We all love a good party – and in our sphere of marketing, we love events! They’re just big parties with top-notch swag, engaging speakers and tons of networking opportunities. When we’re planning an event (or thinking of creative ways to promote an event), our enthusiasm should be contagious. Our excitement should create more than a desire in potential attendees, but rather spur a burning need to be there, for fear of missing out. But how can we drive registrations and boost attendance to our next corporate party, reception or conference? Open your eyes, and your emails.
Email is a powerhouse in 1:1 connections. It’s one of the only marketing channels you can truly personalize for a specific audience, making it the perfect tool to build momentum around an event. Employee email helps you to convey your brand’s message and voice across a large audience, and it’s surprisingly easy to use the channel for your next event invite.
Engaging Your Audience
Recently, our friends at Litmus published a creative guide on How to Use Email Marketing to Support Your Next Event, which outlined some creative ways to promote an event. While the obvious ones (who, what & where) can be easy to put down on paper, it can sometimes take a little extra umph to engage your audience to the point of registering (or RSVPing) for your event. Here are a few highlights on what they said:
Get straight to the point
Yes, the 5 W’s are easy to articulate on paper, but this is one place you don’t want to ramble on. Answer those questions quickly and efficiently, ideally in less than a paragraph. What type of event is this? Who are the guest speakers? Where is it? The more information your audience has right out of the gate, the faster they can make their decision on whether or not to attend.
Create clear CTAs that jump off the page
Setting your call-to-action apart from other content on the page helps draw the eye away from the “noise” and towards the “main event.” This makes it explicitly clear to readers what action they should take, without any questions around how to get there. Making it easy for people to RSVP for your event means more conversions and, ultimately, more attendees.
Highlight video recaps or blog posts on past events
Offering readers a glimpse at secondary content, like a video, blog post or infographic, can help build excitement and suspense for your upcoming event. Showing individuals what they missed last year (or reminding them what they saw) reinforces the value of your event and reminds viewers why they wanted to attend in the first place.
Spell out what attendees can expect to learn or who they can expect to see
Building urgency around your event helps drive registration and attendance. Marketing emails can reveal the agenda and keynote speakers or featured guests to drum up excitement surrounding an event. Associating your organization with big names in your specific industry can also help strengthen credibility and build brand strength.
Promote Your Next Event in Employee Email Signatures
When thinking about creative ways to promote an event, consider the email signature and why it’s the ideal place to take all of the above tips into account for effective event marketing. You can highlight the key details (date, time, location, etc.), drive RSVPs or registrations with an easy-to-locate CTA, and build urgency with a photo of past events or by promoting a featured speaker. Here are a few awesome examples of great event invitations we love to give you a little Sigspiration (get it?):
Sigstr’s email signatures are specifically designed to relay quick, exciting messages with clear CTAs. And just think: the average person sends 41 emails per day at work, making the email signature one of the most-viewed marketing channels in the book. With that kind of promotion power already working for you, Sigstr transforms these emails into highly effective marketing opportunities, driving registrations, RSVPs and brand awareness.
Request a demotoday to see how Sigstr works and why it should be on your list of creative ways to promote an event. Or, learn more by checking out our latest resource below:
As a team of digital marketing enthusiasts, we’re always on the hunt for great new content to share with our audience. One of the concepts that keeps resurfacing is the idea of “employee advocacy”. What exactly is it? Our friends at DynamicSignal define employee advocacy as:
“Employees sharing their support for a company’s brand, product or service, on their personal social networks. The goal is to inform, educate and engage the workforce, thus keeping them in the know, and allowing them to become brand ambassadors.”
Employee Email + Employee Advocacy = Opportunity
At Sigstr, we’re big believers in the power of employee email. You may have seen us share the statistic in previous posts that employees send an average of 10,000 emails to their most important contacts every single year. From customers to prospective customers, thought leaders and influencers to vendors and partners; employee email represents a personal communication method that reaches a vast audience. And when you combine the power of email and the audience that those emails reach, you have a pretty incredible marketing opportunity.
Employee Advocacy Starts with Engagement
In a recent DynamicSignal blog post entitled, “Effective Employee Advocacy Opens The Door For Influencer Engagement”, author Lionel Menchaca shared his perspective on the power of employee advocacy as an influencer engagement channel. We loved reading the article, so we’ll share a few key learnings and add-in a few thoughts of our own. Let’s get to it:
According to Menchaca’s post, “Brands understand that potential customers trust information from employees they know personally more than when it comes from executives or from the brand itself. But brands that focus on pushing content are missing the best part: developing and empowering the internal subject matter experts (SMEs).”
Your employee communications are an effective way to share important company or marketing information as these communications establish a trust that may not otherwise be present. Think about this from a personal perspective, would you be more trusting of a corporate marketing message, or a valuable resource sent along by a trusted peer?
Real Benefits Happen When Brands Identify Internal SMEs
The post goes on to explain, “Enlisting employee advocates to share content is a good first step. No question that it helps drive awareness and attention to content that brands produce. But in my experience, the real benefits happen when brands take the time to identify their own internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and empower them to connect to topic influencers outside the company. In other words, while all employee advocates are valuable, not all are created equal. No question sharers make up the biggest base of employee advocates. But, there is value in moving employee advocates up the hierarchy.”
In our experience at Sigstr, we couldn’t agree more. The concept of employee advocacy has become increasingly more important as a trusted avenue to help brands cut through the “marketing noise” while sharing important pieces of content or news. The power of employee advocacy through Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – especially via the owned employee email channel from our perspective – can be an effective way to empower content creators and content sharers across the organization.
Menchaca shared a graphic we think effectively visualizes this idea of empowering employees to take an active role in marketing – regardless of their department, team or role.
The Power of Employee Email as an Owned Channel
The first step of creating content is a critical component, but how should your employees share it with their email recipients once it’s finalized? Will employees actually take the time to attach a PDF or an image to each email they send? Probably not – and they shouldn’t anyways. And even if they did, extra effort is also required for the recipient and can cause storage and virus concerns.
With Sigstr, every single employee email sent closes with a branded email signature and drives real marketing ROI. Easily add clickable call-to-action banners to your email signatures. After initial setup, these banners update automatically across your entire organization (or to a designated department or group) anytime a new campaign is activated.
Sigstr unlocks employee email as a new owned marketing channel. For marketers, that means promoting the newest piece of content, an upcoming webinar or important event, or a company initiative in a visually compelling way that’s displayed with every single employee email sent. Empower your SMEs to create incredible content, and allow your sharers to incorporate the latest marketing content into each email. Want to determine what content appears based on employee’s department, team or group? No problem! See for yourself in the below examples how the power of Sigstr can help build employee advocates and turn employee email into a valuable owned marketing channel:
Ready to start including compelling imagery through your employees’ html email signatures? Request a free demo today.
Want more information first? Check our latest resource below:
When it comes to your customers, there are tons of touch points that came into play when you earned their business. And just because they signed a contract with your company doesn’t mean that you can stop earning their business every single day. In fact, earning their business is a daily practice that includes SaaS customer support strategies, educating them on your products and services and making sure they feel like a valued part of your company.
Once your customers see additional value in what your product or service can provide, they’ll often share more of their pain or challenges to see if your offerings can help their bottom line. Building a relationship comes with time, but in these valued customer conversations it’s important to keep them up-to-date with the latest information across marketing, product, sales and so on. SaaS customer support representatives should share product notes, case studies, blogs and articles to earn credibility, yes, but also to ensure your valued customers are aware of important product updates or industry changes.
Customer Happiness = More Revenue
Prominent SaaS companies would tell you that roughly 80% of their new customers are referred from their existing customers. The true value of SaaS customer support is not just from the lifelong value of those businesses, but from word of mouth and engagement with customers’ peers and referrals. These conversations can often be started by sharing stories of another similar customer that has found success using your product or services. When it comes time to share these case studies, product updates, thought leadership pieces, or other relevant information, how do you engage your customer success reps without causing them to lose focus?
Educate Customers With Every Email Send
Consider this statistic: an individual employee sends on average 10,000 emails each year, which means 28 percent of their day is spent in the inbox. These personal, relationship-building emails are already representing your brand, but think about the email signature as an opportunity for up-to-date marketing, sales and product content to be distributed in the same context – with no extra effort on the part of the customer success representative or other customer-facing employees.
Call-to-action banners in email signatures (as shown in the illustration to the right) can play an instrumental role in customer success. These interactive banners can include important company initiatives in the hundreds (or thousands) of the emails your customer success representatives and other customer-facing employees are sending every single day. Turn your email signature into a conversation starter to help customers feel further connected to your brand. Take, for example, a few of the use cases below of how several Sigstr customers are educating their customers through the power of email signatures:
Start Educating Customers With Employee Email Today
Request a demo today to see how Sigstr can help build on your customers’ success. Or, click below to access our latest helpful resource:
Last Friday, our CEO Dan was featured on Episode 20 of #ThePawdcast. This digital marketing podcast focuses on entrepreneurship, startups, creativity, innovation and more. In an overview of Dan’s episode, the hosts mentioned their favorite part of the show is hearing what makes people tick, what they are most passionate about and why they do what they do.
The show is hosted by Joshua Davidson, the 22-year-old tycoon that heads up ChopDawg, a marketing & design studio that helps entrepreneurs turn their great app ideas into reality. We had the privilege, nay the pleasure, of speaking with Joshua and Captain Eddie Contento (if you watch the episode on YouTube, you’ll understand why this is funny), ChopDawg’s Executive Branding Director.
The recording is a little over an hour, so we compiled a list of our key takeaways for those of you who would prefer a 10-minute read to a 60-minute listen.
Key Takeaways:
1. The best business models are the ones that are “Duh” ideas. If you have a brain blast moment, and when you share your story with people and they give you the “duh, why didn’t anyone think of this before?!” know that you are onto something big.
2. In order to build a business, you have to do three things: sell the product, build the product and support your customer. We hired a kick-ass VP of Sales, VP of Product and VP of Customer Success right away and then built a team around them.
3. How did Sigstr win its first customers? Dan called every marketer that he knew and pitched the idea. He asked if he went out and built the product, would they buy it? For everyone that said yes – when the product had been built he reached back out. He was able to gauge the interest of the ideal audience before making the investment in a solution.
4. A majority of big marketing technology purchases (think ESP or CRM) have a slower implementation process and a longer timeline to see success. Marketers are looking for “quick wins” that are impactful in a meaningful way. Sigstr is a quick win – we come in at a low price point, we can be implemented within minutes and we make a quick impact.
5. Email has, according to some, been dying for decades. But in terms of external communications, nothing has come close to replacing the need for email. Internally, we understand that Slack and HipChat are taking over the form of communication. This allows businesses to really focus on the most critical use of email – your communications with your prospects, customers, partners, investors and other important contacts.
6. At Sigstr, we change our campaigns weekly. We pump out new content constantly. While this is what we do, the rate at which you update your campaigns is dependent upon your content marketing strategy. What is most important to you? What provides the most value to your audience? Once you hone in on that, you can have a better idea as to what Sigstr campaigns you should create and how frequently it needs to be updated.
7. The number one most crucial piece of building a startup from the ground up is hiring the right people. Hire people you trust. Every single Sigstr employee to this point has been found through a referral. When you are an entrepreneur starting out on your own, you try to do everything. But ask for help with hiring – your people are your biggest asset and you want to get that right the first time.
8. Revision:Dan said that his biggest “failure” from his first venture was hiring a contractor because he didn’t know how to manage expectations, what was important to him, and the contractor wasn’t an equity partner. Upon further reflection, Dan wants to share how critically important consultants are at the right stageof a startup. It is important to understand your MVP (minimum viable product), the point in which your product is developed with sufficient enough features to satisfy early adopters, before you take the step to hire a contractor.
If you want to hear more from the guys behind this digital marketing podcast, follow Chop Dawg Studios, Joshua and Eddie on Twitter.
Need another digital marketing podcast to listen to? Here are a few others Sigstr has been featured on this year:
Terminus, the driving force behind the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) movement, brings us FlipMyFunnel, the ABM Roadshow. What is the #FlipMyFunnel conference all about? Don’t listen, watch:
Join the Sigstr team in Boston for a day of learning and celebration that will empower you to accelerate your pipeline and grow revenue. We want to meet you there! So much so that we are willing to help you out with your ticket – if you use the promo code SIGSTR50, you will receive 50% off!
