Employee email signatures – something that is usually viewed as a pain to facilitate rather than an opportunity. Sigstr helps organizations leverage employee email as an owned channel for Marketing and employee communications. This is why Sigstr exists – we show Marketers the hidden potential of employee email (and the simple but powerful effects of centrally managed email signatures).
We love telling this story, the story of “why Sigstr”. The best way to tell this story is in a 60-second video, and we’re proud to be releasing that new video this week.
Be sure to check it out below, and scroll further down for the video brief!
Tone:
Modern, friendly, professional, and clean.
Script:
Sending an email, it’s a small task with enormous potential. In fact, the average employee sends 10,000 emails every year, and each of those emails has the power to grow relationships, inspire action, and leave a lasting brand impression. As your company expands, so do the opportunities to tell your story, opportunities to build something great. Sigstr was founded on this belief. We offer simple, centralized control of employee email signatures, ensuring an on-brand close with every sent email. And, interactive banners customized for specific Campaigns and individual departments. Unlock an entirely new Marketing channel. With Sigstr, every employee in your organization leverages and promotes the incredible content you pour your heart into. Request a free demo today – and magnify the incredible potential of employee email with Sigstr.
Goal:
This video should explain why consistent email signatures can benefit organizations of all sizes. It is a brief overview of the Sigstr email signature platform and illustrates the hidden potential of employee email and how it can be used as an owned channel for Marketing and employee communications. It also portrays the simple but powerful effects of centrally managed employee email signatures.
Target Audience:
Marketers, owners of a company’s brand, and IT managers.
What kind of marketer doesn’t like stats? It’s part of our DNA – we LOVE statistics about marketing in general: programs, channels, and every other stat under the sun that helps us do our jobs better. As marketers, we know that every dollar can (and should) be measured, every lead matters, and every new deal should be accounted for where it was originated. We measure conversion rates and open rates and click-through-rates and displays and… the list could literally go on forever.
But all of that marketing data can be paralyzing. If you try to measure everything, you really measure nothing at all, because it’s impossible to make changes and improve data points if everything is a focus.
So when our team ran across a new article entitled, “110 Digital Marketing Stats” via gShift, a company that’s built around content performance, we got excited. Our team at Sigstr identified our top 13 favorite digital marketing stats from the post, and we added 2 extras as a bonus under “employee email”.
Let’s dig into the stats:
SEO
60% of all organic clicks go to the top 3 organic search results (Hubspot)
Those involved in the B2B buying process are already 57% of the way down the path to a decision before they’ll actually perform an action on your site (Think With Google)
MOBILE
51.7% of emails were opened on Smartphones and 15% were opened on Tablets, with 33.3% opened on desktop/laptop computers according to Movable Ink’s US Consumer Device Preference Report for Q3 2015 (Movable Ink)
Users spent on average 1.8 hours on their smartphones every day and apps account for 89% of their mobile media time (Social Media Today)
CONTENT MARKETING
On average, 75% of ideas are turned into a content asset, published once and never reused or repurposed again (Kapost)
72% of marketers worldwide said relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic (MarketingProfs)
94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content strategy. Other popular platforms include Twitter (87%), Facebook (84%), YouTube (74%) and Google+ (62%) (Content Marketing Institute)
INFLUENCER MARKETING
59% of marketers are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets over the next 12 months (Tomoson)
1 in 3 people come to a brand through a recommendation (Brandon Murphy)
SOCIAL
Buffer reported for its user base, tweets with images received 150% more retweets than tweets without images (Kiss Metrics)
ANALYTICS & REPORTING
27%of B2B marketers say they are effectively tracking content utilization metrics (Aberdeen)
GENERAL MARKETING
33%of marketers were not sure which digital channel makes the biggest positive impact on revenue (MarketingProfs)
Gartner’s 2015-2016 CMO report shows that 98% of marketers believe digital and offline marketing are merging and marketing strategies will need to reflect this (Gartner)
EMPLOYEE EMAIL
In 2015, the number of worldwide email users will be nearly 2.6 billion. By the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will increase to over 2.9 billion (Radicati)
In 2015, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day totals 122 emails per day (Radicati)
No matter what kind of marketer you are, your role is rooted in statistics: what’s working, what’s not working, where should you and your team be spending your time and budget? Maybe you weren’t considering it, but employee email could be a necessary addition to your digital marketing mix. The statistics around volume are hard to overlook – so why not take advantage of it?
