market for a new event management system, remember that marketing tools should be a major priority when making a decision. The right software will simplify managing your entire event, including how you promote it to donors.
By consciously thinking through how your attendees will register, how they’ll interact with your emails, and how they’ll donate, you can market your event to them in ways that best align with their priorities and with your campaign’s goals.
Remember to take a broad view of both your overall marketing strategies and event tools. This way you’ll find the best points to intersect them and create some real buzz!
Teams everywhere are doing incredibly creative things to open up employee email as a new owned marketing channel. How so? By mastering email signature marketing (ESM).
What appears to be a straightforward concept at first, ESM actually represents layers of design, targeting, and marketing ROI possibilities. Just how many layers? Enough to fill 26 pages of The State of Email Signature Marketing report.
The Sigstr Marketing team surveyed over 1,000 campaign banners from our top customers to bring together a lineup of trends and best email signatures that will serve as the ultimate guide to your ESM journey.
Amongst the many discoveries you will find within the report, here are three that stood out to us:
Product and event use cases
From ticket sales to customer support, there are endless use cases for email signature marketing. To keep things simple, we narrowed it down to six main categories. Here’s a breakdown of ESM’s most popular use cases in 2017:
14% of the campaigns we analyzed were focused on promoting the organization’s product or service. This includes specific use cases like a free trial, app download, services or offerings, sale, discount, and scheduling a demo. Collectively, this group achieved the highest engagement rate, with events (the most popular category) coming in at a close second place.
ABM targeting
Of the three different campaign targeting techniques, sender-based was the most popular and ABM proved to be the most effective (highest average click-through-rate). When we say “ABM” we mean campaign banners that target specific contacts, accounts, industries, or regions. Account-based marketing functionality allows you to assign a NBA case study campaign to a targeted list of sports franchises, for example.
SendGrid represents our best-in-class example for this type of targeting. They published several different versions of their essential email guide, and used email signature marketing to deliver each version to the appropriate audience. Each campaign banner includes specific messaging for the targeted vertical, including ecommerce, media & publishing, travel & hospitality, and more.
The popularity of blue and power of purple
In addition to targeting and use cases, we also analyzed specific visual elements within the campaign design. One of these elements was the main or prominent color of the banner, and we tallied these numbers based on the primary colors of the traditional color wheel. Here’s what we found:
We discovered that blue was a popular color, to say the least, and shades like white, grey, and black were surprisingly more common than bright choices likes green, purple, and orange. Purple proved to be the most effective, however, with the highest average click-through-rate.
In addition to prominent colors, use cases, and targeting, The State of ESM report also shares data around call-to-action placement, design best practices, banner dimensions, and more.
The possibilities with ESM are endless, so we’re here to be a helpful resource and take out some of the guesswork for you with data, trends, and best practices. That’s exactly what this report is intended to do, while inspiring you with customer examples and design ideas. Click below to download your copy.
As a member of the ABM Leadership Alliance, Sigstr was proud to be present at last week’s Optimzing ABM Impact event held in partnership with ITSMA. Over 300 people registered to join us in San Francisco to learn how the best of the best are overcoming real-world ABM challenges. The day also consisted of industry best practices and some amazing cocktailsafterwards.
If you weren’t in San Francisco or you missed the invite, don’t sweat it. Here were my six big takeaways from this event.
Relationships matter
Us B2B marketers say it dozens of times every day: “account.” But how often are our sales and marketing teams talking in depth about “individuals” in an account. You might be running an account-based program, but unless you’re focusing on the real human beings in those accounts, you’re probably not going to experience as much success. The good news is that this isn’t news – ITSMA found that marketers are seriously investing in building and sustaining relationships. Budgets have increased by 65% for better engagement and advocacy.
Remember: you’re marketing to an account, but it’s a human that’s buying. And on that note…
ABM focus and ROI are positively correlated
ITSMA found that a company’s top 20 accounts are responsible for 50% of new revenue. That’s not an accident. It’s a function of the attention, focus, and love you put into nurturing that campaign. In addition to explaining the value you provide and gaining the trust of those accounts. It would be wonderful if all your accounts were treated like top accounts, but there are only so many hours in the day. That’s why it’s so crucial for companies to get systematic about identifying what constitutes a top account. Hint: it’s probably a combination of account “fit” and potential revenue.
Sales and marketing alignment is everything
At this point, the strongest thing that sales and marketing are aligned on is that they need alignment. But beyond that, it’s up to every member of the sales and marketing teams to own and display their commitment to alignment.
As Jessica Fewless from Demandbase eloquently stated:
“If Sales isn’t committed to that [target account] list, it’s not gonna work. If Marketing isn’t committed to that list, it’s not gonna work.” –@jfewlessB2B#OptimizingABM#ABMLA
Take it from us – we spend literally all day every day building solutions to make custom tailored, precisely targeted content scalable – and it isn’t easy. The biggest single challenge for ABM is developing campaign assets that are mass customizable, followed by personalizing marketing content to key personas in accounts. This is such a tough challenge to overcome that Sigstr is teaming up with Uberflip and Terminus on an upcoming webinar to discuss exactly that.
It’s okay to rethink territories
If you’ve really committed to an ABM program, you’ve already made a number of decisions that make you a little nervous. Maybe even outright queasy (more on that shortly). So if you’re in for a penny on ABX, you’re in for a pound and you should take the time to rethink how non-marketing disciplines could or should shift. One thing I really appreciated was hearing how Sigstr customer, Snowflake, assigns territories. Each account executive gets 100 accounts and, boom, that’s their territory. From there, Daniel Day, Director of ABM at Snowflake, says that everything his marketing team does is to help support and coordinate their AE’s with those accounts. And clearly it’s working for them – Snowflake has achieved unicorn status.
B2B marketers are just now coming off a 15-year talk track about how we need to optimize for inbound. And now we’re all supposed to suddenly accept that inbound isn’t a priority? That’s a tough pill to swallow to be sure. But once it’s down, that pill makes you feel amazing (this is a vitamin reference, I swear). When you’ve committed to a coordinated account-based approach where your display ads are seeing off-the-charts performance because they were timed perfectly with your direct mail send and your sales dev reps are making warm connections with perfectly suited content, it’s absolutely blissful marketing. (Hey… new acronym!)
See you In Vegas?
The ABM Leadership Alliance is going to be gathering at the SiriusDecisions Summit in Las Vegas this May for a blowout event. Follow the ABM Leadership Alliance and/or Sigstr on Twitter and you’ll be sure to get an invite.
Personalized marketing messages and relevant content all help convert leads into demos or meetings for your sales team. But what about after the demo? It’s usually up to the account executive to send a sales follow up email that (hopefully) helps progress the deal to the next stage.
Just like your company’s website, collateral, and newsletter, these one-to-one emails with prospects leave a lasting brand impression. As a result, it’s important to compose these messages in a way that proudly represents your entire company while also encouraging a clear action and standing out amongst the crowd. In this case, the “crowd” being the hundreds of other emails the prospect receives on a weekly basis.
All easier said than done, right? We agree. That’s a lot to pack into one email.
If you break down this type of message into each of its components, however, you’ll find tons of opportunities to transform “just another email” into a personalized and authentic brand touchpoint. Here are five ideas for your next post-demo email:
1. Restate one fun fact you learned about them during the call
Who says it has to 100% “down to business” all of the time? The prospect on the other end of the line is also a human being, so going out of your way to relate to him or her shows that you’re not a robot and that you actually care. And it doesn’t always have to be about the weather! Here are a few examples:
“You mentioned on the call that you’re headed to New Orleans next week for vacation. I was just there last year and really enjoyed eating at GW Fins (the lobster dumplings are amazing). Happy to recommend any other go-to spots if you need ideas! Just let me know :)”
“I noticed that you’re a big Chicago Cubs fan. Are you going to any games this summer? I’ll be there in July to see them take on the Cardinals. Let me know if you have any favorite spots my family and I should check out before the game!”