Here are 7 reasons you and your team should attend the FlipMyFunnel conference in Boston on August 11th:
1. Incredible speaker lineup
Hear from incredible speakers and thought leaders like Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce.com, Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, Kevin Bobowski, CMO at Act-On, Kipp Bodnar, CMO at Hubspot, Elle Woulfe, VP of Marketing at LookBookHQ, Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared, and many more, including industry moderators and panelists.
2. Learn how to Flip your Funnel with ABM
You will learn from thought leaders on the new revolutionary marketing trend and programs for digital marketers and sales leaders alike. The program is chock full of great content including topics like account-based marketing, sales development techniques, and case studies from brands you admire.
3. Catch up with the Sigstr squad
In celebration of #FlipMyFunnel Boston and the 1st birthday of the event, we are hosting a “tailgate”. The Sigstr booth will be tailgate themed, so keep your eyes out for the Sigstr flag! We will be handing out koozies, cigars and Buffalo Wild Wings (more affectionately known as “BDubs”) gift cards for all of those who stick around for a demo!
4. #FlipMyFunnel’s 1st Birthday Party
The August 11th event marks #FlipMyFunnel’s 1st birthday, and the FMF team plans on celebrating in a big way. They’re throwing a party at Laugh Boston, Boston’s premier comedy club, that starts at 8:30 PM and doesn’t stop until midnight. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served and the viral sensation responsible for this rendition of Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen”, violinist Rhett Prett, will be performing!
5. Meet the kickass sponsors & exhibitors
The #FlipMyFunnel conference has an incredible set of sponsors and exhibitors that make the conference possible. A few of the representing companies include Terminus, G2 Crowd, Act-On, BrightFunnel, Sigstr, along with many other rockstar companies. Conferences are a great time to talk with vendors you already use and even strike up a conversation (and see a demo) for a software that might be beneficial for your marketing or sales team.
6. Meet prospective customers
If you’re a marketer that sells to other marketers or sales representatives, then #FlipMyFunnel is the place to meet prospective customers. Connect with attendees and learn about their needs and goals. If there’s a good fit, then perhaps they’ll be your next customer.
7. Explore Boston
Boston is an incredible city – especially in the summer! Take some time to explore one of the most historic cities in the United States, and take in some exceptional seafood while exploring neighborhoods like Downtown, Back Bay, Fenway, Hyde Park, Mission Hill, and so many other fun areas.
We could keep going, but hopefully we’ve listed out enough reasons to convince you to register for the FlipMyFunnelBoston conference kicking off in just a couple of short weeks. The Sigstr team will be looking for you! We hope to see ya on the flip side (get it?)!
Going on 5 months as a Sales Development Representative (SDR) at Sigstr, not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new. Last week was no exception.
TechPoint, an organization that promotes and accelerates the growth of Indiana’s tech community, gave 17 individuals the opportunity to shadow SDRs (sales development representatives) from 4 tech companies around Indianapolis. Officially, that program is called “Sales Bootcamp”, and it provides an opportunity for these 17 individuals to jump right in and experience the everyday life of a SDR.
A Recap of the Week
Sigstr was lucky enough to be 1 of these 4 tech companies, and hosted the 17 “campers” last week. Since Sigstr currently has 3 full-time SDR’s (including myself), we divided the 17 campers into 3 teams. Each of us served as the team leader for these 3 groups, and overlooked 6 individuals that have never been in sales. We introduced them to the tools we use and best practices when prospecting.
The week kicked off with a crash course on how to operate Sigstr’s 2 main prospecting tools, Datanyze and SalesLoft. They received a better understanding of how to make cold calls, form their own Sigstr sales message, and how to respond to interested prospects via phone and/or email.
This took a lot of trial and error throughout the week, but we were perfectly fine with that. We learn by trial and error everyday, as a SDR team and as a high growth company. Even though the sales pitches weren’t perfect at first, we made a huge amount of progress throughout the week (and even scheduled some demos). The week long bootcamp was for the campers, but it’s safe to say that the Sigstr SDR team may have learned more from this experience.
A Learning Experience for Both Sides
Fresh out of college, I would never expect to oversee 7 individuals that are considering a career in sales. To be honest, as of right now, I’m not even sure sales is for me and my future. I’m continuing to figure it out (which I’ve learned is perfectly okay). As said before, I’m learning something new everyday in order to excel in my position and contribute to Sigstr’s success the best way I can.
At Sigstr, we pride ourselves on being curious and always learning. That mindset helped me with my 7 campers, answering their questions (the same questions I had 5 months ago when I first started) and using what I have learned to help my team.
Last week gave me a sense of where I’m at in sales and how much I have to grow. Not only in my position, but as a person that would like to lead others in the future. It was great to see all of the campers’ progress during their time here at Sigstr. On behalf of the SDR team, and everyone here at Sigstr, we wish the best for all 17 campers. Thanks for working hard and making the week fun. Cheers!
The B2B SaaS industry is no stranger to buzzwords. Every article, tweet, webpage, blog post, webinar, podcast and blab is littered with a litany of in-your-face industry jargon. It is unescapable. We live in a world of newness – new applications, new platforms, new concepts, new solutions for old problems. Along with all of the new technology, comes a new set of words that, when used appropriately, can help you sound more knowledgeable on your topic. With this ever-evolving climate, it is difficult to stay up to date on all the latest buzzwords. As a tech company focusing on email signature management, Sigstr is an offender in the buzzword game.
Here is a list of our most frequently used buzzwords, heard in and around the Sigstr office, and their meanings:
1. “Bandwidth”
Use:“I don’t have the bandwidth to get that done this week.”
What it means:Bandwidth is associated with your workload. Saying “I don’t have the bandwidth” is a nicer way of saying “I am too busy”.
2. “Tee up”
Use:“I would like to tee up a discussion with ‘x’ on how Sigstr can help streamline brand consistency in their employee email signatures.”
What it means:Plan, organize or carry out an event. Basically, you are just trying to schedule a conversation to learn more about Sigstr.
3. “Low hanging fruit”
Use:“We need to go after the low hanging fruit before we tackle x project.”
What it means:Tasks or goals that are easily achievable. This can refer to either “easy win” business or simple tasks to complete.
4. “Sync”
Use:“Let’s sync up on this before the end of the week.”
What it means:To coordinate something with someone else to make sure all parties are on the same page and operating on the same level.
5. “We’ll talk offline”
Use:“We’ll talk offline about this later.”
What it means: This one really cracks me up for several reasons. The first being, it sounds silly. Aren’t all in-person conversations technically offline? The term essentially means you want to discuss the topic in a smaller group at a later date. The second being, the antithesis of the phrase alludes to the classic scene in “The Internship” as Vince Vaughn’s character continually refers to being online as “on the line”.
6. “Take your temperature”
Use: “I want to take your temperature on this.”
What it means:This is a softer ask than “gauge your interest” in the sales process. It is frequently used at the end of a call in place of “well what did you think?”
7. “Dig in”
Use:“We’re always happy to dig in and see what we can do to help.”
What it means:To dig in implies to take time to learn more from both parties. The sales representative wants to learn more about the prospective client’s problems, wants and needs, and the prospective client wants to learn more about the sales representatives company/service.
8. “In real-time”
Use: “Once a campaign is activated or email signature is changed, signatures are instantly updated company-wide in real time.”
What it means:This is another one that cracked me up the first time I heard it. “Real-time as opposed to what, fake time?” In real-time is used to reference the instantaneous nature of our signature marketing platform’s updates.
9. “Optimize”
Use:“Signatures and campaigns are optimized across desktop and mobile devices.”
What it means:I hear this word 10 times a day around the office. From the marketing team (guilty as charged), from sales representatives as they are on calls and in reference to copy on the site or in blog posts. To optimize is to make the best of or make the most effective use of ____. We optimize your email signature.
10. “Leverage”
Use: “Leverage Direct Communication”
What it means:This was pulled directly from the top line of our “Product” page on the site. In Giant. Bold. Letters. This is one of the most frequently used words in reference to Sigstr’s value proposition. Leverage is to use some quality or advantage to achieve a desired effect or result.
11. “Streamline”
Use:“…and help you streamline your branding and content distribution via the employee email signature.”
What it means:To streamline is to make an organization or system more efficient and effective by employing faster or simpler working methods. This word is used in multiple contexts. Yesterday, I said I wanted to “streamline the decision making process” in reference to deciding where to go to lunch.
There they are. The first step is acceptance, right? We’re guilty of using each and every one of these, and we aren’t afraid to admit it. However, we know there are more. What is missing from our list? Tweet us your most used buzzwords at @SigstrApp.
And if you want to see more unique aspects of the Sigstr culture and our email signature management app, read these related blog posts:
A picture is worth a thousand words, so the saying goes. While us marketers love a good infographic or chart, the saying holds true in almost every context. In a recent article on JeffBullas.com, author Savannah Louie says “words aren’t enough any more.” And we agree with her! In fact, 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day, according to an Aol & Nielsen content sharing study. Wow, that’s a TON of content consumers have access to view. How do they decide what to dig into and what to skip?
As marketers, we need to be increasingly more and more intentional about standing out from the crowd. While words can be incredibly powerful, we need to capture the attention of our followers in new, graphic-centric ways that give us an edge. The article authored by Savannah goes on to say that, “With the increase of photo, video, infographics and screenshots – today’s marketers are discovering the power behind imagery in content marketing.”
Why Images Are King in Content
“Communication coupled with imagery – photographs or video – is easier to process and more entertaining than words on a blank canvas,” says Savannah. Forbes Insight reports that nearly 60% of senior executives prefer to watch video instead of reading text, if both are available on the same page.
Still skeptical? Check out these interesting stats from an Inc. article:
The average person gets distracted in 8 seconds, though a mere 2.8 seconds is enough to distract some people
People form a first impression in a mere 50 milliseconds
An estimated 84 percent of communications will be visual by 2018
An estimated 79 percent of internet traffic will be video content by 2018
Posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts
People are 85 percent more likely to buy a product after viewing a product video
Posts with videos attract 3X more links than text-only posts
“People remember 80% of what they see or do, versus 20% of what they read. Imagery in content marketing is a “must” if marketers want to make a lasting impression on consumers.”
3 Tips to Creating Powerful Visual Content
In Savannah’s article, she points out 3 tips to make content more powerful using visuals:
1. Pick the right type of content
“Stock photos may be an easy way to add a visual element to a blog post, but there are better ways to execute visual marketing,” said Savannah. “Adding an infographic or a short video outlining key points can make content much more meaningful to the consumer.”
“However, if your hands are tied and you’re at a loss for original images, using a relevant stock photo is better than completely foregoing a visual element. Reports show that 40% of people respond better to text coupled with visuals than plain text. Although stock photos may not be ideal or original, these images will garner more attention than no visuals at all.”
2. Make a call-to-action
Savannah also shares that, “Visual marketing can be an asset because of its ability to inspire consumers to take action. Marketers should ensure that they are taking advantage of this capability by including a call-to-action (CTA) with their visual marketing.”
“Not all CTA’s have to be obvious. By drafting creative, stimulating content, consumers will feel compelled to share your work with others. By simply providing a solid piece of imagery, you can inspire your audience to advocate for you without actually having to ask.”
3. Be aware of omnichannel marketing
“You can tweet the best video content with links to landing pages on your website… But if your site is not optimized for mobile, this means nothing to the consumer trying to access your site from their smartphone,” commented Savannah.
“Consumers should be able to access all touch points of your company without a hitch. Encountering an incorrectly linked landing page or receiving conflicting messages across two separate platforms can be a major turnoff for consumers. Ensure that you are producing seamless content with omnichannel marketing to avoid confusing or frustrating customers.”
The Power of Imagery in Employee Email
Want another opportunity for your marketing and content to cut through the noise? Your employees send thousands of emails every single day, each with an opportunity to be visually appealing. Use Sigstr for your html email signatures so company branding is consistent, and employee email becomes an owned channel for marketing and employee communications.
Easily add clickable call-to-action banners to your html email signatures. After initial setup, these banners update automatically across your entire organization anytime a new campaign is activated.
Sigstr’s email signature generator allows your employees to use the power of imagery in html email signatures. For marketers, that means promoting the newest piece of content, an upcoming webinar or important event, or a company initiative in a visually compelling way that’s displayed with every single employee email sent.