Try pulling your own numbers for some of the above benchmark statistics and learn what channels and programs work best for your team. And if you’d like to see how examples of the best email signatures and how they can help your Marketing team distribute content (and boost your metrics), we’d love to help!
Sign up for a free demo today to see Sigstr’s best email signatures or click below to access our latest resource:
Email continues to be a mission-critical tool for businesses across the world. While in the past some have predicted the certain death of email, the opposite is happening. Even with products like Slack and other internal communication tools prevalent in the market, email is still the backbone of communication. In fact, email usage is expected to increase over 6% each year for the foreseeable future.
According to email experts at the Radicati Group, it’s estimated that each employee sends about 28 emails every day, or about 10,000 emails every year. This huge volume of emails (up to 1M emails a year for a company of just 100 employees) proposes a huge untapped marketing channel. Because every single email an employee sends contains an email signature, smart marketers are using that signature area to promote their most important initiatives (like content or upcoming events) to the targeted audience that receives those emails: prospects, customers, partners, vendors, and influencers.
While marketers are now using employee email signatures to distribute their most important content, what about other departments across the company? Can they use great email signatures to promote what they care most about, too? Absolutely. Need some ideas on how to leverage employee email signatures across your entire organization? Here are 3 examples of how other departments can use great email signatures to promote what their departments care about most:
Sales
If Marketing’s primary objective is to drive engagement with the brand, then Sales wants you to engage with the process. Sales, whether it be pre-sales or getting the final contracts signed, cares a lot about the process and making sure prospects see the true value of what they’re providing. Marketers want the prospects to be engaged with every email and every part of the process – no matter how short or long the sales cycle is.
Your company wants customers to be eager to learn as much as possible about what you can provide them by way of the products or services offered. You want them to see the value of what you offer and understand the benefits of deciding to work with your company rather than the competition. And they want all of that to happen with minimal investment and in the most efficient way possible. What if you could let your email signatures do the work for you? What if with every email you guided your prospects on a journey? A journey where with one click of a button they could interact with the process by requesting a demo, seeing a product video or tour, viewing pricing and product features, or calculating the impact your product or service could provide with an ROI calculator. With each click and interaction, they understand your product or service offerings better – all with zero effort from the sales rep.
Now every email can help your prospects feel more and more confident about moving through the sales process.
Allow prospects to interact with resources like:
Demo requests and product videos
Pricing and feature guides
ROI Calculators
Human Resources
The HR department is focused on finding great talent and equipping talent to be successful in the workplace. But finding candidates in today’s competitive market can be incredibly challenging. Human Resource departments need to find clever ways to showcase how their company is different and how their culture is attractive to those who may be job searching.
Because HR department employees send emails to many potential employees or partners that may be interested in working for their company, their email signatures offer a prime opportunity to showcase open positions – either specific jobs or a blanket “we’re hiring” – and showcase the company’s unique culture, all through HR employees’ great email signatures.
Give prospective employees a glimpse into your company with:
Video footage of the office or with the CEO
A culture showcase and “meet the team”
A call-to-action with current open positions
Company X-Factors and stats
Customer Success & Customer Support
If Marketers want you to interact with the brand, and Sales wants you to engage with the process, then Customer Support and Customer Success want their customers to learn more about the product, services and value the company offers. Customer Support and Customer Success exist to help customers feel more confident about the product and services being provided. They want their customers to understand not only how to get their questions answered, but how to best troubleshoot and solve problems for themselves and continue the learning journey well beyond signing on as a new customer.
Customer Support and Customer Success want customers to understand the products and services you offer so intimately that they become dedicated advocates of the company, product, services, and people – resulting in greater satisfaction and more referrals.
Promoting product materials or a referral landing page doesn’t mean replacing an existing portal or community, but rather great email signatures with clickable call-to-action banners that serve as a constant reminder of the tools and resources that are available for those customers and urges them to join the conversation.
Customers can be one of your company’s biggest asset. It all starts with education and empowerment.
Give customers information such as:
Service and support phone numbers and contact info
Latest product release notes
Community sign-in or sign-up page
Overview of new product/services
Landing page to suggest referrals
What about your Channel team promoting new partnerships? If you work for a professional sports team or athletic department, why not use great email signatures to promote ticket sales? The options are endless, and best of all, a single admin on the Marketing team can create the Campaigns and assign to various groups or departments, so your departmental employees can simply keep sending emails… all of which automatically update with the latest Sigstr Campaign.
