When you’re creating Sigstr Campaigns, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. With so many marketing mediums at play, it’s difficult to be continuously innovative in emerging channels, like employee email. Oftentimes, design resources are allocated to long-time players like search, social and paid advertising. Meanwhile, channels like Sigstr and your email signature block receive far less attention.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned situation presents a missed opportunity. Your most important prospects, customers and partners receive emails from your employees. This audience of influencers are more likely to view your email signature (and the clickable call-to-action banner located underneath) than any other piece of marketing collateral. With this level of exposure, it’s imperative to make sure the signature designs you’re promoting make a lasting impression.
If you’re a Sigstr user, you may have the sudden urge to rethink your entire creative strategy. It’s totally normal (and easier than it sounds)! To get started, step one is to review Campaign best practices. Once you are familiar with the basics, you can move on to exploring more complicated design elements. Below, we’ve highlighted three design principles that turns Campaigns from mundane to extraordinary.
Think Beyond the Box
Who says Sigstr Campaigns have to mimic traditional marketing banners? Feel free to use subtractive space to make design elements pop or ditch the rectangular shape altogether. Four straight lines do not need to dictate your entire creative process.
Create Dimension with Layers
There is nothing more uninteresting than a Campaign made with just blocks of color and text. Create the illusion of depth by layering images, abstract shapes, color overlays and patterns. A multi-dimensional Campaign pulls the viewer in and encourages conversion.
Tell a Story with Illustrations
It’s true what they say – a picture is worth a thousand words. Campaign illustrations are an effective tool in creating brand identity. Instead of filling your Campaign space with lengthy text, use illustrations to catch your audience’s attention and make them feel connected to your brand.
Your employee email signature block is prime marketing real estate. Don’t waste the opportunity to promote your latest marketing initiatives by leveraging an unmemorable Campaign. Create content that stands out and entices viewers to take action.
For more email signature and Campaign banner inspiration, check out our latest resource below:
As a marketer, you know just how important content is to your marketing strategy, your goals, and generating revenue for the bottom line of the business. For many companies – especially those in the technology or cloud software space – content marketing is a fundamental piece of the marketing puzzle. Without content, what programs can you run and what can you promote? Sure, you can always put out a sales message or a demo call-to-action, but companies have found that when they give away really useful and meaningful information in the form of content, such as ebooks, blog posts, case studies, infographics, one-pagers, and even videos, they get much better results.
According to the Altimeter Group, 57% of marketers reported custom content was their top marketing priority for 2014.
Why is that? Prospective and current customers want to learn – they want to partner with a company that cares about education. So marketers use content to drive programs, which in turn (or in theory) create qualified leads, opportunities, and eventually closed business. And another thing that’s so great about content: it’s measurable! Marketers can gain incredibly useful insights into click-through-rates, landing page visits, conversion rates, and so much more.
Hold on – it’s not so simple.
If creating content and putting it behind a landing page or up on the blog is so easy and guarantees such great results, then why hasn’t every company mastered content marketing? And why isn’t every company seeing huge results from the content they do produce? Or why don’t companies pour all of their marketing resources into content, since it’s such a golden opportunity?
“Every role within marketing has its own tools, content types, and channels to manage, each responsible for different aspects of the content and buyer lifecycle. Without a strategy in place for coordinating all of these pieces, seeing the big picture of your marketing impact is almost impossible. Not to mention, adhoc content creation across departments leads to duplicate, off-brand, or unnecessary content. That’s why 65% of content goes unused in B2B organizations, representing a massive cost center directly located within marketing.”
65%! That’s an astounding amount of content that goes unused. Just imagine how much time and how many resources go into creating just one piece of content.
Just for example sake:Say the average piece of content takes 5 hours to write. For a blog post, that’s a high number, but for an ebook, research report, or even a case study, that’s a very low number. So, 5 hours to create the average piece of content for a content marketer whose salary is $60,000 per year (source: Marketing Land). That piece of content is costing your business about $150.00. Most content marketers create about 1 piece of content per day, so the per weekly content cost (not including any graphic design, branding, or interactive elements) for just one content marketer is $750. Now multiply that number by how many members are creating content in a given organization, and then multiply that number by 52 (the number of weeks in a year).
That’s a LOT of content, and the time, cost, and resources that support that content adds up very quickly for many organizations.
What’s the root of the problem?
According to the Forrester Wave: Content Marketing Platforms, 2015 report, “The upshot of every marketing team being a de facto publisher is colloquially known as ‘content chaos’—a scenario of overlapping, invisible, and underused brand assets and collaterals.”
There is so much content being created by so many individuals across Marketing, Product Marketing, Segment Marketing, and the list goes on… that getting use out of every single piece is incredibly difficult. Your audience sees hundreds if not thousands of marketing messages every single day, so ensuring your 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?
Not only that, but the Marketing team must educate the Sales team and other departments on the value of the piece and then help them understand how to use it in prospective or current customer conversations. But with everything else that Sales and Customer Success teams have on their plates, using marketing content – no matter how valuable it may be – often falls to the wayside.
How your employees’ email signature block can help.
If there’s one communication channel your employees live by, it’s email. On average, an employee will send about 10,000 emails annually to their most important contacts, whether they be prospective customers, current customers, job candidates, partners, vendors, or industry influencers. Your employees send email all throughout the day, sometimes even at night, on the weekends, or while they’re on vacation. The channel literally never stops.
Sigstr, an email signature generator, was created to help marketers cut through the noise and share the company’s most important initiatives automatically via the employee email signature block. Email signatures have been getting much more attention over the past year as marketers and companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to see the email signature block as an important marketing asset. The employee email signature is quite possibly the #1 place where your company’s brand is viewed most often – maybe even more than your company website!
What’s Sigstr?
Smart marketing through email signatures – that’s what Sigstr is all about. Simple management for the employee email signature block that ensures a consistently branded email signature for employees and unlocks a powerful marketing channel with clickable call-to-action banners.
How does it work?
With a few clicks in Sigstr, marketers can automatically inject a clickable image, called a Campaign, to the Outlook and Gmail email signature block. The Sigstr admin can also change the format, fonts, and allowable text found in the employee signature lines. These Campaigns or signatures are updated automatically across all employees and can be filtered by groups. And best of all? No need to involve IT or interrupt the end user.
Need more inspiration for your email signature block design and how you can use it to distribute content? We have you covered. Check out our newest resource below:
Smart marketing through email signatures – that’s what Sigstr is all about. Simple management for the employee email signature block that ensures a consistently branded email signature for employees and unlocks a powerful marketing channel with clickable call-to-action banners.