Need Some “Sigspiration”? (see what we did there?)
Check out a few of our favorite examples below.
Ready to start including compelling imagery through your employees’ html email signatures? Request a free demo today.
Want more information first? Check out our latest helpful resources:
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.
If you’re a marketer, then surely you’ve heard the statement: “Email is Dead” many times over in the past few years. In fact, just last year an article appearing on Inc Magazine entitled, “Why Email Will Be Obsolete By 2020”, John Brandon made the following statement, “I’m predicting that a new communication channel will replace email by 2020. In fact, there are already signs that business is starting to move away from email as a primary form of digital communication. We have so many alternatives. You can send a text message or a DM on Twitter. You can drop someone a note on Facebook or start a chat.”
Sure, it’s true that the email channel is changing – and that’s a great thing, isn’t it? As the world of technology evolves, so do the options for how we can communicate with our co-workers, families, and friends. We’re sure glad we’re still not mailing letters or picking up the landline phone whenever we need to connect with someone. Calling and sending mail through the postal service certainly has it’s place – just like email does and always will. New channels are being added on a regular basis, and those channels add value in certain areas. Take Slack for instance: the value it adds to internal teams is incredible.
But is that it? Email is dying because other channels are coming on to the scene and adding value, too? Let’s dig in further.
Email Is Alive & Well
If email is dead, then why do we see the volume and opportunity growing with each passing year? According to a recent TechCrunch article entitled, “You Can’t Kill Email”, the channel has never been more alive and well. The article states that,
“Radicati’s most recent Email Statistics Report estimates that by 2019, the number of worldwide email users will exceed 2.9 billion — that’s up 10 percent from 2015. Additionally, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day is also projected to increase, suggesting global email will rise 14 percent over the same period.”
Why is email still growing so fast, even if other prominent communication channels like Slack and Facebook and even Twitter DMs are being added to our list of options? The article states that, “The truth is our use of email is only increasing, because the way we use it is evolving to help us better manage the everyday to-do lists in our work and personal lives. Email is still an integral part of the way we communicate today, and the reasons are many.”
We couldn’t agree more with that statement. None of us communicate via email the way we did when it was first introduced as a channel (and thank goodness!). We can use email as a formal channel, an informal channel, and even a transactional or marketing channel. The uses of email are across the board and will continue to evolve in the future.
Does your team use Slack? Or a project management platform? Ironically, Slack sends an email to you whenever you miss a direct mention. How about Salesforce? Have you noticed that the CRM platform, which tried to eliminate email in the sales process, eventually added Outlook plug-ins to accommodate for email needs?
Take Advantage of Email Volume
If you can’t beat them, join them. Email isn’t going away anytime soon, so how can your organization take advantage of this growing channel and its many benefits?
Consider this statistic:on average, an employee will send approximately 10,000 emails each year, so a company of 100 employees will send 1M emails per year and a company of 500 employees will send 5M emails a year! Can you see how this channel can play an important role in your marketing mix? According to a recent article by OfficeTeam, it may be one of the most overlooked marketing channels.
Sigstr’s email signature generator was created to tap into the enormous marketing opportunity that lives in the email signature layout. The email signature has been getting much more attention over the past year as marketers and companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to see email signatures 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.
Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse service or product offerings? In addition to promoting your company’s most important initiatives, use Sigstr Signatures to ensure that every employee’s email signature layout meets brand standards and formatting requirements. Email is a powerful engine for companies of all kinds – use it for your brand’s advantage. And not only that, it’s a channel that can be measured meticulously and improved upon almost immediately.
Here are a few of our favorite email signature layout examples:
Request a demo today to see how Sigstr can help with your company’s email signature layout. Or, click below to access our latest resource:
Well, what can I say? I graduated. It’s over. I did it.
I know most of you are saying, “Hey, any idiot could do that.”
“Well, it was tough for me. So back off!” (Billy Madison, anyone?)
There are three things that will be imprinted in my mind in relation to graduating from the greatest college out there (Indiana University – Go Hoosiers!) and starting my career. Surprisingly, it does not include walking across the stage and receiving my diploma.
Taking my last college final (it took me 12 minutes) and the pure nirvana I felt subsequently
The palate-pleasing beer and its name (Nefarious Nectar) I shared with my girlfriend right after that last college final
Receiving a call from Sigstr‘s VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes, with an offer to join the Sigstr team as a Business Development Representative
I interviewed with over ten different companies and received four job offers. This being said not to stroke my ego or toot my own horn, but to point out the amount of opportunities I sorted through to find the perfect one. This was also pretty tough, as I was commuting back and forth to IU’s campus in Bloomington four times a week and working between ten and twenty hours on the weekend at St. Joseph’s Brewery. Adding job interviews into that schedule was difficult to manage. Note to self: breathe, it’s over.
I talked with Kevin for about ten minutes on the phone and promised him that I was ready to learn and ultimately come in and work my little hiney off. I consider myself to have a decent amount of Sales experience for my age after an internship with the Indiana Pacers (side note: a Sigstr customer with some cool email signatures) and a few other “Sales” jobs throughout college. However, at the time, if you asked me to define marketing, buyer personas, or lead nurturing in an intelligent manner, it would result in a prompt answer of “uhhhhh”.
My job title is “Sales” or a “Business Development Representative” depending on who you ask, but really I like to look at it as a hybrid between Sales and Marketing. Drew Kelley (that tall guy pictured above) introduced me to Sigstr, and likes to define us as “smarketers”. See what we did there? My goal everyday is to help Marketers drive brand consistency and unlock an unused Marketing channel through cool email signatures.
Today marks my one-month anniversary here at Sigstr. During that time, I’ve gone through a crash course on Marketing, Sales, tech, how to iron a shirt, and everything else in between to prepare myself and close the knowledge gap. Google searches included (but were not limited to):
“What is demand generation?”
“100 Marketing terms that every Marketer should know”
“What do cool email signatures look like?”
“How to be an adult”
Everyday, I learn something new. Everyday is an opportunity to gain knowledge and get better at my craft.
Sigstr is a team of about twenty of the most hard-working, fun to be around, tech savvy, individuals that I have the opportunity to go shoulder to shoulder with (literally…we’re touching shoulders and need more office space…and its coming). Sigstr is a growing force to be reckoned with – which you can read more about in last week’s press release. Every army needs a general, and I can’t say enough good things about our leader. Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr CEO and Founder, has taught us all to work hard and celebrate our achievements (you can read more about that here).
We’re a scrappy group, helping marketers craft cool email signatures and open up a new digital Marketing channel. When you think about an email signature, you may question how something so simple can have a huge impact on a brand. That’s fair…I get it. But if you think about the average amount of emails one employee sends annually (10,000…yes 10,000), you can start to see the opportunity it presents as a new channel for your digital marketing toolbox.
With that, I’ll finish this post the same way I started it…with a quote. “If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”
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:
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:
Sigstr is excited to announce our plan to invest $1.4M in order to create 100 jobs right here in Indianapolis over the next 5 years, thanks to the award of $1M in EDGE Tax Credits. We’ve grown from 1 to 20 employees in just the last 12 months, and plan to hire over 100 more individuals across all areas of the business in the next 5 years as we aggressively expand operations to support our team and market opportunity.
The Sigstr team is incredibly grateful to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) for supporting our growth in such a significant way. In the words of Sigstr’s Founder and CEO, Dan Hanrahan,
“Employee email represents a tremendous, and largely untapped, opportunity for marketers, and we are just getting started unlocking that potential. We can’t imagine being better positioned for the future, and the decision to scale our business in Indianapolis is a huge part of our competitive advantage.”
We now serve over 175 customers and we’ve built a team of 20+ professionals, dedicated to helping marketers leverage the power of employee email signatures. We are continuing to aggressively hire top-level talent to support all functions of the business. For more information on open positions or to learn how your organization can put employee email signatures to use, visit: https://www.sigstr.com/company.
Interested in reading the entire press release?Access it here.
And a big “THANK YOU” to the local Indianapolis media for helping us share our news throughout the day!
I blankly stared at the woman who just asked me that question. The Dan she was referring to is Sigstrs CEO and Founder, Dan Hanrahan.
This was during a morning coffee networking opportunity. Our conversation up until this point had been fairly standard and surface level. Where are you from? Where did you go to school? What did you major in? Did you see that last episode of Game of Thrones?
This new question threw me for a loop. How do I describe what its like working for Dan and being a part of the Sigstr team? For some reason, it reminded me of a conversation that I had with my father when I was 14.
One of my dads closest lifelong friends has been his high school baseball coach. When it dawned on me that Coach B was quite a bit older than my father, I asked my dad about their friendship. Sort of taken back by the question, he paused before going into this explanation:
Coach B is the kind of coach that made you work hard. If you committed to working hard, he was your biggest advocate. If you worked hard for him, he worked hard for you. He is the kind of coach that makes you want to run through walls for him. It made him not only a great coach, but a great guy and now a great friend.
This recollection brings me back to the moment when I was asked, So whats it like working for Dan? Dan is the type of CEO that makes you want to run through walls for him. His passion and voracity for making Sigstr successful in-turn impresses a passion and voracity to work hard in all of us.
Personal Goals + Sigstr Goals
At the start of my career at Sigstr, Dan had me write down all my goals for this year, the next 3 years and beyond. He asks each new employee to do this within their first few days at Sigstr. We met at Patachou (which if you have NOT been, I highly recommend the Cuban Breakfast) and exchanged our printed list of goals. We talked through each point extensively – Dan genuinely interested in each point on my goal list, no-matter how ludicrous the ambition (i.e. walking the red carpet). Dans ending note on our goal conversation was that Sigstr would enable us to reach those goals.
I left our breakfast with a newfound sense of confidence that these goals were within reach. Any time I was feeling downtrodden by my (then) Business Development role (Business Development being a fancy term conjured to sugarcoat the number of prospect calls and emails being sent to gauge interest), Dan would bring up one of my goals. He would remind me that everything that I was doing was helping me get one step closer to my goal. Every time we reach milestones here at Sigstr, we are greeted by an alarmingly forceful high five or beer (or in my case an Angry Orchard).
Working Hard + Celebrating Achievements
Dan expects hard work. He wants Sigstr to succeed and help marketers save time and energy managing employee signatures for email. He wants Sigstr to give us the means to accomplish all the goals we shared with him and more. At the same time, Dan also expects us to participate in Friday late afternoon Beer:30s. He has one rule about out of office company bonding and it is that each adventure must end at a local Irish pub, which is met with no complaints (and if you want to understand why Dan is so passionate about Irish pubs, read this post).
Another Sigstr team member, Kolby, recently wrote a blog post that reiterates our work hard, play hard mentality:Life at a Tech Start-Up: Three Truths and One Lie. As said best, The benefit, or perhaps consequence, of being part of a small team is that everyone is expected to contribute in a big way.
We all work hard for our big wins, and celebrate when we accomplish them. Dan lives by the age old boss man proverb, if youre a man by night, youre a man by day. I can only interpret this as a more sophisticated way of saying you can play hard if you work hard.
The Sigstr team is growing and were looking for more rockstars to join our work hard, play hard culture. If youre looking for an opportunity in a high-growth Marketing SaaS company, wed love to meet you. Learn more about our opportunities at: www.sigstr.com/company
Evercontact is a tool that helps you keep your address book up-to-date by automatically analyzing email signatures in your incoming email and adding new contacts and updating your existing address book without creating duplicates.
While their tool certainly comes in handy (I mean – who actually enjoys manually updating their address book? Nope.), the content they create is also killer.
A few years back, the company published an infographic entitled, “The Anatomy of an Email Signature”. Since 2011, Evercontact has analyzed over 700 million emails to extract valuable information about professionals’ email habits, so they know a thing or two about employee email.
As our company, Sigstr, is built on managing creative email signatures, we had to share this infographic and some of the key learnings with our readers. Below is a rundown on Evercontact’s take on the anatomy of an email signature.
What do professionals include in their creative email signatures?
How does social media fit into creative email signatures?
While Twitter leads the way at just over 7% inclusion on email signatures, overall social media is lacking from the signature area of professionals. We assume this is because professionals don’t want to overwhelm their email recipients with tons of links and information (and we agree!), and therefore leave out social media information like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. However, including LinkedIn information (traditionally more of a professional social network), can be beneficial.