Each department within your organization is important. They each impact the entire business in different ways, and each have a different story to tell. Employee email signatures and the Sigstr Groups feature can help amplify that message, whatever it may be, from that particular employee, department, or entire company.
Our mission at Sigstr is to make marketers look amazing. We’re hard at work unlocking the incredible marketing ROI in employee email, and we wanted to share 3 breakthroughs you can use for your email signature template:
Analytics
You’ll notice “Sigstr Views” have replaced “Displays” in your campaign analytics. Sigstr Views will not tally a view when an employee composes a message, yielding more meaningful campaign impression counts and click-through-rates.
3rd Party Integrations
We realize that individual customer and prospect interactions go beyond corporate email. That’s why we’ve made 3rd party integrations a top priority and are proud to feature new partnerships with Salesloft and HubSpot. Here’s what you need to know:
The SalesLoft Integration enhances your marketing efforts within the SalesLoft Cadence application by appending a Sigstr signature and campaign to your Cadence email communications.
Your input determines what integrations we build next. Drop us a note if you have suggestions!
Automatic Installation
Sigstr has released an automatic installation method for Gmail users: Gmail Signature Sync. The new process removes the need for employees to install Sigstr individually. Now, the Sigstr administrator has the ability to push campaign and signature updates to each employee’s email signature template through the application portal. Watch the two minute video to learn how you can start leveraging this powerful functionality!
We are committed to making Sigstr an invaluable component to your marketing strategy. Feel free to send us feedback about your experience and let us know what kind of features you would like to see added. All opinions are welcomed!
Thank you for believing in our mission and for being a supporter of Sigstr! If you’d like to stay in the loop with announcements like these, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter!
Our VP of Product, Sam Smith, had only been at Sigstr for a few weeks. From what I remember, I believe he thought I was crazy. I liked Sam a lot, but I had no idea if he was writing code or just logging into Hacker Typer all day. This was one year ago today.
Sam’s first project was releasing groups into the Sigstr email signatures product. At that point, we had campaigns only and one size fits all. No control for email signature templates, very basic Outlook/Google integrations, no groups, limited UX, and so on. Groups was the #1 most requested feature from our first 25 customers, so we built it. It was a game changer (but at this point only in concept as Sam had not launched his first release).
On Quatro de Mayo, Scott Dorsey and Eric Tobias (our friends at High Alpha – at which point both High Alpha and Sigstr were brand new together) asked what we were doing to name the release. ExactTarget and iGoDigital were amazing companies these guys built and led. They always named their releases – it was a fun culture thing and helped as we talked about what happened in which release.
Sam quickly realized the next day was Cinco de Mayo. After approximately 8 seconds of deliberation, we had a nomenclature for our releases:
booze | number
1 second later, the release was dubbed Tequila Cinco. Clearly, that was the last time Scott or Eric ever suggested that we name a release.
Aside from the naming, and most importantly, the release itself was perfect. Game changing functionality that was exactly what our customers wanted. Fast forward to today and exactly one year later, Sigstr has a product that stands up branded email signature templates and unlocks marketing opportunities in every email employees send. And we do it for some of the world’s largest companies.
So here’s to Sam and our product team on the one year anniversary of Sam’s first release. You guys dominate, and pose for pictures like it’s the cover of a new Mumford and Sons album (here’s one below from our 1st ever Sigstr Field Day). We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for your hard work.
Your employees hold the responsibility as a brand ambassador to your company. So in order to have a successful rebrand or brand refresh to update your company’s look, you need every single employee to embody your new corporate identity. That means following specific steps to ensure that each and every employee is using the right logos, templates, fonts, and colors in all internal and external facing communications.
A lot of careful consideration goes into determining what a new visual identity should look like – one that’s memorable, drives awareness and makes it easier for your sales team to win deals. Usually this sort of endeavor is months if not years in the making, and can take an army of team members to make it successful. But while the tactics of this are important, the true importance is embracing what you and your employees believe your company brand and values should represent, and facing the world as a united front.
At Sigstr, we understand that the process of pulling off a successful rebrand or brand refresh can be time consuming and challenging, so we’ve given you a head start by developing a quick checklist. Use this to ensure all of your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted as you refresh your company’s identity, but add to it as you uncover more areas and document those for your next brand refresh (hopefully many years down the road)!