2. Recap their main objectives, goals, or desired business outcome
A lot can be discussed during demos or slide deck presentations, especially when it extends to an hour. So be sure to record it, go back and review main talking points, and list them out in the follow-up email. Recap the call in a way where their most important initiatives line up with your product’s value prop. For example…
“I know we talked a lot about customer education and how that’s a top priority for your team this year. Sigstr’s ability to promote tutorial videos, knowledge base articles, and user group meetings within employee email can help get your resources in front of the right customers.”
3. Be appreciative of their time and the opportunity to help
Yes, this may be a simple one, but it goes a long way. Always be sure to thank the prospect for their time and show your excitement for the opportunity. Everyone is busy and sometimes spread thin across many different responsibilities, so time is valuable. They didn’t HAVE to take a demo with you, so let them know how much you appreciate and value their time. And if you’re not genuinely enthusiastic about how your product or service can help them achieve their goals, then they won’t be either. Excitement is contagious and it starts with you!
4. Provide clear next steps with a timeline
It’s always important to view every interaction as a way to progress a prospect relationship or sales cycle. Laying out clear and concise next steps with a proposed timeline can help you stay in the driver’s seat. These open-ended questions do not…
“So when do you want to meet next?”
“Are you interested in buying soon?”
“When can I expect to hear from you?”
Instead, be more specific and make it easy for the prospect to take the next step by providing options.
“Based on what we covered today and what else we need to learn around IT requirements, I think it makes sense to schedule a quick 15-minute call early next week. Does Monday at noon or Tuesday at 2pm EST work for you?”
5. Use email signature marketing to stand out
In addition to the recommendations above, email signature marketing will also help you stand out amongst the other hundreds of emails hitting your prospect’s inbox. Data shows that email recipients are attracted to branded email signatures with call-to-action banners within the first three seconds of opening an email. So if you have their attention, why not take it one step further and include messaging that is personalized and specific to the email recipient?
Here’s how we’re using email signature marketing with marketing automation today to make it happen:
1. An account executive runs a demo for a particular prospect.
2. After the demo, the AE immediately opens up Salesforce and goes to the contact view of that particular prospect. Within the contact view, the AE will scroll down to the HubSpot Intelligence section and click “Add to post-demo email follow-up workflow.”
3. Behind the scenes, the prospect will be added to a HubSpot workflow that automatically adds them to a target list. Note: this is because we have HubSpot synced with Salesforce. HubSpot is also integrated with our Sigstr account, so we’re able to sync that same HubSpot list and assign it to a specific email signature campaign.
4. This is all possible with Sigstr’s ABM functionality, where teams target accounts or individual contacts with specific content that is most relevant to the email recipient. So, when the Account Executive sends the follow-up email to the prospect, they know that their email signature will automatically display the “Thanks for seeing a demo!” banner.
5. Timely messaging leads to a higher chance of engagement, so let’s assume the prospect does in fact click on the account executive’s email signature campaign.
6. The prospect will then be taken to a page that shares more about email signature marketing with Sigstr’s top content resources.
7. Because this banner is specific to a time-based event, we set up a rule within the HubSpot workflow that automatically removes the prospect from the targeted list after five days.
8. When the AE emails the prospect again in the future (assuming it’s after five days), his or her email signature will automatically update to a new campaign banner.
Bonus: Want even more automation? Assign specific email signature banners to different sales stages set in your CRM or marketing automation. When the prospect is moved to a different sales stage, they will also move to a new target list.
Are there any ideas or techniques that we missed? Let us know how you personalize demo follow-up emails by tweeting @SigstrApp.
“Sure, that sounds interesting. Tell more more.” A positive response! And a booked meeting.
What did I do differently? Why does this person want to talk to me? Was it my tone? Timing of the call? Who I called? What I said?
Sound familiar sales development superstars? This job is hard and the community is small. Alongside the team at ZoomInfo, we’re making an effort to connect that community to accelerate training, build trusted networks, make friends, and have fun by rallying around our profession. Introducing…The SDR Wars!
We’re beyond excited to kick off the first ever head-to-head sales development competition. And it will be all be moderated and emceed by Morgan Ingram, founder of The SDR Chronicles and Director of Sales Execution and Evolution at JBarrows Sales Training.
Bi-annually, we will be showcasing sales development teams from some of the world’s best sales organizations to see who has the best outbound team in the business. The winner of The SDR Wars will take home a killer prize and bragging rights as the hardest hustling team out there.
The competition will include 16 sales development teams going against one another in a friendly bracket-style competition to develop and elevate their sales development skills. Participating teams include: Terminus, TINYpulse, ZoomInfo, Vidyard, SalesLoft, Zoom, Everstring, Emplify, MINDBODY, Return Path, and more. Our first competition will start on Tuesday, March 13th.
Additional perks include access to the sales development slack channel and some good ol’ swag.
Interested in joining? You’re in luck! Additional team slots are still available. To enter your sales development team for the opportunity to take home The SDR Wars trophy, find the team in green at this year’s Rainmaker event. Or, visit SDRwars.com for more information.
Here at Sigstr, we honor our team’s favorite shows, movies, and celebrities by creating their hypothetical email signatures. And during the month of March, we highlighted 64 of those email signatures with a little friendly competition. We put together a bracket-style tournament and asked Sigstr friends and family to determine the winners for each round. Thus, the Tournament of Fictional Email Signatures was born.
And the winner is…
Michael Scott! Round by round, the “World’s Best Boss” proved why he has the world’s best fictional email signature.
Thank you to everyone who voted throughout the month of March! Over 200 voters and 500 total submissions helped us determine the first-ever Fictional Email Signature Champion (well deserved, Prison Mike)! We couldn’t have done it without your participation, so thanks again for making this tournament so much fun.
It’s a shame there isn’t a Dundie for “best email signatures” so Michael Scott could present it to himself. After defeating the mighty Darth Vader in the Final Four, this Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin Scranton has punched his ticket to the Championship. Awaiting him in the main event is an over-achiever from Pawnee, Indiana who racked up so many votes against Chris Traeger it literally wasn’t even close.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” a few wise men once said (Wayne Gretzky and Michael Scott). Is this Michael’s shot to become a Fictional Email Signature Champion? Or will the “Knope she can!” campaign earn Leslie enough Championship votes to win it all?
See how they got here in the bracket (above), round-by-round results (below), or the Final Four results report. And submit your Championship vote to decide their fate.
Final Four matchup results
Michael Scott (57%) defeats Darth Vader (43%)
Leslie Knope (68%) defeats Chris Traeger (32%)
Final Eight results and highlights
It’s been a long winding road all month long to the Fictional Final Four and now we’re finally here. All thanks to an exciting round 4 that sent half of the email signatures home, and the other half to the promise land.
The left side of the bracket had 2 dominating performances from Darth Vader and Michael Scott, setting up a “World’s Best Boss” vs. “Galaxy’s Ultimate Villain” matchup in the Final Four. The right side included 2 gutsy performances from a couple of Pawnee government employees who now find themselves in a Parks and Rec showdown with a trip to the championship on the line.
You know the drill – use the bracket (above), matchup list (below), or round 4 results report to catch up on all of the fictional email signature action.
Final Eight matchup results
Darth Vader (59%) defeats Joyce Byers (41%)
Michael Scott (67%) defeats Tom Haverford (33%)
Chris Traeger (52%) defeats Tyrion Lannister (48%)
Leslie Knope (53%) defeats Buddy the Elf (47%)
Round 3 results and highlights
16 email signatures and 8 head-to-head matchups entertained fans this round as we saw an Elf from the North (pole) take down the King in the North, 52% to 48%. Pawnee’s fearless leader from the Parks Department won in convincing fashion against Kylo Ren as her voters continue to shout, “Knope she can!” And how about that Star Wars showdown between Darth Vader and Han Solo?
Each of these round 3 winners have earned their right into the prestigious Fictional Final 8. Catch up on all of the action in the bracket (above), matchup list (below), or round 3 results report. The drama continues to build as the stakes get even higher in round 4. Who will the voters pick to move on to the Final 4?