What are the top 5 Do’s & Don’ts?
Think twice about adding social media profile links if it doesn’t blend well with professional goals
Separate your email signature from the email body with the accepted form “–”
NEVER use an entire image as your email signature as it often becomes an attachment and your info won’t be clickable
If you’d like to try using an image in your email signature, try an email signature generator to ensure your images are automatically updated and always render properly
Do provide an international prefix (like +1 for the United States) if your audience is global
Want to take your email signature to the next level?
Sigstr offers marketers complete brand control of employee email signatures with fonts, formatting, color, social links and more through its integration with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Insert a Sigstr Campaign (graphical call-to-action) into the email signature template to utilize every employee’s email signature as a targeted marketing opportunity. Sigstr gives marketers the opportunity to promote the company’s most important initiatives or content, such as events, press, case studies, ebooks, job openings and much more.
See Sigstr in action by requesting a demo. Or, if you’d like to learn more, check out our latest resource:
Weve recently enjoyed following along with Zero to Scales podcast, which is all about bootstrapping startups to $100k monthly recurring revenue and beyond. The hosts of the podcast are Greg Hickman and Justin McGill. Greg and Justin, both entrepreneurs, tackle subjects like:
Handling early traction
Growth hacking strategies
New products they use to grow their businesses
And so on
For Sigstr, the podcast is beyond applicable as our company is quickly accelerating our product offerings as well as growing our team. But it just so happened that Greg and Justin highlighted Sigstrs product on episode #117 entitled, Planning the Next Product Offering and Launching Key Integrations. In this blog post, well give you the cliff notes version of what Justin had to say about Sigstr and his personal email signature.
In Justin McGills words, Sigstr is one of his favorite marketing assets. He explains what value he sees:
Basically what [Sigstr] allows you to do is set up your whole team with email signatures. And I can go in and create a new campaign, and it will update each personal email signature for all of our employees and everything. So, it allows you to track open rates and click through rates and everything on a banner image. You can put address, phone number, URL, all kinds of different things, your social media links and everything.”
Listen to the full podcast recording below, and tune into the 34 minute markto hear the guys talk about Sigstr.
We love Justins enthusiasm about the simplicity of Sigstr and also the benefits of measuring the marketing impact of email signatures, which is supremely important for marketers. Whether youre a digital marketer, content marketer, or both, measuring the impact of campaigns and programs is near and dear to your heart as the insights help you determine whats working, not working, and the overall impact of a call-to-action or design.
Justin goes on to comment that Sigstr is a great asset for his team:
Sigstr ensures that your team members all have a standard email signature. But at the same time the solution allows me to see important statistics such as Sigstr Views, campaign impressions, and click through rates. The solution and its capabilities are sweet, and its a great tool.
Justin explained that Sigstrs email signature generator has been on his mind since last August when he initially saw the solution listed on Product Hunt. But it was when Sigstr announced its Google Apps integration that Justin knew he and his team had to begin using the tool. Sigstr also recently announced integrations with Outlook and HubSpots marketing platform, in addition to Google Apps, which you can learn more about in our recent post.
Thanks again to Justin and Greg for highlighting Sigstr in Zero to Scales podcast episode #117. Well keep listening, and hope you will too!
If you’re in need of a solution for your personal email signature or company-wide signatures, Sigstr can help. Learn more by scheduling a demo.
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 team at Sigstr is always on the lookout for great articles, posts, podcasts and helpful information for digital marketers. So when we ran across this post from Technorian entitled, “Conversion Rate Optimization: Secrets as Revealed by 54 Industry Experts”, we had to write about it and share it with our readers. Digital marketers have a tough job. Not only do they have to keep up with their competitors, but perhaps more than any other role across a company, their digital marketing tools and marketing campaign software of choice evolve and change on a weekly basis.
In this article the author, Adnan Afzal, interviewed 54 industry experts about how to increase conversion rates. We’ll share a few of our favorites below, plus one more that we believe is an important addition to digital marketers’ toolboxes: employee email signatures.
“One of the best ways to improve in your conversion rate optimization is to have an explainer video on your site that tells your audience why your site or service is for them. If you ever take a look at the top selling products on ClickBank, you will notice that nearly all of them are using explainer videos on their landing page. Extremely long sales pages worked well in the past, now it’s all about the sales video. Make it engaging, interactive and of course ending with a call to action for your target audience. Be sure to check out my how to create killer explainer videos article for how to create one for your site.”
“Storytell. It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve conversion rate. Tell me why you started your business. Tell me how you are using your products. Tell me what your customers are gaining from working with you. Let me feel your pride and emotion. If I don’t feel something on an emotional level when I visit your website, then I’m just going to compare on price and then you lose. Storytell more for improving conversion rate optimization.”
“Constantly test different colors for your call to actions in an a/b test environment. I remember Google tested over 50 shades of blue before they found the best converting blue for their organic search results. Keep testing until you find the best that works for you.”
“I recommend investing in great visuals for improving your conversion optimization rate. The prospective customer has to be able to visualize using the product, and if you have gorgeous visuals and video, you help the customer break the buying barrier. Research indicates products on a white background work better than a busy background. Investing in great visuals is beneficial for both sales and website conversion.”
“Whether your marketing department produces great content, case studies, videos, or product descriptions, getting your marketing message through to your target audience is critical. Each company employee is estimated to send about 28 emails per day or 10,000 emails per year, and each of those emails contains an email signature. Smart digital marketers are using the email signature’s untapped potential to promote their most important products or initiatives within the signature area of each email. Put the email signature to use with marketing campaign software that helps your company brand employee signatures with approved fonts, formats, colors, and even social media channels, while also promoting the company’s most important content or initiatives via clickable images called campaigns.”
Main Takeaway
Whether you’re a digital marketer, content marketer, or both, conversion rate metrics are near and dear to your heart. It helps you determine what’s working, not working, and the overall impact a call-to-action or design can have on that particular marketing campaign.
Explainer videos, storytelling, a/b testing, overall design, and marketing campaign software. These can all help boost your conversion rates so you and your team generate more qualified leads that translate to closed/won business for your sales team.
Use these recommendations to get started and find out what works best for your team. And if you’d like to test marketing campaign software for your employees’ email signatures, we’d love to help! Check out the latest Sigstr resource to learn more:
Our mission at Sigstr is to make marketers look amazing. We’re hard at work unlocking the incredible marketing ROI in employee email, and we wanted to share 3 breakthroughs you can use for your email signature template:
Analytics
You’ll notice “Sigstr Views” have replaced “Displays” in your campaign analytics. Sigstr Views will not tally a view when an employee composes a message, yielding more meaningful campaign impression counts and click-through-rates.
3rd Party Integrations
We realize that individual customer and prospect interactions go beyond corporate email. That’s why we’ve made 3rd party integrations a top priority and are proud to feature new partnerships with Salesloft and HubSpot. Here’s what you need to know:
The SalesLoft Integration enhances your marketing efforts within the SalesLoft Cadence application by appending a Sigstr signature and campaign to your Cadence email communications.
Your input determines what integrations we build next. Drop us a note if you have suggestions!
Automatic Installation
Sigstr has released an automatic installation method for Gmail users: Gmail Signature Sync. The new process removes the need for employees to install Sigstr individually. Now, the Sigstr administrator has the ability to push campaign and signature updates to each employee’s email signature template through the application portal. Watch the two minute video to learn how you can start leveraging this powerful functionality!
We are committed to making Sigstr an invaluable component to your marketing strategy. Feel free to send us feedback about your experience and let us know what kind of features you would like to see added. All opinions are welcomed!
Thank you for believing in our mission and for being a supporter of Sigstr! If you’d like to stay in the loop with announcements like these, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter!
The Next Web, commonly referred to as TNW, has been sharing, inventing and advancing tech developments since 2006. The website offers a wealth of information for tech companies of all shapes and sizes, and has become a trusted source for how-tos, tech updates, and much more.
We recently ran across a TNW article, authored by Ritika Puri, entitled, “5 content distribution channels you might be overlooking”. In today’s B2B SaaS world – and for many tech companies in general – content has become king. For companies to survive and grow in today’s market, they must be seen as trusted advisors and thought leaders in their space, producing genuine content that helps the user or executive not only understand the product or service, but the industry as a whole.
According to a recent study conducted by The Guardian, 41% of people (and 33% of millennials, those aged 18-34 years old) claim to feel overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of choice on the internet. According to another study, the average attention span in 2012 was eight seconds. Even goldfish are easier to engage. Their attention spans? Nine seconds. In today’s digital work with so much content being produced by thousands of companies each day, the difficult part of content marketing (besides, of course, creating incredible content in the first place), is finding channels where your content will be noticed by your target audience.
In this TNW article, Ritika outlines 5 content distribution channels you might be missing. Ready to check them out?
1. Sales and Customer Success teams
According to Ritika, “Client managers and deal-closers are the crucial link between your company and the outside world. These team members are constantly in the field, solving your customers’ most crucial problems.”
“Sales reps and account managers spend the bulk of their days building relationships and fielding inbound questions,” says Ritika. She explains that content can help by providing the ultimate conversation starter.
Marketers can work with their companies’ sales masterminds to:
Pinpoint content ideas from incoming questions.
Distribute material: Build content into ongoing conversations such as the email signature (which we’ll touch on in the next “Email” section) — this process facilitates relationship-building at scale.
2. Email
Company blogs are everywhere, so it’s highly unlikely that your audience will be checking your blog each day for updates.
But according to Ritika, email is an invaluable channel for reaching — and engaging these audiences 1:1. “When you publish a blog post, send your audience a short and sweet notification,” she explains. “You can monitor peaks in unsubscribe rates to avoid spamming people.”
There’s no need to worry about visuals or an over-the-top newsletter. Just prioritize the basics in the form of:
Your great content.
A link back to the entire article on your block.
Useful Tip: In addition to using email to communicate content, also think about the email signature. Email signatures have been getting much more attention over the past year as marketers and companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to see email signatures examples as an important marketing asset. The employee email signature is quite possibly the #1 place where your company’s brand is viewed most often – maybe even more than your company website!
Consider this statistic: on average, an employee will send approximately 10,000 emails each year, so a company of 100 employees will send 1M emails per year and a company of 500 employees will send 5M emails a year! Can you see how this channel can play an important role in your marketing mix? According to a recent article by OfficeTeam, it may be one of the most overlooked marketing channels.
Here’s one of many email signatures examples that can be found promoting content:
3. Content syndication
“Is your blog audience relatively small?” Ritika asks. “As a new content marketer, you may feel overwhelmed by the challenge of building a reader-base from the ground up.”
Ritika explains that one solution is to amplify the reach of your content by syndicating it with other blogs or media channels:
Step 1:Build relationships with relevant blogs, brands, or publishers
Step 2:Pitch content regularly
Step 3:Return the favor – exchange value for value
Ritika explains that, “It’s important not to syndicate just for the sake of getting your post out there, but target it to the audience that will benefit most from your content.”
4. Good old fashioned networks
Don’t have a social media following? Don’t worry about it. “It’s likely that you’re involved with organizations — alumni groups, business associations, or networking events — that are distribution hubs,” says Ritika.
One solution is to reach out to these connections and ask them to support your content via social media. “Make sure to emphasize why this content would be valuable or inspirational to the group’s audience,” she says.
5. LinkedIn influencers
LinkedIn recently released its influencer program to the public. Today, it’s possible for any member to self-publish, syndicate, and distribute content on the platform, or even use LinkedIn Sponsored Updates as a paid content promotion channel.
Here’s a recent example of how Sigstr uses the LinkedIn Updates features to share content:
The Major Takeaway:
Find new channels for content distribution that aren’t widely used by others in your industry. If you simply promote your content the way every other company does, it will be nearly impossible to ensure your content is noticed.
Thanks again to Ritika for sharing great examples of how companies can cut through the content marketing clutter.
For more email signatures examples, check out our latest resource below:
As someone who spent the first several years of her career working in a corporate cubicle, the idea of joining a start-up was intriguing. Like many, I wondered if Hollywood’s depiction of the quintessential start-up had any truth to it. In fact, the week before I joined Sigstr, I remember watching an episode of Silicon Valley and thinking it couldn’t possibly be realistic. As it turns out, the start-up perception isn’t that far from reality. Read on to discover three truths and one lie the world has been told about life at a tech start-up.