Suggested Phase 1:
Employee email signatures / email signature format
Website homepage & key website pages
Social media channels
Sales & company powerpoints
Product demo environments
Business cards
Company blog
Newsletter, customer communications, and marketing automation emails
As you’ll see from the checklist, one of the first items we suggest your company updates in your re-brand is employee email signatures. Why? The employee email signature is often the only interaction prospects have with your company, and each employee at your company likely sends about 10,000 emails per year to your company’s most valuable contacts. For a company of just 100 employees, that’s over 1M brand impressions just by email alone! And while in the past whenever your company updated a font or a color, you had to send an email out to all employees (like this), that doesn’t have to be the case.
Sigstr’s email signature generator solution combines a cohesive email signature format with engaging campaigns, all in one easy-to-use software platform, easily managed by a single administrator.
Sigstr Signatures:Individualized, employee-specific names and titles. Centrally controlled branding, content, and information.
Sigstr allows your company to gain control of employee’s email signatures to ensure proper formatting and branding on every single employee email signature. No longer will you have to worry about outdated signatures, formatting issues, or wrong uses of colors or fonts. And best of all, get the data to see what’s working!
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 format or change icons, fonts, and allowable text in employee signature lines. These campaigns or signatures are updated automatically across all employees and can be filtered by groups. And best of all? No IT or employee action required.
Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building your professional email signature format.
Did you know that the average employee sends roughly 10,000 emails a year? In a company of 100, thats 1,000,000 emails! Because digital communication is so prominent in the workforce, youd think most professionals would be masters of proper email etiquette. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. If you want to ensure your emails are being well received, leverage the following four tips and join the emailing elite.
1. Keep it short and to the point
If you cant get your point across in a paragraph or less, revert back to the Stone Age and make a phone call. Contrary to popular belief, giving someone a call can save an extraordinary amount of time and effort. The added bonus is that speaking to someone directly means youll receive a response instantaneously. Imagine that!
2. Avoid the dreaded “reply all”
Weve all been victims. A well-intending colleague sends out a company-wide email about leftover pizza in the breakroom and all hell breaks loose. One person unintentionally asks the entire office if there is left-over pepperoni at the same time the office jokester replies with a GIF of stampeding elephants. All of a sudden, inboxes are full and everyone is annoyed, confused, or best case scenario, entertained. Whatever the situation, do not be tempted to reply-all to tell everyone else to stop replying-all. You are part of the problem.
3. Use emoticons wisely 🙂
Personally, Im a big fan of the smiley face. However, its worth remembering that Im a millennial who loves texting, open-office environments, and Gilmore Girls. Not everyone in the professional world is like me. If you cant imagine a day without a friendly semi-colon and parenthesis, opt to use emoticons in internal email threads instead of external communications. Your coworkers will be much more forgiving.
4. Represent your brand appropriately
If any email signatures in your company look like this, youre doing it all wrong.
First things first, inspirational quotes have no place in your email signature template. Furthermore, your digital signature does not need to mimic the styling of Lisa Frank or look like John Hancock designed it himself. Instead, use your companys branding guidelines to create an appropriately formatted email signature template. If the term branding guidelines conjures no understanding, your company may want to consider an email signature generator. Yes, this is a Sigstr plug.
Theres no question that email is a necessary and impactful communication tool in the professional world. With these four tips and a little common sense, youll be well on your way to becoming an email expert in no time!
Want to see more bad examples of email signature templates? Check out this recent blog post:
Last week, nearly a dozen of Indys smartest marketers gathered to contemplate the trials and triumphs of digital marketing. The event was hosted by Sigstr,a platform for email signatures, andwas the first of many future Digital Marketing Roundtables – an event conceived with learning and networking with the best and brightest in mind.
There is a constant debate as to who truly owns brand. From our discussion, we reached a simple conclusion: everyone. You can invest millions of dollars in fancy marketing campaigns and advertisements, but your people are your front line. No matter the size of your organization, your people are your brand. If you invest in culture and hire the right people, your brand will flourish. See how email signatures can also help with that in this recent blog post.
2. Marketing’s impact on the entire organization, including culture.
A strong company culture is a beautiful thing. If only celebrated internally, you have happy employees. If showcased to the world through the use of digital marketing, you have happy customers, prospects, and peers. Marketing can make a colossal impact on all aspects of an organization. Using the aforementioned example, showcasing culture can lead to higher interest in becoming a part of that culture and can impact the quality of talent in potential hires. There are a variety of channels that can be utilized to exhibit culture (including through your email signature template – Lesson.ly is the perfect example of this).