Round 1 set the tone, but round 2 certainly did not disappoint. Some are saying this is the most competitive fictional email signature action they have seen in decades. It’s hard to argue with that statement when 8 of this round’s 16 matchups ended in a 50% something to 40% something result. This included a couple of 51% to 49% buzzer beaters, where Kylo Ren defeated Joey Tribbiani and Tyrion Lannister took down Luke Skywalker in the much anticipated “daddy issues showdown”.
On the flip side, we also witnessed total domination from Jim Halpert, Joyce Byers, Buddy the Elf, and Darth Vader. And now we’re onto the next round where 16 email signatures and 8 hilariously entertaining matchups await our votes. Check out the bracket (above) or matchup lists (below) to catch up on all of the early round action. You can also view the full round 2 results report here.
Bracket 1
Joyce Byers (76%) defeats Luna Lovegood (24%)
Jim Halpert (83%) defeats Nancy Wheeler (17%)
Darth Vader (70%) defeats Kevin McCallister (30%)
Han Solo (53%) defeats Andy Dwyer (47%)
Bracket 2
Prince (51%) defeats Dustin Henderson (49%)
Tom Haverford (57%) defeats The Grinch (43%)
Michael Scott (67%) defeats Eleven (33%)
Leia Organa (53%) defeats Dwight Schrute (47%)
Bracket 3
Chris Traeger (52%) defeats Rachel Green (48%)
Homer Simpson (62%) defeats Frosty (38%)
Tyrion Lannister (51%) defeats Luke Skywalker (49%)
Hermione Granger (65%) defeats Katy Perry (35%)
Bracket 4
Leslie Knope (65%) defeats Andy Bernard (35%)
Kylo Ren (51%) defeats Joey Tribbiani (49%)
Buddy the Elf (73%) defeats Lady Gaga (27%)
Jon Snow (56%) defeats Phil Dunphy (44%)
Round 1 results and highlights
Wow! What a round it was to kick off the tournament. 140+ voters determined who advanced and who went home. We saw unexpected upsets, lopsided victories, and even a few nail-biting matchups that came down to the last few votes.
Highlights included a a dominating performance from Michael Scott with his 88% to 12% win against Ron Weasley (the biggest margin of victory in round 1). And how about that Homer Simpson vs. Harry Potter matchup? Just a few votes proved to be enough as Homer squeaked by with the 51% to 49% win. Speaking of 51/49, our favorite hairy co-pilot made it interesting against the King in The North.
Check out the bracket (above) or matchup list (below) to see all of the round 1 results. Or, view the full results report here.
Bracket 1
Joyce Byers (51%) defeats Chandler Bing (49%)
Luna Lovegood (55%) defeats Goldie Wilson (45%)
Jim Halpert (68%) defeats Daenerys Targaryen (32%)
Nancy Wheeler (55%) defeats The Incredible Hulk (45%)
Darth Vader (82%) defeats Carl Winslow (18%)
Kevin McCallister (57%) defeats Phoebe Buffay (43%)
Han Solo (65%) defeats Beyoncé (35%)
Andy Dwyer (66%) defeats Wolverine (34%)
Bracket 2
Prince (58%) defeats Doctor Emmett Brown (42%)
Dustin Henderson (66%) defeats Brienne of Tarth (34%)
Tom Haverford (74%) defeats Danny Tanner (26%)
The Grinch (60%) defeats Star-Lord (40%)
Eleven (60%) defeats Monica Geller (40%)
Michael Scott (88%) defeats Ron Weasley (12%)
Leia Organa (77%) defeats U2 (23%)
Dwight Schrute (52%) defeats Hodor (48%)
Bracket 3
Rachel Green (54%) defeats Santa Claus (46%)
Chris Traeger (52%) defeats Kevin Malone (48%)
Homer Simpson (51%) defeats Harry Potter (49%)
Frosty (57%) defeats Madonna (43%)
Tyrion Lannister (56%) defeats George McFly (44%)
Luke Skywalker (74%) defeats Lucas Sinclair (26%)
Katy Perry (54%) defeats Professor X (46%)
Hermione Granger (60%) defeats Arya Stark (40%)
Bracket 4
Leslie Knope (74%) defeats Ross Geller (26%)
Andy Bernard (72%) defeats Fred & George Weasley (28%)
Joey Tribbiani (52%) defeats Will Byers (48%)
Kylo Ren (62%) defeats Deadpool (38%)
Lady Gaga (51%) defeats Tim Taylor (49%)
Buddy the Elf (72%) defeats Donna Meagle (28%)
Phil Dunphy (64%) defeats Marty McFly (36%)
Jon Snow (51%) defeats Chewbacca (49%)
All posts from the “If [Blank] Had Email Signatures” blog series can be found here:
We are so pumped to be joining 900+ marketers next week at the B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, AZ. This must-attend conference brings together the top thought leaders and practitioners in content, demand generation, and sales. Real-world case study examples, actionable takeaways, content awards, and beautiful weather. How could you not be excited?
A full agenda (50+ sessions!) packed into just 3 days will leave you with plenty to do. And, the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess is sure to provide plenty of scenic views to inspire and energize you throughout the week.
So rest up, fill your calendar, and get ready for an awesome week. Here are 5 tips from the Sigstr team that will help you get the most out of #B2BMX.
1. Know thy agenda
Did we mention there are over 50 sessions to choose from? The #B2BMX Agenda is so big that it even has 13 filters to help you narrow down your choices. Stretching from morning to evening across all 3 days, the agenda is a great place to start if you want to plan out your days ahead of time. From account-based marketing to digital strategy to channel marketing, this event offers 6 thought provoking tracks that can help guide you.
Use this week (or the flight in for you last minute planners) to study up and pick out what will bring you the most value during your time there. And don’t forget to leave some time on the calendar for eating and sleeping (and maybe a few margaritas).
2. Connect with the Finny winners
Get an exclusive look at some of the most innovative marketing campaigns of the year. Then, network with the geniuses behind them over lunch. #B2BMX’s Killer Content Awards luncheon is always a must-attend event every year. Best of all, you’ll be entertained by Second City Works, who brings some humor and creative flair to the show experience.
This year’s categories include video content, buyer-focused content, sales enablement, channel partner marketing, measurable ROI, and more.
3. Join the #B2BMX Fun Run / Walk
Kick off the week right and join hundreds of marketers running (or walking) the resort’s 65 acre property. Get some exercise, take in the views, and maybe even get to know a few of your fellow attendees. The race starts at 8:30am Monday morning.
PSA: don’t forget your sunscreen! And stay hydrated before and after the race.
4. Get ready to take notes from this amazing lineup of speakers
In addition to the activities and facilities, we’re excited to learn from dozens of industry analysts, authors, and thought leaders. Whether you prefer pen-to-paper or you can’t go anywhere without a laptop or mobile device, have your equipment and materials ready for pages of notes.
Learn about native advertising from Edwin Wong or see how to humanize the B2B buyer’s journey with Brian Solis. The Sigstr team is especially excited to hear from content marketing rockstars like Jen Spencer, Matt Heinz, Julia Stead, and Sangram Vajre. Whichever topic or type of speaker fits your style best, this lineup is sure to have it. So bring on the note-taking…
5. Follow the conversation
Stay in loop with updates and announcements by following @B2BMX on twitter or scrolling through the #B2BMX hashtag. You won’t miss a thing throughout the week with either of these bookmarked on your mobile device. What’s a content marketing conference without social media, right?
And of course, don’t forget to stop by the Sigstr booth and chat with these friendly faces. We can’t wait to see you there!
Account-based marketing provides a strategy for B2B companies who want to grow revenue by focusing on the best-fit prospects. Most marketing strategies include a broad approach to lead generation with the goal of capturing as many leads as possible. However, 63 percent of marketers still say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge. ABM is a different approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers.