TRUTH: Offices are open and casual
The Sigstr office is completely open, adorned with a bright green wall, trendy artwork, and an assortment of desks that are frequently rearranged to make room for our growing team. The thought of cubicles lining our walls is almost laughable. Personal space is not a concept we are particularly familiar with.From my seat, I can easily communicate with anyone in any department. While distractions are frequent, we benefit immensely from the increased level of collaboration.
Scattered about the office, there are a number of items that give the place “character”.In the last few months, almost the entire team has invested in standing desks – partially because we care about out health and partially to fit in. We also own a basketball hoop, popcorn machine, nose whistle, and desk elliptical. Our attire? Take a peak in the dev room and there’s a 100% chance at least one person is wearing a tech tee. In short, we have mastered the “tech” look and are proud of it.
TRUTH: Business is fast-paced and ever-changing
The biggest adjustment I had when moving from a large corporation to a start-up was the pace. Change is rapid at Sigstr, especially in relation to the technology behind our email signature generator. Instead of having to tell customers features won’t be available until next year, we make monumental improvements to the Sigstr application every single day. It’s exciting, overwhelming, and highly satisfying.
To keep up with our evolving email signature generator, employee roles and the Sigstr business model constantly adjust as well. We all wear multiple hats. For example, I’m a Customer Success Manager, but I frequently join sales calls, create product marketing content, and write articles for our blog. As a Sigstr employee, there are endless opportunities to gain experience in a variety of areas.
TRUTH: Every employee matters
The benefit, or perhaps consequence, of being part of a small team is that everyone is expected to contribute in a big way. In a large company, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. At a start-up, every employee has a voice and every individual has the potential to make a lasting impression. It may sound like a line out of an HR pamphlet, but at Sigstr, everyone matters.
To drive the point home, employee impact isn’t limited to each individual’s functional area. There has been multiple scenarios where I’ve suggested application updates to our Product Team and they’ve taken my opinion into consideration. There’s no red tape. No bureaucracy. Just team members working together to create a better email signature generator.
LIE: It’s all fun and games
At the end of last quarter, Sigstr hosted our first ever Sigstr Field Day. The company spent half of a Friday playing whiffle ball and other miscellaneous games. It was glorious. That evening, I told a friend about my day at work. She rolled her eyes and joked about the “difficulty” of my job. While the teasing was lighthearted, the problem was that my friend didn’t know the whole story. Sigstr Field Day was created in celebration of the fact that we had exceeded quarterly goals. Ironically, the day was the RESULT of hard work and dedication. The Sigstr team may have a lot of fun, but the company’s success is always our number one priority.
Beyond the hard work, there’s also a high level of uncertainty in working for a start-up. Sigstr has proven it is a viable business, however, there is a certain level of ambiguity in ongoing strategy and direction. Hard-hitting questions are asked every day. What’s our next step? What features are the most important? Are we targeting the right people? Should we go in a new direction? As a result, big decisions are made that impact the whole team. Anxiety certainly ensues. The only solace is to have faith in the vision and experience of our leadership team.
At the end of the day, working for a start-up is an incredibly challenging, yet rewarding experience. I feel confident in saying that all of my teammates feel lucky to be contributing to the success and growth of Sigstr and our email signature generator. For anyone looking to work hard, diversify their skill-set, and make an impact, the start-up lifestyle might just be the golden ticket.
Interested in joining the Sigstr team? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions here.
In conjunction with the theme ofa recent postfrom our CEO, Dan Hanrahan, featuring Sigstr’s very first product launch dubbed “Tequila Cinco”, and the beginning of frozen margarita season (otherwise referred to as “summer”), I thought this topic was not only warranted but necessary.
I digress.
Why are email signatures similar to tequila?
Let’s say that you had one bad experience with it and now you never want anything to do with it ever again. Sound familiar?
Why? Let’s explore what could have caused a poor first experience and see how we can remedy your aversion to tequila (and email signatures).
1. You went with the cheap stuff.
If you are looking for a pain-free experience, you need to stick with top shelf products. In a recent blog post by George Easton entitled “Make Gmail Company Signatures Easy with Sigstr”, Easton states that Sigstr’s “simplicity, more full-featured marketing Campaigns, and excellent phone support with a personal touch” makes Sigstr a top shelf product in the professional email signature templates realm.
2. You did too much too fast.
A simple Google search for “cool email signatures”, “best email signatures” or “email signature examples” will yield upwards of 800,000 results. If you take inspiration from several different examples, you may end up with an email signature with multiple fonts, cursive sign offs, inspirational quotes, social icons, logos, images and hyperlinks, which are overwhelming when used all together. We have created a best practices document that will have you setting up professional email signature templates in no time.
3. You didn’t ask for help.
I am no stranger to the “I must do everything myself” logic. I have never read a manual or a “how to” guide. Learn by doing. I get it.
However, do not leave your organization’s email signatures up to chance. Our goal is to simplify the process and provide our customers with consistently branded, rock star email signatures.Updating employee signatures is notoriously time-consuming and compliance is not guaranteed. Sigstr has built a powerful tool to maintain consistent branding, manage all contact information and ensure total compliance. In addition, we have assembled a team of absolute customer success savants (bartenders) to assist in the creation and management of your professional email signatures templates (top shelf tequila).
Our client success team exists to help you pick out the perfect tequila for you that best compliments your specific wants and needs (and help you finish the bottle, too, if you so choose to share). We have our very own Email Signature Designer, Michael, that will help you find the best format for your brand and build out incredible, eye-catching call-to-action campaigns that unlock the powerful marketing potential your employees emails hold. You can check out some of Michaels incredible designs here.
4. You forgot the lime and salt.
Email signatures by themselves are like tequila without the lime and salt. For us, our lime and salt is our Campaign piece. Sigstr Campaigns allow you to highlight your latest marketing content in every touch point your employees have with your customers, prospects, peers and vendors alike through your most vital channel of communication: 1 to 1 emails. Sigstr, much like the combination of tequila + lime + salt, is the perfect combination of a cohesively branded signature and an engaging call-to-action campaign. After initial setup, any Campaign you create will automatically update across your entire organization anytime a new Campaign is activated. Need some Campaign inspiration? Here are some of my favorites:
So when you’re contemplating taking another sip of email signature marketing, remember this:
Spend the extra cash and invest in a top shelf product. It will save you the headache and you will feel better about your decision tomorrow when your entire organization has beautiful, consistently branded professional email signature templates.
Don’t overindulge – skip the Comic Sans and the hot pink inspirational quote. Keep your signature sleek and simple.
Ask for help – our client success team can help you build out a comprehensive email signature design that works best for your team.
Don’t forget the lime and salt. An eye-catching call-to-action design transforms your email signature from a place holder to a new marketing channel. Capitalize on this previously unused space by implementing Sigstr Campaigns.
See how organizations like A&A have achieved 20x ROI after implementing professional email signature templates with Sigstr:check out their case study here.
And if you need a new recipe for your next tequila drink, check out the “Sigstrita”.
With email being one of the most prominent (if not the most prominent) forms of communication today, it’s easy to take for granted. Often times we use the email channel as a quick method of communicating and responding, and forget that email isn’t the same as having a face to face conversation with someone. Take this scenario from a recent HubSpot article for example:
Imagine the following conversation at a party:
Person 1: Cool party, huh? My name’s Scott.
Person 2: Hey man, nice to meet you.
Person 1: Do you work around here?
Person 2: Yeah, right by the bay actually.
Person 1: Nice, well I’m going to say hi to the host.
Person 2: Catch you around!
Person 1: You too. My name’s Scott.
… ?
Scott Tousley, the article’s author, points out that Person 2 is probably thinking, you just introduced yourself, and now you’re ending the conversation by introducing yourself again? This weird interaction is what Scott pictures in his head every time he sees someone include their email address in their email signature. He points out that it couldn’t possibly be good email etiquette… right?
This is just one of the many email signature mistakes we all make all too often. So what are the rest? We’re glad you asked, because we’ll uncover some favorites from HubSpot’s email mistakes post:
1. Including your email address
According to Scott, including your email address in the signature is the ultimate insult. We completely agree. It’s hard enough to condense down the email signature, so why add unnecessary items? You might as well say:
p.s. Just in case you’re totally oblivious to how email works, here is my email address at the bottom of my email from the email address you just received this email from.
Thanks,
Captain Redundancy
2. Including a fax number
This probably doesn’t even need an explanation. When was the last time you actually used a fax machine? According to Scott, most people aren’t still living in 1994 and sending faxes. Or 1894 and riding horses to work. Enough said.
3. Leaving “Sent from my iPhone” as the default signature
We love Scott’s explanation here, and couldn’t agree more. To mobile phone users, this means “Yes, I’m capable of grammar and spell checking. But I’m on my iPhone, so that means rules don’t apply to me. Oh yeah and if I call you jerk instead of Jack, yes, that’s my AutoCorrect. Deal with it!”
Instead, proofread (at least once or twice) as you would on a desktop computer and eliminate the need to call out that you’re sending from an iPhone.
4. Listing every social media profile
It’s true that listing too many social media profiles is overdone. Scott comments that, “No one is going to click every single social media icon. Instead, focus only on the accounts that matter most to growing your business or building your personal brand.”
5. Not including your phone number
There are two professional ways to get in touch with people, according to Scott:
Email
Phone
They obviously have the first because they are receiving your email, but don’t forget the second.
6. Forgetting an international prefix if you have international clients
If you work with international folks, Scott recommends including the prefix for your country’s code. For example, the United States code is +1. The code for Brazil is +55.
7. Using a corny quote
We see this all too often, and apparently Scott does, too. “Keep the inspirational quotes on Pinterest and Tumblr, not in email signatures.” Well said, Scott!
Are you guilty of some of these email signature crimes? It’s okay, we can help.
For marketers, keeping the brand consistent across all employees can be a major struggle. Sigstr‘s html email signature generator helps marketers create the best email signatures for their employees, which can be easily implemented and automatically updated.
Sigstr offers marketers complete brand control of employee email signatures with fonts, formatting, color, social links and more through its integration with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Insert a Sigstr Campaign (graphical call-to-action) into the html email signature generator to utilize every employee’s email signature as a targeted marketing opportunity. Sigstr gives marketers the opportunity to promote the company’s most important initiatives or content, such as events, press, case studies, ebooks, job openings and much more.
Ready to get started with the power of an html email signature generator to help you and your company eliminate these common mistakes? Check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
HubSpot has built an amazing business around the power of inbound. The power of creating helpful content to power inbound leads. Today, marketers pour their hearts (and budgets) into creating incredible content, and Sigstr injects that content into your employee email signature – the most frequent point of interaction with customers and prospects.
Back in April, I wrote a blog post about how to pump Sigstr metrics into HubSpot to measure the overall impact a Sigstr campaign has on your company’s objectives. Objectives like driving more traffic to your website or increasing exposure to a specific piece of content. And then even generating more leads for a Marketing campaign.
Yes, I am a Sigstr team member (so I may be biased in that regard), but first and foremost I’m a digital marketer. From that perspective, I can tell you this is something I use everyday because of its impact.
At Sigstr, we’re all about making life easy. We use employee email – which reaches a higher volume of targeted contacts than any other medium – and then take advantage of otherwise unused real estate inside, your marketing is organically exposed to thousands more impressions. And the metrics in Sigstr measure the effectiveness, so you can make changes based on science, not on “feeling.” Pumping your Sigstr metrics into HubSpot helps you, as a marketer, see how your prospects, contacts or even current customers are interacting with your brand through employee email.
It’s amazing what my team and I’ve been able to do by using Sigstr + HubSpot together. After mentioning this to our Product team, they realized the overlap between the two and decided to productize it.
In my first post, I gave you a quick rundown on how to manually connect Sigstr to HubSpot. Now, it’s even easier and the connection can be made in Sigstr!
Here’s how it works:
1. After clicking “Create Campaign”, uploading my image, and appropriately labeling my Sigstr campaign, I then clicked on “Connect To Platform”.
2. After clicking “Connect To Platform,” a box popped up asking if I would like to connect to HubSpot.
3. Then, I logged into my HubSpot account and clicked “Grant Access.”
4. Now I can see HubSpot goodness flowing right into Sigstr. In the Sigstr campaign, I can access the full list of landing pages I’ve created in HubSpot.