3. Budget breakdown.
With hosting a multitude of different organizations comes a multitude of opinions and theories on how to spend your budget. In the breakdown of digital vs. traditional marketing channels, several companies stated they allocate less than 20% of their total budgets to digital marketing efforts. Dan asked the group what they would do if they were given an additional $1 million in marketing budget. The unanimous decision was to invest in talent.
Perspective from Tim Kopp, General Partner, Hyde Park Venture Partners:
“The easiest way to fix culture is to win. Marketing helps you know how you are winning. Start measuring your efforts, setting goals, and ensuring each person knows what they are accountable for. I have never seen a losing organization with a winning culture, period. Setting a culture of performance helps motivate team members and create transparency. Marketing is a crucial player in fueling these efforts.”
Tim also recently published an entire post specific to marketing’s role in building genuine culture and the effect it has on talent attraction, development, and retention. You can check out the post here.
Perspective from Sigstr’s VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes:
“Yesterday my horizon was expanded and eyes opened. I had to the privilege to learn from the best and brightest marketers in Indianapolis. I learned how broad of a reach marketers have on their organization’s success. They impact culture, perpetuate brand halo, drive employee engagement and enablement, and of course deliver leads to the sales organization. For me, it spurred a subtle reminder that in the race to the sun every action and individual is impactful. We, you and I, have the responsibility to represent and promote our company’s passion as we work to develop and grow.”
We are very appreciative of the opportunity to host a room full of smart digital marketers. A big thank you to all of them for taking time out of their days to join us for the event. We walked away smarter and look forward to continuing to learn and grow at future events.
Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr Founder/CEO, provides a recap of the day in the video below:
“So, first and foremost, it’s mostly about giving back and adding value to the digital marketers in Indianapolis. It’s so hard to sort of get out in your community when you get buried in your work. So, to look around and see those connections and one-off conversations marketers have with one another, to help them connect, is really invaluable.
In theprocess of that, we (Sigstr) learn, and our job is to ask questions (hopefully smart questions) and sit back and listen to the smartest people in our community tell us about their opportunities and challenges. So, if we facilitate an environment along those lines and facilitate that discussion, and maybe even add a few beverages of choice, people tend to have a lot of fun and walk away with better connections that help them.
They’re all really facing the same sort of decisions and evaluating the same opportunities. It’s really interesting, there were all kinds of engaging conversations and we talked a lot about budget, strategy, and brand, and things along those lines. We asked this group, ‘If you had a 10% increase in budget that just showed up today, how would you spend it?’ and the entire room, almost without exception, said people.
It’s really clear (I think there were 3,400 logos of technologies you can buy in themarketing tech stack) that the marketer is sort oflimited with their time. They can only log in and do so much fromso many tools. And so, the marketer is really constrained in the tools that add value without requiring a lot of time, and those are the ones that tend to win.
We also talked a lot about the brand piece and how marketers show return on investment on brand. There were some really interesting conversations there. It’s a really hard thing to do, but we all agreed that, more than anybody in the organization, marketing cares about the brand. They can provide tools to enable the organization – but at the end of the day nothing creates a better culture or brand than winning. The brand stems from the people you place within the organization.
It was fascinating to sit back and understand what kinds of decisions these guys face everyday and how many different things are pulling them for time and what matters most. So for those of you that were here, thank you so much for spending the day with us. It was an incredible opportunity and very humbling to see so many busy and smart marketers spend some time with us. It won’t be the last we assemble a group of really smart digital marketers and we’ll continue to listen and build that feedback into the Sigstr email signature generator so we can help in the ways you need us to.
So thanks again for coming and we hope you join us again. For those that didn’t have a chance – please reach out we’d love to have you next time.” – Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr Founder/CEO
For more on email signatures, email signature templates, or professional email signatures, visitour Resources page.
Weve all been victims. A well-intending colleague sends out a company-wide email about leftover pizza in the breakroom and all hell breaks loose. One person unintentionally asks the entire office if there is left-over pepperoni at the same time the office jokester replies with a GIF of stampeding elephants. All of a sudden, inboxes are full and everyone is annoyed, confused, or best case scenario, entertained. Whatever the situation, do not be tempted to reply-all to tell everyone else to stop replying-all. You are part of the problem.
If any email signatures in your company look like this, youre doing it all wrong.