The rise of account-based marketing
ABM is powerful because it can market to specific companies instead of wasting time (and money) on unqualified or unideal prospects. And believe it or not, it has a higher ROI than any other marketing activity, according to 97 percent of marketers in a survey by Alterra Group. Above all, account-based marketing is a framework of efficiency for your marketing and sales team.
Companies like Terminus have emerged as leaders in this growing category. Their platform allows teams to execute on this strategy and measure the impact. And the CMO of Terminus, Sangram Vajre, leads a #FlipMyFunnel community that helps teams all across the nation with ABM use cases and strategies.
Direct mail, retargeting ads, micro sites, field events, etc. There are many activities and channels that coordinate together within a team’s ABM plan, all of which help progress deals faster and win key targets. And employee email is no exception.
The power of employee email
6 hours. That’s the average amount of time most American workers spend in their inbox per day. Employee email presents a huge opportunity for marketers. It gives them the ability to add personalized, but scalable, content resources into the billions of organic conversations that are already happening. How? The employee email signature.
Email signature marketing is a natural addition to any team’s account-based marketing lineup. Users can now assign an email signature campaign to specific contacts or accounts. So when your employees send an email to a specific recipient or organization included in any target lists, the clickable call-to-action banner will dynamically update and serve personalized content.
Adding ESM to your ABM lineup
We sat down with Sangram to talk more about this powerful duo. And how his team uses email signature marketing for their own ABM efforts.
Full transcript:
Employee email is a big opportunity. If you think about it, every single organization is using email. They’re sending thousands of emails every single day. Everyone gets an email, everyone knows and reads email.
The question really is…what are you doing about it? Optimizing the email signature and figuring out if you are getting the right message internally and externally to the right people. This is going to be immensely helpful and game-changing for a lot of organizations.
With Sigstr, and having email signatures very well brand represented, I think it changes the way you think and perceive a brand. So, I look at it and think that internally, when we have a campaign going on, let’s make sure that our message is front and center of everybody. Well how do you did that? Well, everybody sends email. So email signature marketing makes sense.
When you think about reaching out to your customers, or even investors, what is the brand message you want to say without overly talking about yourself? Email signature marketing can really help you do that. So when it’s branded well, and when it’s put together well, it can really make you stand out.
I think ABM and email signature marketing really go well together. If you think about organizations and how they buy, they are so many more people a part of the decision making process. So it’s 5, maybe 10, maybe 15 people, all a part of the decision making process. And they’re all not going to download an ebook, so how are they going to know more about you and your brand? How are you going to stand out?
They’re probably going to look at your email signature, and that becomes the first place from a brand identity perspective. Then, they might click on it and go to your website and then spend more time on your website. Then they’re going to know more about what you stand for. So to me, account-based marketing and email signature marketing really goes well together. And I love what Sigstr is talking about, which is people drive relationships and relationships drive business. All of that is predicated on the fact that the people know what your brand stands for.
I remember the day that I was finishing up onboarding with our new VP of Customer Success, John Klein. We had just finished my typical (and I am sure very boring) presentation and were wrapping up when I asked him about his family. John stated that he has 3 children, 2 teenagers and a 10 year-old little boy named Jack. Jack was diagnosed with Burkitt’s Lymphoma and sadly succumbed to his illness February 6, 2016. John was incredibly proud of how much his former employer, Delivra, did and continues to do to honor Jack and hoped that he could continue to raise awareness for Jack’s Pack at his new Sigstr home.
Jack’s Pack began when Jack was diagnosed with his illness. His friends, family and community rallied around him, their slogan was “We have Jack’s back”. His bravery and joyfully infectious smile in the face of his disease, inspired people to live their lives more joyfully and purposely.
The Sigstr team also has Jack’s back. So if you receive an email from a Sigstr team member today, you will notice a new email signature campaign. This banner is not promoting our latest ebook, case study, or next big event. Instead we are asking that you take a few minutes out of your day to learn more about Jack’s Pack and the St. Baldricks Foundation. Jack’s Pack continues to raise funding for further research for Burkitt’s Lymphoma in hopes that others can benefit. Jack would have wanted to help others going through the same struggles that he did and would be proud to know that we all still have his back.
We at Sigstr encourage you to learn more about Jack’s Pack and the St. Baldricks Foundation. And if you and your organization would like to promote this in your email signatures, feel free to use the free campaign design below.
We also issue a challenge today, in honor of Jack. Pass on a random act of kindness to a stranger. And if you complete this challenge, please take a picture and tag #JacksPack on social media. That way, we can all pay it forward and inspire another act of kindness to honor a special boy who means so much.
As a football junkie, there are two things other than the action on the field that get me excited to watch the Super Bowl. The Commercials (duh) and the musical performances! This year, not only do I get to watch my favorite team the Philadelphia Eagles do battle with the New England Patriots, but I get to watch one of my all-time favorite performers do what he does best at halftime. That of course is the one and only Justin Timberlake.
That got me thinking…who has delivered some of the most memorable Super Bowl performances of all time? How would we give these iconic artists a standing ‘O’ in classic Sigstr fashion? By creating their hypothetical email signatures, of course. If you haven’t seen us do this for Star Wars or Game of Thrones, then you’re in for a treat! Sit back and enjoy as we celebrate some of our favorite Super Bowl super stars.
Michael Jackson
Let’s start with the halftime show that changed everything. In 1993, Super Bowl XXVI featured a Garth Brooks National Anthem, an OJ Simpson coin-toss (hindsight is 20/20) and the moonwalker himself, Michael Jackson. He delivered a halftime show that would go down in history as the first to get higher TV ratings than the actual game. The performance included smash hits “Jam”, “Black & White”, and 3,500 Los Angeles area kids helping him seal the deal with the epic humanitarian ballad, “Heal the World”. Who else could’ve pulled that off but the undisputed King of Pop?
Janet Jackson
If Michael Jackson’s halftime show was the one that changed everything, his little sister’s 2004 performance was the one that made everything stop. With an assist from this year’s headliner, JT, we can’t recall a more TiVo’d moment in history. In fact, this “incident” became the most searched event in internet history, birthed the phrase “wardrobe malfunction” and set us on a path that would eventually give us (wait for it) YouTube!
Madonna
For every king there is a queen and, as the reigning Queen of Pop, Madonna rode in on her golden throne and delivered one of the most memorable Super Bowl performances of all time right down the street from the Sigstr offices at Lucas Oil Stadium. Madge “Party Rock”ed with LMFAO and managed to overcome a poorly delivered ‘’We’re #1’’ sign from M.I.A. before teaming up with Mr. FU himself, Cee-Lo. She then closed the show with a spirited rendition of “Like A Prayer”. Super Bowl XLVI in 2012 had everything you’d want including an NFC East team, the New York Giants, triumphing over the New England Patriots. Eagles fans can only hope this year’s contest yields the same result.
Beyoncé
Two words: Queen Bey. Is anyone else picking up on the royal theme here? Dressed like a superhero in all black leather, accompanied by her fellow children of destiny Kelly Roland and Michelle Williams, and backed by her all-female band, dancers, and horn section, Beyoncé unequivocally answered the question who “Run The World”? For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, it’s girls (shout out to @GirlsWhoCode). This 2013 show was, in a word, fierce, drawing overwhelming praise from the entertainment community and prompting Rolling Stone Magazine to ask a different question: Why would you ever have a Super Bowl without Beyoncé? We couldn’t agree more.
Prince
Rounding out the royal family in the best way possible is the unmistakable falsetto of Prince. Some argue the 2007 halftime show was the best of all time. Why? Picture this…70,000 football fans packed into Miami’s Dolphin Stadium with actual rain falling from the sky as Prince delivers a master class in stage presence and chord stroking. Now imagine every one of those rain-soaked fans belting out the end of “Purple Rain” in unison. “Oooooo Oooooo Ooo Ooo! Oooooo Oooooo Ooo Ooo!”. Need we say more? *Tosses guitar into the crowd* “Game blouses!”