5. Rather than manually copying/pasting in my HubSpot landing page URL, it automatically populates within my Sigstr campaign.
Remember that image of the funnel at the top of this post? Here are the first two parts. Track total email signature displays and clicks within Sigstr.
Track unique landing page visits, contacts gained, and customers won within HubSpot. With these three metrics, along with your metrics in Sigstr, you have a full picture of how prospects, contacts and customers are interacting with your professional email signature format and just how much impact this can have as an additional digital marketing channel.
The awesome people at HubSpot preach the importance of landing pages and how each one should be connected to a HubSpot campaign – which is what we do here at Sigstr. And so, by connecting my Sigstr campaign to the right HubSpot landing page, I can connect the two and see the impact of employee email signatures within a specific HubSpot campaign.
Investing in simple tools that help make your life easier is important to digital marketers. We like things easy, efficient and effective. So tracking metrics to prove that it’s working is important, too. (And effective marketing makes you look good in front of your boss.)
Sigstr helps you (easily) manage your professional email signature format and opens up a new channel to promote your content. From attracting visitors to closing customers, HubSpot brings your entire marketing funnel together. Put these two together and some pretty cool things can happen.
Want to see more? Here’s a tutorial video that walks you through each step:
Risking it all at an incredible speed. Why go 245 mph, weaving in and out of other cars, and inches away from a concrete wall? For the incredible reward. For the thrill of the ride (and hopefully a nice glass of milk after it’s over).
It’s May. It’s Indianapolis. It’s the largest single day sporting event in the world (350,000 fans), the Indy 500. Growing up with superheroes like Rahal Andretti, Unser, and Hinchcliffe (my son’s hero) makes Indy natives admire those that risk it all for huge rewards. It’s in our DNA, and a part of the reason why Indy has a thriving marketing tech start-up world.
The risks are different, no doubt. But the principles of joining a SaaS startup are similar. Calculated risk, going really fast, trusting your team, and believing that the journey and ultimate reward are worth it. Thanks to the Sigstr team who believe in the journey and that we will ultimately finish first.
The best drivers have the best teachers. It’s why there are multiple generations of Andretti’s and Unser’s. Thanks to our investors and advisors who meet with us, guide us, and support the Sigstr family.
I’d like to dish out a few more thanks. First, to the Indiana Pacers, for being a great Sigstr customer and hosting my Dad and I at the speedway for a practice day.
Thanks to another Sigstr customer, Arrow Electronics, for sponsoring James Hinchcliffe (and for creating awesome email signatures)!
Thanks to the Indy 500 for giving us superheroes and injecting the fascination of speed and big rewards into our DNA.
As a company or organization in the business services realm, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you have superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand and both of these are very important to you.
We wrote an ebook that covers 7 clever tips to boost your business services brand with an email signature builder, and today we’ll highlight the last tip, #7.
What will make customers or clients select your company versus your competitors? Most choose the service provider that offers the greatest value for their money. In many competitive markets, theres price parity among the principal players. So the best way to win business is not to cut your prices or rates, but instead add products or services that elevate your offer (making it too good to resist). This is called bundling.
Take time to develop a service bundle that you know will appeal to your best prospects. You may need to test various offers until you find a winning combination; then modify your offer periodically to keep your incentives fresh.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
When was the last time you received a well packaged, branded box with useful information and beneficial tools inside? Our point exactly. While online advertising can be effective, many companies have completely forgotten about the time-tested offline methods such as direct mail marketing. Heres why your business services company should give it a try:
According to a study conducted by DMA, when direct mail is sent to an existing customer the response rate is 3.4%. The response rate for email is 0.12%.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to get started with the power of an email signature builder? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today.
Sales development representatives, sales reps, and account executives rely on email more than any other role in your organization. If your sales or SDR team uses SalesLoft Cadence for email communications, you may want to consider an integration with Sigstr.
SalesLoft Cadence drives incredible efficiencies and visibility to the SDR process. Sigstr helps you get more out of Cadence and every email your employees send. As with any email, Cadence messages often close with an email signature. Sigstr ensures every email signature in Cadence, Gmail, or Outlook is consistent and includes a demand generation call-to-action. Analytics within Sigstr help you see how prospects and contacts are interacting with your email signature examples.
The best part? The Sigstr + SalesLoft integration requires minimal configuration. Watch the video below to see how the magic happens:
Through the Sigstr API, SalesLoft aligns to your Sigstr account and user profiles. Using the user email address as the common identifier, SalesLoft applies an individual signature to his/her SalesLoft signature settings.
To enable the integration, first navigate to your SalesLoft settings. Then, to your integrations tab. Once in the integrations section, simply use the toggle button to activate the users. Once active, each user’s SalesLoft Cadence signature settings will automatically be updated with a Sigstr signature and campaign.
As you can see, this integration can make your email sending incredibly efficient. Personalized and sincere emails are key when communicating with prospects. Lesson.ly, a learning management platform, uses this integration as an integral part of their process. Sending hundreds of email per day through SalesLoft Cadence, Lesson.ly harnesses the power of Sigstr with no added effort. Once a Sigstr campaign is created, the administrator applies it to one or all members of Lesson.ly’s sales team, and the campaigns and signature instantly appear in Cadence.
So, you’re a startup or company that’s scaling up with a Marketing team that wears 1,000 different hats. Your Marketing budget is small (but mighty!) and you need to fill the funnel with quality leads that can convert. Have no fear, Product Hunt just released the ultimate Marketing stack for startups. This list includes all the tools you need to build your best startup Marketing strategy – we recommend taking a look.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Pexels – Need free stock photos? Here is your new best friend
Lead Pages – Landing page generator built for conversions
If you’re not familiar with Product Hunt, here’s the lowdown:
Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It’s a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, website, hardware projects, and tech creations. Read more here.
We’re big fans and have been on Product Hunt for almost a year now. Our listing can be found here. As you can see, it’s a great platform for checking out recommendations from your peers. It’s also a way to interact and drive great discussions with your current customers.
Email signatures in your Marketing strategy
We’re also grateful to be included in their Marketing tech stack for startups. If you’re a startup, a company growing fast and scaling up, or even a bigger organization, Sigstr is a great way to ensure brand consistency and unlock a powerful marketing channel in your email signature design.
For a Marketing team that doesn’t have a lot of time in the day, Sigstr is simple to use and takes less than 5 minutes to set up. Easily update your email signature design and include a Campaign banner to highlight your latest marketing content or most important company initiatives. Sigstr prevents any headaches your Marketing Director may have over controlling the brand in employees’ email signatures (there’s always that one guy with the comic sans font and corny inspirational quote).
We recommend checking out all of the tools mentioned in Product Hunt’s Marketing tech stack. If email signatures are a part of your Marketing strategy, and how you can use them as a new channel for lead generation, let us know how we can help! Or, try it yourself for free with a 30-day free trial.
For more inspiration on your email signature design, check out this latest resource:
If you are a business services company, you have a unique challenge. You don’t have a physical product, instead you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. Your company’s success was built on the people you recruited and brand you worked so hard to build, and as such, both are incredibly important to you.
We have created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with cool email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #5.
Good relationships are built on trust. So its natural that customers want to learn as much as they can about your company and the people that stand behind it. For instance, your customers tend to look for deeper information when deciding on which company or service to choose, and the vast majority do research on the web before making a purchase. Having a complete company website is a smart and affordable way to convey in-depth information about your service business.
Showcase your service benefits on the main page, just as you would in an effective company brochure. Include your companys story, photos, staff bios and affiliations. And show how well your company delivers on its promises by providing testimonials, case studies or work samples. Most importantly, give your visitors a way to reach out to your company. Include an info@ email address, forms where they can learn more about your services, and content they can download in exchange for a few pieces of information (such as name, company, and email address).
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Did you know 80% of buyers start their search online? It is and will be more vital than ever to have a compelling and appealing presence online. Many search engines display local search results allowing customers to connect to businesses locally; which is much easier than competing with major websites in the same industry. In addition, mobile applications are becoming more popular, with the ability to suggest businesses based upon your location or search results.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to start creating your own cool email signatures? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today.
Please excuse my typos. Not because I’m sending from my mobile (by the way…please consider removing that from your email signature :)) but because I might have had too good of a time last night. 3 hours of sleep…but a big smile on my face.
Why?
Opportunity. Salesforce Connections day 2 is getting started. I feel like day 1 ended a few minutes ago. Much obliged Stevie Wonder, Meehan’s Irish Pub, Gibney’s Irish Pub (are you sensing a theme here?).
For the 8 of us here from Sigstr, there is literally no place in the world we’d rather be.
Marketers create leverage by building incredible brands and creating useful content.
There are 5,000 of the world’s smartest digital marketers in Atlanta.
So for me, and for Sigstr, you might as well try to get 20 hours out of every day here. On day 1 alone:
3 hours later, the expo hall is waking up to Jimi Hendrix pumping on the sound system. It’s what happened in Indy at the ExactTarget Connections events (anyone remember 3am at Steak and Shake – thanks Scott Dorsey!)
In my first job out of college, I worked for a hard charging bulldog, Ryan Hasbrook, at a two man startup called Brooksource (now hundreds of employees and a Salesforce customer). I learned that many of the best opportunities happen at Irish pubs after midnight. I also learned that the other best opportunities happen at 7am the next morning.
“If you’re a man (or woman) by night, you’re a man (or woman) by day,” was what Ryan told me.
As a 22 year old, that meant an opportunity to jumpstart my career. Today, if I leave my family for 72 hours, you better believe I’m going to find the opportunity. With this many smart marketers in one place, one conversation can change everything.
Come say hi and see some professional email signature examples. Our team rocks, and you’ll be happy to know them.
Author: Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner of High Alpha
High Alpha is a venture studio that conceives, launches, and scales next-generation enterprise cloud and SaaS companies.
Good luck to Scott McCorkle and all of my friends with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud this week as they prepare to launch Connections 2016! I have always loved Connections – the conference brings together the best digital marketers in the world to learn, share, be inspired, innovate and celebrate together.
So many incredible highlights over the years – Subscribers Rule!, Malcolm Gladwell, Sir Richard Branson, Michael J. Fox, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Soledad O’Brien, Jim Collins, Indianapolis Symphony, Train, The Fray, Steak and Shake at 3am, Imagine Dragons and many more.
This week, I am excited to see Sigstr (one of our newest High Alpha companies) exhibit at Connections and plug into this dynamic and vibrant marketing ecosystem. Sigstr is a next generation marketing tech company focused on the often-overlooked and very powerful channel of 1-to-1 employee email communications.
Sigstr enables marketers to standardize professional email signatures (so important for brand consistency) and leverage the precious real estate of 1-to-1 employee emails to promote events, white papers, job openings, new products and much more. Marketers can manage these campaigns with segmentation tools, powerful analytics and enterprise controls.
I am very excited to see what the best marketers in the world can do with the Sigstr technology!
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.
Today, Sigstr announced significant advances to its product announcing three important new product capabilities, including:
First, with central deployment capabilities, the install process removes the need for employees to install the application individually. The Sigstr admin now has the ability to push updates via the application portal.
Second, multi-brand companies can now utilize different signature templates for various subsets of employees now allowing several signatures to be simultaneously active across the organization.
Finally, Sigstr’s SalesLoft integration enhances marketing efforts within the SalesLoft Cadence application by appending a Sigstr Signature and Sigstr Campaign to Cadence email communications.
“Building an exceptional and easy-to-use product is incredibly important to the Sigstr team,” said Sam Smith, VP of Product at Sigstr. “Our customers are replacing their manual and time consuming ways of updating signatures, and we have built a product to make this process seamless. These new product updates are critical to our users, and we are hard at work building further integrations and product updates that will deliver incredible ROI and brand cohesion.”
In addition to the SalesLoft integration, Sigstr has a variety of integrations available for Microsoft and Google. Push Sigstr to all employees, or have each employee run a one-time Install. Don’t stop there! Consider Sigstr for any tool you use to send email:
Read More & Get Started with an Email Signature Creator
Want to learn more about Sigstr and its recent product announcements? View the entire press release here.
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature creator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Did you know that the average employee sends roughly 10,000 emails a year? In a company of 100, thats 1,000,000 emails! Because digital communication is so prominent in the workforce, youd think most professionals would be masters of proper email etiquette. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. If you want to ensure your emails are being well received, leverage the following four tips and join the emailing elite.