U2
U2’s 2002 halftime show was a special moment in American sports history. Super Bowl XXXVI was the first major sports event held in the United States after 9/11 and the New England Patriots made the most unlikely run to get there. It started one month before when a no-name, 6th round draft pick out of Michigan took over at quarterback for an injured Drew Bledsoe. U2 delivered an emotional tribute to everyone who lost their lives that day, scrolling their names behind them as they played “The Streets Have No Name”. Bono even opened his jacket to proudly reveal the bars and stars. The Patriots, led by that fiery, 6th round back-up we now know as Tom Brady, would kick a field goal as time expired to win their first Super Bowl. Hollywood couldn’t have written a better script!
Aerosmith
Alright folks, trivia time. What was the first hip-hop single to be a Billboard Hot 100 Top 5 hit?
Answer: The epic rock-rap collaboration “Walk This Way” by Run D.M.C. and Aerosmith.
In stark contrast to U2’s poignant post-9/11 tribute, this 2001 performance showcased just how much fun we were having in America pre 9/11. JT and his former bae Britney joined the rest of N’Sync and stood alongside Nelly and Steven Tyler to deliver the MTV version of “Walk This Way”. Maybe Justin knew his big day would come soon as he brought home the chorus of N’Sync’s hit “It’s Gonna Be Me.” We may never know. What we do know is this, those little headset microphones can’t possibly still be cool. Can they?
Katy Perry
Katy Perry rode into the 2015 halftime show on a 16 foot tall, 26 foot long, 1,600 pound golden lion. That’s right…a golden lion. Take that mother of dragons! If Super Bowl halftime shows were the Olympics, Katy’s effort would’ve earned her a gold medal. The California Gurl’s performance began with a “Roar”, ended with “Fireworks” and somewhere in-between, she was able pull off multiple 10-second wardrobe changes. She even made one half of a dancing shark duo an internet sensation. Her motto: sing like nobody’s listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like #LeftShark.
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga saw Katy Perry’s Super Bowl XLIX entrance and thought, “I bet I can top that!” How you ask? By singing “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” from the roof of Houston’s NRG Stadium as a patriotic red, white, and blue, 300-drone light show ensued behind her. The opening reached its crescendo following the closing lines of the “Pledge of Allegiance” as Gaga lept into the stadium. To be honest, anything she did after that was just icing on the cake. The entrance alone puts Gaga’s 2017 performance in the Top 5 for greatest halftime shows ever. Little Monsters everywhere rejoice. Paws up!
Whitney Houston
While Whitney Houston’s heart-pounding rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t technically at halftime, it was so good we just HAD to include it in our list of top Super Bowl performances. In 1991, just 10 days into the Persian Gulf War, Super Bowl XXV was the first to be broadcast worldwide (reaching 750 million viewers). This was her moment and boy did she deliver. If that many people witnessed “The Voice” singing this song, imagine the number of goosebumps and tears that followed. Especially when she raised one fist into the air, and then two, while holding that final patriotic note.
We have learned a heck of a lot over the past two years from over 350 companies using email signature marketing. We even took it a step further and teamed up with EyeQuant, an AI platform that helps companies make faster and better design decisions, to find out what resonates most with email recipients. We want to share our research with you so that we can help you make the most of employee email as a marketing channel – so we turned that research into a #allkillernofiller webinar hosted by our VP of Marketing, Justin Keller, and CEO, Bryan Wade.
We conglomerated 25 minutes of killer information into these 3 takeaways:
1. Never underestimate the power of email.
Marketers have been trying to predict the Doomsday of Email for decades. “Email is dead” has been the headline of far too many blog posts for too long, and we are here to put that to rest. Justin opened the webinar with some pretty staggering statistics that support this thesis.
“Every day 1 billion songs are streamed on Spotify. 4.4 billion searches are done on Google. These are all make-your-brain-hurt size numbers but they all pale in comparison to email. Over 274 billion emails are sent every day. 3.2 million emails are sent every second.” – Justin Keller
Adobe’s 2017 Email Consumer Survey yielded some pretty substantial evidence that backs up these numbers. The report reveals that email still reigns supreme as the most preferential avenue for brands to communicate with their audience.
In fact, Adobe even went so far to say that millennials are “obsessed” with email. This is music to our ears. Think about the math…
“It’s not rocket science, it’s pretty easy to find out how many impressions your company can get every year. The average employee sends about 10,000 emails a year. If you have 100 employees that’s 1,000,000 impressions!” –Justin Keller
The beautiful thing about email signature marketing is that you don’t have to change what you’ve been doing – there is no crazy system that you need to implement or be trained on. As Justin said, it’s not rocket science! It’s simply a new way of thinking about the emails your employees send out on a daily basis. Every email is a unique touchpoint with an engaged audience. Your marketing team could be utilizing that as a highly-personalized and targeted marketing channel by simply adding a call-to-action banner in your employees’ email signatures!
2. Email signature marketing works.
Don’t just take our word for it – we brought in the big guns to prove the effectiveness of email signature marketing. After months of hearing “does this really work?” we teamed up with EyeQuant to put the questions to rest. The extensive and eye-openings results of that study can be found here. If you’re more of an auditory learner, Justin and Bryan did go over some of the most mind-boggling findings in the webinar (the recording can be found at the bottom of this post). If you’re more of a skim reader like me, here are the highlights.
We ran 3 different EyeQuant tests to compare an unbranded vs. branded signature:
Perception Map: Intended to show what the email recipient will see and miss in the first 3 seconds.
Hot Spots: Intended to show the 10 most attention-grabbing spots of the email.
Attention Map: Intended to show which elements capture the most attention.
“The science tells us that when you have a beautifully designed email signature, as well as an image with a clear call-to-action, it becomes an effective way to engage with your customers.”-Bryan Wade
The proof is in the pudding! Couple these results with the aforementioned results from Adobe’s Email Consumer Survey and you can’t deny it: Email is still the workhorse of digital marketing. Your most important contacts are engaging with employee email communications every single day and paying attention to the email signature. This piece of digital real estate is an extension of your brand – so use it to your advantage to drive conversions and distribute relevant content.
3. The key to effective email signature marketing is in the design.
Specific design elements can help engagement rates sway one way or the other. From colors to the call-to-action, there’s a lot to think about within a campaign banner design. The goal of this webinar was to share data that might take out some of the guesswork. A highlight reel of the “Art” section of the webinar is below. And if you’re interested in more best practices and data, check out this blog post that highlights our top 9 takeaways after analyzing our own email signature data during the 2017 year.
“One thing you want to make sure you’re really doing is clearly defining the CTA. This will get the attention of the email recipient and spur them to take action.” – Justin Keller
“Be clear and concise with your wording and description of the resource – but get a little crazy with the graphics! Go bold! Use unusual imagery. In this customer’s campaign example, we’ve got a llama on a tv and that definitely makes me want to click on something.” – Justin Keller
Thanks again to those who joined us for this #allkillernofiller webinar. The research (science) shows just how impactful email signature marketing can be, and design (art) plays a big part. Between the live presentation (find the recording below) and this blog post, hopefully we’ve inspired you to think of employee email as a new marketing channel that can provide value to your business. See you at the next webinar!
At this point, Sigstr has been included in several hundred million emails, so our team has learned a lot about email signature marketing. This small slice of digital real estate has become the most targeted and authentic marketing channel for almost 400 brands. Where else do you have the opportunity to see how your most important contacts, customers, and prospects are interacting with your content within everyday 1:1 interactions? Employee email provides a wealth of data and knowledge that can help all of us be better marketers and shape strategies for other channels, campaigns, and designs.
With this in mind, our team went back and analyzed every email signature marketing campaign that Sigstr launched in 2017. Here’s what we learned:
1. Targeting specific audiences with relevant content is important (internal education for the win!)
As a refresher, Sigstr offers three different targeting options for your email signature marketing campaigns:
Sender-based:Organize your employees by department or geographic location so you can assign specific content to each group (for example, Marketing can promote an upcoming webinar while Customer Success promotes a product release).
Internal:Email recipients with your company’s domain can receive internal campaigns, while those who don’t see only external content. This gives you the ability to rally employee engagement with initiatives like open enrollment, employee recognition, upcoming company events, and more.
Account-based marketing:Sigstr’s ABM functionality allows marketers to deliver 1:1 targeted content to specific contacts, accounts, industries, and regions. For example, assign a sports franchises recipient list to a NBA case study campaign.
We used all three targeting strategies throughout the 2017 year, with sender-based campaigns leading the way.
Although sender-based proved to be the most common, internal campaigns performed the best (in terms of average click-through-rate) as we used them for upcoming company outings and culture. Here’s our favorite internal campaign from last year:
2. From events to recruitment, there are many use cases for email signature marketing
In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing the “State of Email Signature Marketing” report that analyzed 1,000+ campaigns from the 2017 year. We looked at data points and trends like prominent color, dimensions, targeting, visual elements, and specific use cases. Across those 1,000+ customer campaigns, we tallied 27 different use cases for email signature marketing. TA-WEN-TY SEV-EN! That’s incredible.
We counted 17 different specific use cases from our own account, which we organized into these main categories.
Events (conference or trade show, podcast, webinar)
Customer (review or rating)
Company (award or recognition, new website, news or press, brand, recruitment or culture)
Resource (blog, infographic, ebook or case study, video)
Product (services or offerings, request a demo)
Other (partner or referral program, philanthropy, fundraising or donation)
Here’s a breakdown of our most popular use cases from 2017:
3. Employee email is a powerful marketing channel for philanthropy and nonprofits
Of the specific use cases listed above, philanthropy scored one of the highest engagement rates. And we’re not the only ones to see success! We were excited and proud to share the Herff Jones story earlier this month, which shows how they achieved a 300% ROI and helped plant 80+ trees in Africa (all within 2 months after launching Sigstr). CrowdRise also agrees, as said best by their Director of Marketing, Gary Wohlfeill.
“That seemingly slight space at the tail-end of your email, if treated correctly, has the opportunity to be a real powerhouse for your nonprofit.”
4. We love the color green (big surprise there), but we see high engagement when experimenting with other campaign colors
Across the 70+ campaigns we launched in 2017, we analyzed the one prominent color used for each banner. By a landslide, green was the winner at 56%. And grey took home the silver medal (how ironic) at 18%.
Green may have been our most popular choice, but orange performed the best. We’re okay with this considering the fact green goes well with orange (woohoo St. Patrick’s Day is only 45 days away)!
5. Eye-tracking tests say CTA buttons matter, but our data tells us otherwise
We recently published an ebook that includes eye-tracking analysis and tests around dozens of different email signature examples. And within this analysis, attention maps and hot spots were used to show us which elements capture the most attention. Multiple tests revealed red hot areas around a clearly defined call-to-action (such as a button), so we thought our click data would tell the same story.
73% of our campaigns included a call-to-action button, yet these banners collectively had the exact same engagement rate as those without one. CTA button or not, it’s still important to include language that encourages the email recipient to take action. Request a demo, meet up with us, download now, and register here are a few of our favorites.
6. Be mindful of specific campaign design elements (like photography)
We also analyzed the different elements incorporated into our campaign designs, whether it be icons, photography, just color, or a combination of all the above.
While “illustration or icon” and “combination” proved to be the most popular, we saw the most engagement with photography. In addition to our account, photography was also declared the winner (in terms of click-through-rate) after analyzing 1,000+ campaigns from our customers. Here’s an example of what this might look like:
7. Account-based marketing and employee email is a powerful duo
At this point, you may be wondering, “what was Sigstr’s most successful email signature marketing campaign in 2017?” Well, we’re glad you asked!
When targeting specific audiences or verticals, good things tend to happen and engagement rates go up. This campaign was no exception, as we created a “Sports franchises” recipient list (think Cubs, Cowboys, Lakers, Red Wings, etc.) and paired it with the campaign banner below. What better way to show the sports industry how Sigstr can deliver value to their team than showing how we did it for the Indiana Pacers?
8. Email signature marketing and Sales Dev teams are BFFs
Remember…you can mix and match content with specific sender groups (see #1 for more). And across our 8 sender groups, the Sales Dev group collectively saw the highest engagement. Chances are, your sales team members are sending out the most external-facing email, so this is great news. Campaign banners in SDR’s email signatures (something that is included in every single one of their outreach emails) can serve as a subtle, yet effective, way to lead prospects to the next stage. Requesting a demo, signing up for a free trial, reading a relevant resource, etc.
Added bonus: if you’re looking to scale your email outreach (while keeping it personable, empathetic, and customer-centric), our good friends at SalesLoft can help. And they integrate directly with Sigstr, so you can easily amplify the success of outreach email and email signature marketing together.
9. Consistent activity and fresh content is key
We launched 71 total email signature campaigns in 2017. That boils down to about 6 a month or 1.5 per week. Consistent activity is important because engagement rates may diminish the longer a campaign runs. With that said, we recommend switching or launching a new campaign every 2 weeks. If you’re worried about your content supply keeping pace with this rotation, multiple variations of a campaign (that promote the same resource) can extend its shelf life.
Our goal here at Sigstr is to be a helpful and trusted resource as more and more teams embark on the email signature marketing journey. We want to be transparent and openly share what we have learned from our own campaigns. This post was intended to do just that (while also inspiring you with design ideas and entertaining you with “dad joke” humor).
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or newbie, we’re always here to help and collaborate. Let us know what your team has learned from email signature marketing by tweeting @SigstrApp! And stay tuned for more trends, data, and best practices in our upcoming “The State of Email Signature Marketing” report.
In the past few months you’ve probably seen a “top marketing trends for 2018” list. No matter which list you read, you invariably saw some combination of the words, “AI”, “machine learning”, and/or “chatbots.” These innovations are becoming so prevalent that you can’t throw a rock at a marketing conference without hitting someone talking about predictive analytics engines or a “true” omnichannel approach – two of the many buzzwords that are underpinned by machine learning. AI has become commonplace in leading marketing teams who are leveraging it to inform and enrich their customer relationships, to make their workflows more seamless and optimized, their attribution more granular and predictive and their ad targeting more…creepy?
Customer experience vs. marketing efficiency
We’ve all seen an advertisement that was almost too well targeted at you, at a time that was almost too perfect and gave you an eerie sense that someone – or something- was listening to you. Perhaps you’ve visited a company’s website, navigated away from it, and a few minutes later received an email from that company asking why you left the site. Or maybe you’ve started chatting with a chatbot, only to try and find glitches in its NLP to make it say funny things. More and more, marketers are leveraging these technologies to better understand and convert prospects in order to lower human capital costs and create more personalized experiences at scale. For that reason, we’re going to leave machine-assisted optimization out of this conversation since it’s numbers driven and not about direct digital interactions.
To be pithy about what AI means for sales and marketing: We are using robots to better understand and connect with humans. And if you believe the hype, 85% of all customer interactions will be with a robot within 2 years. We’ve seen this in the movies, but in the real world, marketers are coming up on a real-life decision between customer experience and marketing efficiency.
Before we go any further, let’s make it clear that AI and machine learning are crucial technologies that will fundamentally transform our global economy and the marketing function is no exception. Human capital is expensive, and really smart human capital is really expensive, so it makes sense to augment our teams with the best technologies. Not only is there tremendous upside for well-crafted AI interactions, but there are already significant consumer expectations for it. 48% of US consumers expect brands to know about them and to help them discover new products and services. Intelligent targeting and ad optimization are amazing and have led me to purchase several things I never knew existed.
With a wealth of marketing opportunities comes a glut of pitfalls. Consequences from poorly managed machine interactions that could be damaging for your customer experience and your entire brand. With an outsize focus on making artificial intelligence work for marketers, it’s imperative that we don’t lose sight of what will really be driving conversions and closing business for your company: their (human) employees.