1. Keep it short and to the point
If you cant get your point across in a paragraph or less, revert back to the Stone Age and make a phone call. Contrary to popular belief, giving someone a call can save an extraordinary amount of time and effort. The added bonus is that speaking to someone directly means youll receive a response instantaneously. Imagine that!
2. Avoid the dreaded “reply all”
Weve all been victims. A well-intending colleague sends out a company-wide email about leftover pizza in the breakroom and all hell breaks loose. One person unintentionally asks the entire office if there is left-over pepperoni at the same time the office jokester replies with a GIF of stampeding elephants. All of a sudden, inboxes are full and everyone is annoyed, confused, or best case scenario, entertained. Whatever the situation, do not be tempted to reply-all to tell everyone else to stop replying-all. You are part of the problem.
3. Use emoticons wisely 🙂
Personally, Im a big fan of the smiley face. However, its worth remembering that Im a millennial who loves texting, open-office environments, and Gilmore Girls. Not everyone in the professional world is like me. If you cant imagine a day without a friendly semi-colon and parenthesis, opt to use emoticons in internal email threads instead of external communications. Your coworkers will be much more forgiving.
4. Represent your brand appropriately
If any email signatures in your company look like this, youre doing it all wrong.
First things first, inspirational quotes have no place in your email signature template. Furthermore, your digital signature does not need to mimic the styling of Lisa Frank or look like John Hancock designed it himself. Instead, use your companys branding guidelines to create an appropriately formatted email signature template. If the term branding guidelines conjures no understanding, your company may want to consider an email signature generator. Yes, this is a Sigstr plug.
Theres no question that email is a necessary and impactful communication tool in the professional world. With these four tips and a little common sense, youll be well on your way to becoming an email expert in no time!
Want to see more bad examples of email signature templates? Check out this recent blog post:
Last week, nearly a dozen of Indys smartest marketers gathered to contemplate the trials and triumphs of digital marketing. The event was hosted by Sigstr,a platform for email signatures, andwas the first of many future Digital Marketing Roundtables – an event conceived with learning and networking with the best and brightest in mind.
There is a constant debate as to who truly owns brand. From our discussion, we reached a simple conclusion: everyone. You can invest millions of dollars in fancy marketing campaigns and advertisements, but your people are your front line. No matter the size of your organization, your people are your brand. If you invest in culture and hire the right people, your brand will flourish. See how email signatures can also help with that in this recent blog post.
2. Marketing’s impact on the entire organization, including culture.
A strong company culture is a beautiful thing. If only celebrated internally, you have happy employees. If showcased to the world through the use of digital marketing, you have happy customers, prospects, and peers. Marketing can make a colossal impact on all aspects of an organization. Using the aforementioned example, showcasing culture can lead to higher interest in becoming a part of that culture and can impact the quality of talent in potential hires. There are a variety of channels that can be utilized to exhibit culture (including through your email signature template – Lesson.ly is the perfect example of this).
3. Budget breakdown.
With hosting a multitude of different organizations comes a multitude of opinions and theories on how to spend your budget. In the breakdown of digital vs. traditional marketing channels, several companies stated they allocate less than 20% of their total budgets to digital marketing efforts. Dan asked the group what they would do if they were given an additional $1 million in marketing budget. The unanimous decision was to invest in talent.
Perspective from Tim Kopp, General Partner, Hyde Park Venture Partners:
“The easiest way to fix culture is to win. Marketing helps you know how you are winning. Start measuring your efforts, setting goals, and ensuring each person knows what they are accountable for. I have never seen a losing organization with a winning culture, period. Setting a culture of performance helps motivate team members and create transparency. Marketing is a crucial player in fueling these efforts.”
Tim also recently published an entire post specific to marketing’s role in building genuine culture and the effect it has on talent attraction, development, and retention. You can check out the post here.
Perspective from Sigstr’s VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes:
“Yesterday my horizon was expanded and eyes opened. I had to the privilege to learn from the best and brightest marketers in Indianapolis. I learned how broad of a reach marketers have on their organization’s success. They impact culture, perpetuate brand halo, drive employee engagement and enablement, and of course deliver leads to the sales organization. For me, it spurred a subtle reminder that in the race to the sun every action and individual is impactful. We, you and I, have the responsibility to represent and promote our company’s passion as we work to develop and grow.”
We are very appreciative of the opportunity to host a room full of smart digital marketers. A big thank you to all of them for taking time out of their days to join us for the event. We walked away smarter and look forward to continuing to learn and grow at future events.
Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr Founder/CEO, provides a recap of the day in the video below:
“So, first and foremost, it’s mostly about giving back and adding value to the digital marketers in Indianapolis. It’s so hard to sort of get out in your community when you get buried in your work. So, to look around and see those connections and one-off conversations marketers have with one another, to help them connect, is really invaluable.
In theprocess of that, we (Sigstr) learn, and our job is to ask questions (hopefully smart questions) and sit back and listen to the smartest people in our community tell us about their opportunities and challenges. So, if we facilitate an environment along those lines and facilitate that discussion, and maybe even add a few beverages of choice, people tend to have a lot of fun and walk away with better connections that help them.
They’re all really facing the same sort of decisions and evaluating the same opportunities. It’s really interesting, there were all kinds of engaging conversations and we talked a lot about budget, strategy, and brand, and things along those lines. We asked this group, ‘If you had a 10% increase in budget that just showed up today, how would you spend it?’ and the entire room, almost without exception, said people.
It’s really clear (I think there were 3,400 logos of technologies you can buy in themarketing tech stack) that the marketer is sort oflimited with their time. They can only log in and do so much fromso many tools. And so, the marketer is really constrained in the tools that add value without requiring a lot of time, and those are the ones that tend to win.
We also talked a lot about the brand piece and how marketers show return on investment on brand. There were some really interesting conversations there. It’s a really hard thing to do, but we all agreed that, more than anybody in the organization, marketing cares about the brand. They can provide tools to enable the organization – but at the end of the day nothing creates a better culture or brand than winning. The brand stems from the people you place within the organization.
It was fascinating to sit back and understand what kinds of decisions these guys face everyday and how many different things are pulling them for time and what matters most. So for those of you that were here, thank you so much for spending the day with us. It was an incredible opportunity and very humbling to see so many busy and smart marketers spend some time with us. It won’t be the last we assemble a group of really smart digital marketers and we’ll continue to listen and build that feedback into the Sigstr email signature generator so we can help in the ways you need us to.
So thanks again for coming and we hope you join us again. For those that didn’t have a chance – please reach out we’d love to have you next time.” – Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr Founder/CEO
For more on email signatures, email signature templates, or professional email signatures, visitour Resources page.
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #3.
Clever Tip #3: Focus on Relevance Over Differentiation
Differentiation is important to product companies. Most brand models (and business schools) argue the need to differentiate. However, it is rare for a business services brand to achieve complete categorical differentiation. Let’s face it, many service firms offer similar services. As such, it is difficult to actually own a unique market position. So forget about those product oriented, one-word descriptions.
Instead of attempting to be amazingly different from the rest, focus on being relevant. Specifically, relevance as it pertains to the client. The ideal service brand merges the needs, wants, and desires of the client with the character and values of the company.
The key lies in creating a space where customer needs meet company essence, an ideal combination of rational and emotional attributes that apply to both groups. This common ground approach develops a brand that not only resonates with the client by delivering what is important to them, but also develops a brand that is genuine, appropriate, and defensible by the company.
By staking the claim for what you stand for, communicating how you help your clients succeed, and proving how reliable you are in doing this, you’ll develop a unique identity. Most business service companies don’t have the stick-to-it ability to get this far, but if they do, they’ll stand out in the market.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
While content marketing can be extremely valuable to prospective customers and current customers alike, make sure that you are providing resources above and beyond for customers. This includes: training seminars, certification classes, how-to blogs, customer user groups, in-depth customer case studies via webinars, templates, hands-on learning guides, and more. Educational resources can help your customers become more familiar with your services and processes which will help them feel closer to your offering as well as to your people.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
At Sigstr, we help companies of all sizes see the potential of employee email as a new digital marketing channel. Your marketing and/or creative team spends valuable time and resources creating quality content that helps drive brand awareness and demand generation. As a company, all of your employees are already sending a ton of email to a handpicked audience. Why not marry the two and promote your latest content or most important company initiatives through your email signatures?
On average, an employee will send 28 emails/day. That’s 10,000 emails annually. For a 100 employee company, that’s 1,000,000 emails/year. The impact of adding this as a channel to your digital marketing mix is huge. And as a marketer, you probably want to measure the heck out of this to see just how big the impact can be. With that in mind, Sigstr offers analytics within its email signature generator to help you do just that. Impressions, clicks, average click-through rates, etc. We also understand, in some cases, marketers want to take it a step further with metrics such as leads generated, contacts added, and ultimately closed/won business.
Here at Sigstr, we make an effort to “eat our own dog food” (as some would call it). We pump Sigstr metrics into other tools that we use, such as Google Analytics (see the tutorial video) or HubSpot, to measure the impact a Sigstr campaign has on an overall company objective. Objectives like driving more traffic to your website, increasing exposure with a specific piece of content, or even number of leads generated within a specific marketing campaign. Effectively representing your brand and promoting content in your company’s email signatures can help with all of these.
Today we’ll focus on HubSpot, and how you can use Sigstr + HubSpot together to do some really cool things. There are two different ways to feed Sigstr metrics into HubSpot:
1. Create a Tracking URL
For us, we wanted to track how many visits a Sigstr campaign drove to a specific landing page promoting our new ebook.
Step 1: Generate a unique URL in HubSpot, label appropriately.
Step 2: Copy/paste your shiny new generated URL into your Sigstr campaign.
Step 3: Sit back, relax, and watch the metrics (in this case, visits to the landing page) flow into your campaign view within HubSpot.
2. Clone Your Landing Page in HubSpot; Rename Specifically for Sigstr Campaign
If you have a particular resource that is “gated”, meaning a visitor to your site will need to provide contact information and fill out a form before accessing, you can see how many contacts your Sigstr campaign generated. For us, we did this to take it one step further so we could see how many visits AND how many contacts our Sigstr Campaign drove when promoting our new ebook.
Step 1: Clone the landing page that is connected to the particular resource you want to promote and rename appropriately so you can quickly identify its relation to your Sigstr campaign. Also be sure to connect it to your desired campaign in HubSpot.
Step 2: Be sure to do the same with your form (clone and rename appropriately). Go to edit mode in the landing page, add in your new form. In the Campaign view within HubSpot, click on “Landing Pages” to view metrics on visits, contacts, and customers.
Step 3: You can now see this as an interaction (a prospect/contact clicking on your Sigstr campaign and downloading the resource) and how it relates to other touchpoints. This can be found in the specific contact view within HubSpot.
Bonus: View Sigstr Metrics within Salesforce
If you’re also using Salesforce as your CRM and have your Salesforce integration turned on within HubSpot, you can pinpoint specific interactions a lead or contact has had with your Sigstr campaign.
This can be found in the lead view within Salesforce. Scroll down and find the “HubSpot Intelligence” section, then see when that particular lead/contact interacted with your Sigstr Campaign in relation to other touch points.
Email Signatures + Sigstr + HubSpot = Your New Secret Weapon
At Sigstr, we’re all about making your life easier with employee email and taking advantage of this untapped digital marketing real estate. Metrics within Sigstr help measure the effectiveness of this. Pumping your Sigstr metrics into HubSpot or Salesforce helps you, as a marketer, see how your prospects, contacts, or even customers are interacting with your brand through employee email signatures. Add these all up and you now have a new secret weapon and new addition to your digital marketing mix.
For more on Sigstr, what to do with your email signature format, or best practices for your email signature template, check out our latest resource below:
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #2.
Clever Tip #2: Worry About Growing Revenue, Not Your Market Share
Product companies are taught that they must be number one or two, in terms of market position, to be successful. Service brands, on the other hand, should concentrate on growing revenue (not gaining market share, as product companies do). This is especially true because many business services companies focus on specific geographies, such as a local city or state, rather than owning the entire market nation-wide (or even thinking about their global reach). Business services companies that focus on delivering results will see that revenue will grow naturally by ensuring happy, satisfied customers that are willing to share the results with peers in the marketplace.