Brand authenticity and human connections
For marketers, the trend might be in AI, but the future is in making human connections more powerful. To that end, technology that helps us create better human-to-human connections is where marketers should be focusing. Creating customized content, scalable advocacy, and more powerful networking and sharing capabilities, just to name a few. Making your brand feel more human in the age of AI is more important than it has ever been.
Why?
Because if you’re reading this right now there are better-than-blackjack odds that your customers already don’t trust your brand. 54% of people simply don’t trust brands – and injecting artificiality into your brand certainly won’t help matters. Compare that to companies that are focused on creating custom content for their customers (only 22% of their consumers distrust them). Put another way, brands that are less trustworthy are also brands that are less human.
There are many content marketers reading this right now saying, “hey, I use AI to make my custom content experiences scalable!” and to them I say, “enjoy it while it lasts.” As consumers adapt to custom experiences, their expectations will quickly become unreasonable again. As technology advances, so too do our expectations, leaving marketers on the same treadmill of creating great customer experiences.
So what’s the answer? It has to be human. If your company isn’t actively trying to involve its humans in its brand strategy, it’s not only less likely to be trusted, but it’s leaving money on the table. People (especially millennials) prefer to interact with other people, not with brands. As shocking as it may sound, even digital natives prefer to pick up the phone to talk to a human at a business rather than interact with the business digitally. In fact, only 1% of those screen-obsessed millennials would prefer to deal with a brand over social media than in person. Add the fact that marketing messages reach 561% more people when they’re shared by humans than by brands and it’s pretty clear that, for marketers, the future is human.
Finding the right balance
As you’re making investments in this new wave of marketing technology, remember to keep things human, but more importantly – don’t try and fool people into thinking your robot is a human. We’re getting close to living in Blade Runner, but we’re not quite there yet. Chatbots, right-time communications, recommendation engines and the like are all transparently programmed. If you intelligently leverage AI, it can help you create great experiences. If you rely on them too heavily, they’ll make your brand feel as artificial as they are.
We put out this infographic a while ago, but it’s a good reminder that the main driver of your business isn’t Slack or your Facebook strategy – it’s simply email. Zapier recently published research that revealed an interesting trend: While team chat platforms like Slack have had a meteoric rise, email continues to grow at an even faster rate.
The reign of real, one-to-one communication appears to be aeonian. We should keep this top of mind as we embrace all of the fun and efficiency AI has to offer for our marketing programs.
Kate Riney is the Brand Storyteller at Calendly, an incredibly simple scheduling tool. She has experience recruiting for the nonprofit and education industries and focused on improving candidate relations.
Recruiters have to be great time-managers. No surprise there. You need to be good with people. Also, unsurprising. You’re a pro at this, so let’s cover some ideas for maximizing recruitment potential that you may not have mastered yet.
Let’s talk about improving the candidate experience.
It’s been shown that organizations that invest in a great candidate experience actually improve the quality of the hires they make by 70%. Yet, almost 60% of candidates report having a poor experience. And a large majority of those underwhelmed candidates share information regarding their experience online through employer review sites, social media or direct communication.
Which means, if you don’t focus on delivering a great candidate experience, you’ll not only decrease the quality of your hires, you’ll actually damage the employer’s reputation and their prospective candidate pool.
Yikes!
I’m betting those aren’t the results that are going to win you recruiter of the year and get you that sweet bonus. So let’s talk about some simple ways to improve relations and create allies out of candidates—yes, even the rejected ones.
Research the hiring team, not just candidates
The candidate experience actually starts before you ever reach out to a potential applicant. It begins during the research phase.
Remember that you’re always interviewing two groups of people: the candidate and the employer. So when you talk to the hiring team about their needs and expectations for the role, don’t just focus on the basic job description and compensation package. Company culture is also a huge factor in candidates’ job consideration, so it’s your responsibility to have a pulse on the employer’s unique vibes and communicate them accurately. Be sure to get the hiring team’s opinion of why the organization is an attractive place to work and its mission, vision and values.
Even if you’re an in-house recruiter with a handle on the organization’s overarching culture, it’s still essential to understand the hiring team and department’s unique culture as this will have the most immediate and sustained impact on a new hire’s success.
Warm up the candidate and then compel them when sourcing
When you’re ready to reach out to cold candidates, remember that you’re calling someone who is—likely—happily employed. Calling them at their office in the middle of the day should be treated delicately. Not everyone has a soundproof office and most will be hesitant to talk to a recruiter. After introducing yourself and explaining the intent of your call, always ask if now is a good time to chat or if there’s a better time to connect.
If you get an answering service, use your best judgment to respect the person’s current job status. Don’t be too detailed about your message with assistants or secretaries.
Even if you get a chance to talk with the prospective candidate, ALWAYS send a follow-up message with more details and incentivize them to start the application process. Including an eye-catching call-to-action within your email signature and linking it to the company’s job board or website is a great way to hook the candidate. If they’re clearly uninterested in the position, you can send them an email thanking them for their time, ask them to recommend anyone in their network they think would be a good fit for the role and link to your job board or LinkedIn page.
If they’ve already expressed interest in the position and are ready for a more in-depth conversation, use a tool like Calendly to include a scheduling link in your message so the candidate can quickly pick an interview time that’s convenient for them from your availability.
Simplify the application process
Whether you use a CRM or ATS for your recruitment efforts, it’s essential to invest in a compatible resume-parsing tool like CareerBuilder or RChilli. Submitting a resume and then being asked to fill out duplicate information in a detailed application form and questionnaire is very discouraging to even the most eager candidates.
Those who value their own time don’t want to spend hours on an initial job application. Respect their initiative and efforts by simplifying the process.
Explain the entire interview process
Once you start interviewing candidates, it’s vital that you explain what the entire process looks like—up front—regardless of the prospect’s potential. Many organizations prefer to only explain the very next step so that they maintain the flexibility to deviate from the norm for unique scenarios. While tempting, this method is ultimately more risky than it’s worth.
Just like sales teams are supposed to make a promise on what their product or service delivers, recruiters should make a promise to candidates about what kind of timeline they should expect and stick to it. While tough to do, this will also give you more leverage to move the employer along if they start dragging their feet or they come up with unrealistic demands. Confused or anxious candidates who feel like they’ve been forgotten or put on the back-burner will drop off, costing you some of your best talent.
Speed up the recruitment cycle
Similarly, don’t keep candidates waiting. Whenever possible, once you have information to share, share it. On average, it takes three interviews and 3–6 weeks to get out an offer. Time-to-hire is one of most important metrics recruiters must pay attention to. Why? Because the main reason job offers are rejected is that someone else beat you to the punch.
If you don’t want to go back to the drawing board and start the cycle over, speed it up!
Focus on building relationships
As you interact with the candidate, make them feel like a rockstar. A difficult and thorough interview process doesn’t have to be a cold, impersonal one. Too often interviews can feel like stress tests and give candidates an “us vs you” feeling. That’s no way to build a healthy working relationship.
Offering proper affirmation and positive feedback will give candidates the confidence to truly shine by showing you what’s true and important to know about them. A whopping 80% of people say they will take one job over another based on personal relationships formed during the interview process.
So…if you haven’t gotten this point yet: genuinely caring about the candidate is pretty important.
Ask candidates about their unique ambitions
Most interviewers make the process all about what the candidate can do for them. Successful recruiters will ask the candidate about their career aspirations and ensure the position is a good opportunity for them.
49% of employers believe that compensation is the most important factor to candidates, whereas 72% of candidates state advancement opportunities are the top reason why they would change jobs. For Millenials—the largest generation in the workforce—this is of utmost importance, with more than half of Millennials seeking more opportunities to develop their leadership skills.
You can win over candidates with the most potential if you know where their ambitions lie and take this into consideration as you interview and compose an offer.
Advocate for candidates
Your work doesn’t end once you’ve handed off the candidate to the hiring team. Consider yourself the broker between the employer and the potential hire. You are still responsible for their experience.
It may seem out of your hands at this point, but you can ensure that interviewers read all previous interview and reference notes. Make it easy for them by flagging or highlighting important info and offering to brief them.
This also means advocating for the candidate. It’s what sets truly incredible recruiters apart from simply competent ones. Know your candidate; build a relationship with them and have their back.
Did the candidate undervalue themselves? 69% of U.S. employees in the U.S. struggle to know what fair market compensation is for their position. You have compensation analysis tools they don’t have access to. Go to bat for gender-equal, industry-standard compensation for them. Salary is being negotiated by recruiters more than ever, so get the proper training to develop this skill.
Candidates will remember your efforts and become a great resource for future candidate referrals. Organizations will be thrilled to build their reputation as an equitable employer and desirable place to work.
Conclusion
Whether you’re an agency or in-house recruiter, a newbie or a veteran—you can always improve the candidate experience. Find ways to make a tedious and technical process more enjoyable and humane.
It’s the extra 5% of effort that will win you the most ROI. You’ll create allies out of candidates (even the ones that don’t get hired at first) and have more of a network to leverage as you continue your work.
The benefits of delivering a killer candidate experience are endless.
Last year was kind of a big year for us. We more than doubled our customer base. We now work with even more extraordinary companies of the likes of SendGrid, LA Galaxy, Iterable, Yext and dozens more. We announced a $5M Series A Funding. This raise has catapulted innovation for our product and allowed us to hire some serious rockstars, ending the year with an 87% bigger team. This includes some amazing new leaders on our executive team.
The product evolution has also been amazing – our offerings now include Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Contact-Based Targeting Functionality, Sigstr ONE, Mac Desktop Agent, Campaign Scheduling, Threat Stack monitoring, and Who Clicked & Click Notifications. We ended the year having made some really extraordinary – and impactful – partnerships and friendships that brought about big time integrations with Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle, and Salesforce.
In addition to the press release and main highlights above, we also put together a timeline of 2017 company milestone and events. This provides an in-depth look into our culture, product advancement, and growth throughout the year.
February – Launched a new sigstr.com
March – Happy St. Patty’s Day
If you know anything about our team, you know that we love Sigstr green. Why is Sigstr green so important to us? Our founder, Dan Hanrahan, best describes that here. We also love anything and everything that allows us to celebrate as a team, and St. Patrick’s day is always a team favorite.
May – ABM & 1:1 Targeting product launch
With this product release, we brought marketers the first ever opportunity to tap into employee email to deliver 1:1 targeted content to specific accounts, industries, or regions. We brought ABM to your regular everyday email – and that was a really big moment for us. You can read all the hype around that release here.
April – Bryan Wade joins Sigstr as CEO
Like we said, we welcomed some serious rockstars to our team this year. This was a pivotal moment for not only our team, but for Dan as well. Dan’s post on Why I Hired My CEO explains why he felt it was time to bring in a CEO and how he know Bryan was the best man for the job.
July – Sigstr for Events product launch
July – The Sigstr team enjoys a day at the ballpark
One of our core values is to celebrate success. We celebrated all of the amazing product launches and growth in Q2 by taking the team out to the ball game!
August – Series A funding announcement
We were super pumped to announce our Series A this year, especially considering the heavy-hitters involved in the round. Led by Hyde Park Venture Partners, the round also included Battery Ventures, HubSpot, Grand Ventures and High Alpha Capital.
September – We moved into our new office
September – HubSpot’s INBOUND conference
We were so excited for our sponsorship at HubSpot Inbound this year considering our growing partnership with HubSpot with the introduction of our enhanced integration and their involvement with our Series A funding.
Bryan Wade, our CEO, was given the opportunity to host a session on The Power of Employee Email. We had a blast and can’t wait to get involved in an even bigger way in 2018.
November – Dreamforce
We had a blast sponsoring the Marketing Lodge this year at Dreamforce and can’t wait to be there again next year.
December – Accepted to ABM Leadership Alliance
We were selected to join the ABM Leadership Alliance, joining the likes of Demandbase, Optimizely, Engagio, LookbookHQ and others to further educate B2B marketers how to develop and deploy a successful ABM strategy.
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Wow! What a year it was for the Sigstr team as we continue to build momentum into 2018. On behalf of the entire Sigstr team, a heartfelt thanks to all of our customers, friends, and family for supporting us along the way. Cheers to ongoing growth in the coming year as we continue to lead the email signature movement. Sláinte!
Email is at the core of nonprofit communication. From partners to board members to dedicated donors, email is the main channel for providing relevant information. Statistics show that the average one-time gift from email fundraising is $57. Additionally, the percentage of donors motivated to give online by an email jumped 40% from 2015 to 2016, the latest in a continuing upward trend. However, these metrics are only the beginning. There is a part of nonprofit email that can supercharge efforts to drive awareness and donations, yet often goes vastly overlooked: the email signature.
CrowdRise, a crowdfunding platform that uses crowdsourcing to raise charitable donations, identified this space within their emails and quickly realized they could be taking better advantage of it. As a part of GoFundMe, Crowdrise has raised billions of dollars on their platforms and offers an unprecedented amount of social fundraising expertise. Trusted by some of the biggest nonprofits in the world, they felt compelled to pass their newfound knowledge of this simple yet effective outreach tactic on to their audience.
Take advantage of every email sent
Even beyond email blasts, email signatures are on every email your team members send – which represents thousands of engagement opportunities each year. For any nonprofit, maximizing these interactions with a group of people who are already accessible and primed for more information can have a tremendous impact. “That seemingly slight space at the tail-end of your email, if treated correctly, has the opportunity to be a real powerhouse for your nonprofit,” writes CrowdRise Marketing Director Gary Wohlfeill.
Using Sigstr’s email signature marketing platform, communication managers can both ensure brand consistency across their staff, and place a clickable call-to-action banner at the bottom of every single email. Specific fundraising campaigns or events can be highlighted by banners throughout the year. “By adding graphics, clickable moments, and a content forward approach, the once drab signature is now a tasteful billboard for any campaign or initiative that you want to push at that moment,” adds Wohlfeill. Additionally, the ease-of-use, customizability, and robust functionality make it the perfect addition to any non-profit’s engagement initiatives.
Research shows how important these digital touch points are for fundraising – on Giving Tuesday of this year, online giving jumped up by 28% from 2016 – and about 26% of donations were made from a mobile device. Having a compelling call-to-action at the end of an email that gives the recipient an easy option to click through and make a donation will yield impressive results. In fact, eye-tracking tests clearly reveal that an email with a branded emailsignature and a campaign banner attracts more attention than one without, with recipients focusing heavily on the call-to-action.
Show the right call-to-action to the right donors
The Sigstr platform allows your organization to assign different email signature banners across a variety of sender groups within your organization – if you want board members showing a different call-to-action than your volunteer coordinator, for example, you can ensure that will happen through Sigstr. Even more significant, perhaps, is the ability to target recipients of your emails. There are many players within the nonprofit sphere, and you wouldn’t necessarily serve the same CTA banner to all of them.
Sigstr’s account-based marketing functionality gives users the ability to target specific accounts or individual contacts with content tailored to each audience. You may want to show a different CTA banner to a first-time donor than you would a consistent donor. Additionally, you wouldn’t want to send the same call-to-action to someone on your volunteer list as you would to a corporate sponsor.
By leveraging these functionalities and keeping your organization top of mind in the most applicable way possible, you can turn your best supporters into Super Advocates, keeping them at the top of the “engagement ladder.”
Track conversions more effectively
Not only does Sigstr allow your nonprofit to take full advantage of an already owned outreach channel, it provides insights into tracking conversions so that you can understand what’s driving donations, ticket purchases, volunteer sign-ups, etc. Knowing which recipients have clicked a campaign can be a powerful metric for re-targeting efforts.
CrowdRise has already seen success using email signature marketing within their organization, and they’re eager to help their customers do the same. Learn more here about CrowdRise’s perspective on the importance of taking advantage of every email sent.
Karrie Wozniak is an expert on mobile fundraising. She is Vice President Marketing at 
Joshua Meyer brings over 14 years of fundraising, volunteer management, and marketing experience to his current role as the Director of Marketing for 