In the business services industry, whether it be accounting, law, architecture, or consulting, local markets are usually fragmented and crowded with many successful firms generating considerable revenue from like-services. Instead of concerning yourself with your position in the market, focus your efforts on improving the bottom line and ensuring happy, satisfied customers – the rest will follow naturally.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Consider implementing an account-based marketing approach as it is based on the collective decision-making process. It takes into account that most B2B buying decisions are not made by a single person, but rather by a collective group of people. This is where account-based targeting comes in handy. Since each company has its own dedicated IP address, it is easy to identify them collectively by looking at IP addresses. So if you want to target an account, you can target those IP addresses specifically, ensuring you are marketing to the correct group of people in the most efficient way possible.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
At Brooksource, their business is people. Relationships are at the center of what they do. A successful partnership is only as strong as the relationship built. Brooksource is a trusted partner for IT hiring, recruiting and staffing needs. For over 15 years, Brooksource has established and maintained relationships that are designed to meet IT staffing needs. Whether its contract, contract-to-hire, or permanent placement work, they customize their search based upon your company’s unique initiatives, culture and technologies. With their national team of recruiters placed at 20 major hubs around the nation, Brooksource finds the people best-suited for your business.
Brooksource has one simple philosophy: People come first. They know that quality service can only come from quality relationships. Thats why they are committed to understanding their clients cultures and needs and strive to continually strengthen their partnerships.
Brooksource began using Sigstr, a platform for managing employee email signatures, as one of the first pilot companies when Sigstr was in beta mode in 2014. In the past, Brooksource had challenges with cohesive imaging. According to Carlie Oakley, VP of Marketing and Brand Excellence at Brooksource, Everyone had their own look and feel, so we were trying to find a way to control the overall image from our Corporate office. The Brooksource team began using Sigstr as a way to increase their brand awareness and to ensure all employees had a consistent look and feel across their email signatures.
Sigstr lets Brooksource leverage the thousands of personal emails its 200+ employees send each and every day. By building an email signature template within Sigstr, Brooksource can now control portions (or all) of each employees email signatures to make sure each signature is individualized with employee-specific names and titles. A Brooksource administrator can then centrally manage branding, content, and information to make sure the signature is always on brand. In addition, with the Sigstr Campaigns product, Brooksource can automatically include a banner integration at the bottom of every single employee email, highlighting the latest marketing content with a compelling call-to-action, such as the below example.
Check out Brooksources most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date, which was created for their Internal Hiring Team, promoting Top Workplaces. This campaign was very attractive to students looking for their first full-time job after college and garnered a lot of attention, leading the students to the Brooksource website where they could learn more.
The Top Workplaces campaign generated a surge of visitors to their website and an increase in interested job applicants.
Carlie, an incredible partner to Sigstr who has been able to experiment with many different Sigstr campaigns, had this to say about the partnership:
Looking ahead, Carlie shares that, Brooksource has plans to activate a very targeted campaign that can drive client or contractor traffic to our website. Creating a compelling campaign to create interest outside of our normal marketing avenues will be a huge win in our book, and were excited for Sigstr to play an incredibly important role in that.
We look forward to seeing what results Brooksource will continue to experience with the power of an email signature generator. Want to do more with your organizations email signatures? Start your free 30-day trial here.
For more testimonials and case studies from other Business Services companies, check out our latest resource(with email signature examples):
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #1.
Business service companies do not have a tangible display of products that you can see, touch, and test out before deciding to purchase. As a service firm, your brand is mostly comprised of your people. As such, don’t underestimate the internal components of brand development.
To create a collaborative culture, communicate your brand message to the troops so that each individual becomes a true brand ambassador. This helps to ensure that every sales call, every client interaction, and every elevator conversation delivers the brand as intended. Don’t attempt to be Big Brother, but do provide a rallying point for the entire organization, because “speaking in one voice” is far more important for service firms who rely on direct, one-to-one interaction with clients.
Often times for business services companies, email is the main channel for communication and where your company branding is viewed most often. A single employee will send, on average, 10,000 one-to-one emails annually, and each email represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse offerings? Or win new logos by promoting a referral program to your happy existing customers.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Email signatures are a key part of every email your employees send. Many business services companies have caught on to the fact that email is the lifeblood of their company, and a huge opportunity to drive incremental awareness and engagement with their marketing content, as mentioned above. By automatically appending calls to action to your newest piece of content directly within your email signature template, marketers are finally breaking down the barriers of the employee email, and leveraging it to gain millions of brand impressions. With an email signature generator like Sigstr, showcase your most important content or company initiatives to the most engaged audience (those your employees are emailing with directly). And best of all, get the data to see exactly what’s working!
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Springbuk is a nationally-recognized resource for population health. Their team has worked alongside more than 6,000 companies that represent 60 million employee lives. With visibility into the largest corporate wellness programs in North America, they have an uncommon understanding of the challenges, trends and solutions for today’s employer. The Springbuk product team is comprised of wellness, benefits consulting & human resources professionals that work on the front-line of population health.
The company began using Sigstr, a platform for managing employee email signatures, in August 2015 as a way to deliver a compelling and consistent marketing message. They also use their email signature template to showcase the success of Springbuk’s customers. Springbuk’s employees are sending thousands of emails per day to the company’s most valuable contacts, including prospective customers, vendors, partners, customers, thought leaders, and media. Now, Springbuk is able to include the latest and most current customer success stories and case studies in every employee email that is sent, leaving an incredible brand impression.
Sigstr lets Springbuk leverage the thousands of personal emails its employees send each and every day. A Springbuk administrator can centrally manage branding, content, and information across its employee base through the email signature template. In addition, with the Sigstr Campaigns product, Springbuk can automatically include a banner integration at the bottom of every single employee email, highlighting the latest case studies and customer success stories with a compelling call-to-action. With the email signature generator within Sigstr, Springbuk can now control portions (or all) of each employee’s email signatures to make sure each signature is individualized with employee-specific names and titles.
Check out Springbuk’s most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date promoting their newest downloadable resource, “Broker Roadmap”.
The campaign generated 24,800 displays, 131 clicks in just 3 months, which resulted in resource downloads and landing page traffic. Visitors had the opportunity to download the resource by providing a few pieces of information, allowing the Springbuk sales team to follow-up.
Phil Daniels, Sprinbuk’s Co-Founder & EVP of Marketing is a huge champion of Sigstr, saying this about the partnership:
We look forward to seeing what results Springbuk will continue to experience with the power of an email signature generator. Want to do more with your organization’s email signatures? Start your free 30-day trial here.
For more testimonials and case studies from other tech-focused companies, check out these resources (with email signature examples):
Ah, the dreaded company-wide email we’ve all received far too many times. It usually goes something like this:
“Hi everyone, it’s time to update our email signatures. We’ve made some adjustments to our font and company branding, and we would like our employees to also promote our upcoming [insert event, webinar, press release, or whatever it may be] in all of our emails for the next 2 weeks. PLEASE take just FIVE minutes to follow the very specific instructions below in the next THREE days. If you do not, we will find you! PLEASE!”
That email probably includes a list of items each employee in your company needs to do, like illustrated below.
On average, it likely takes your employees about 5 minutes each to update their email signatures (that is, if there aren’t any questions). And think about that time spent across a company that employs 100, 200, 1,000 or even 1M employees. For a company of just 100 employees, that’s 500 minutes or 8.3 hours of precious company time just updating their email signatures.
Ouch! Not to mention, who is the poor “email signature administrator” that has to chase down every employee and manage the process Every. Single. Time. the email signature needs to change? Not to mention respond to the emails of employees who are utterly confused or lost?
If this process is all too familiar, can we suggest scheduling a quick demo with Sigstr? Bonus: if you book a time we’ll send you a pack of Sigstr sticker goodness.
What’s Sigstr?
Sigstr turns your company’s email into a targeted marketing channel that helps deliver your content to the right audience, drive event registrations, execute account-based marketing, and more.
With email signature marketing, teams can dynamically insert targeted 1:1 ads in the email signature section of every email your employees send. Learn more in the overview video below:
How Does It Work?
Sigstr can identify the sender and recipient of every email sent by your employees, allowing teams to engage email recipient with a relevant call-to-action. You can bring the power of email signature marketing to all of your go-to sales and marketing tools. This includes HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and more.
With Sigstr, marketers can run dozens of targeted banners at once, giving you control to:
Promote events by geography
Target current customers with up-sell opportunities
Promote your best content
Deliver training to your employees
Keep sales enablement top of mind
Target specific accounts and contacts
Request a demo today for more customer examples, features, functionality, and best-in-class use cases.
At Sigstr, we focus on email signatures.Sigstr Campaigns allow you to unlock the powerful marketing channel of employee email. Many of my day-to-day responsibilities revolve around designing these campaigns both internally and through our Services offerings where we design campaigns for our customers. That said, I thought Id share a few tips.
Step 1: Gather the Information
Every time I sit down to design a Sigstr campaign in the email signature template, I make sure I have all the information needed. Before I start digging in, I like to have brand assets (such as logos or brand colors), and if the campaign is promoting an event, a URL to the events landing page. Landing pages help provide context and guidelines to design around. Before I dive into the design, I take a step back and ask, ‘What is the main goal I want to accomplish with this graphic? or, What company initiative is this campaign helping promote?
These types of questions will only help your cause as you look to create the best email signature design that fits well with your company initiatives.
Step 2: Experiment with the Brand
Next, before I start laying out the information, I begin experimenting with the brand elements. This includes the color palette (in order to help me understand which colors would work better on top of others), the font, which colors work best with the font, and the logo. Understanding how your brands colors work together expedites the campaign design process immensely for your email signature generator.
Step 3: Putting the Pieces Together
The third and final step of my campaign design process is building out the format of the campaign. When I start to assemble my campaigns, I almost always start at 400 pixels by 96 pixels and adjust from there. I then take all the information that I know I want to include in the campaign and just throw it inside to see how much information I need to work with. Visual hierarchy is a huge part of how a campaign comes together for email signatures. Always be sure to prioritize the most information.
For example, I always start with the campaigns call to action being the brands boldest color. Here at Sigstr, we keep a close eye on the metrics we see within the app. Weve seen the best views to click ratio on campaigns with red call-to-action buttons.
Try including photography in your campaign. Images with overlaid brand colors at 60 – 80% opacity work really well as backgrounds (but be careful not to cause sensory overload). For the best results, combine your image with an on-brand accent color.
Sometimes with a campaign design I’ll find myself hitting a brick wall. Maybe the campaign just doesnt look right, or maybe Im missing some key details that need to be included. When I hit that point, I start asking coworkers what they think about the campaign. Receiving feedback is always the best for improving your campaigns.
Step 4: Next Steps?
So now youve got a fantastic looking campaign sitting in front of you. What do you do next? Try coming up with a second campaign design! Trust me, nine times out of ten the second campaign I end up designing is better than the first. Even if the second version isnt better, you now have some great optionsto choose from.
Hopefully these tips help you with your campaign designs. Here at Sigstr, we’re all about creating the best email signatures, and the campaign design is a big part of that. We’re here to help and be your source for inspiration! If you have any additional questions about your email signature, email us at interact@sigstr.com.
Also, don’t forget about our growing list of tutorial videos! These offer up some great tips and tricks and walk you through how to use certain features within Sigstr.
Its no secret that the marketing technology landscape is evolving (and fast). Marketers, especially those in the world of digital marketing, have the job of keeping up on the latest tech advancements (in addition to their own specific roles demands). And for anyone just getting started in digital marketing, the growth can be overwhelming and even daunting. How do you know what tools you need? Once you determine what tools you need, how do you determine the right partner? The search to find the perfect technology stack for your business is never-ending.
ChiefMarTec.com just released a graphic in conjunction with the 2016 MarTech USA Conference in San Francisco. And boy, this graphic is sure intimidating! The graphic depicts more than 3,800 technology vendors on a single slide. This is up from just 150 in 2011. So in just 5 years, the landscape has become entirely different for the world of marketers!
But no fear, marketers. While this graphic and information can be overwhelming, its important to know that many of the categories remain the same. For instance, the Email Marketing category has grown significantly. This isa result of employee email continuing to be such a staple in todays business world. In fact, did you know that each employee at your company will send approximately 10,000 emails per year? If your company has just 100 employees, then collectively youre sending over 1M emails per year to your most important contacts. Of course that category has grown – theres so much opportunity!
Thats why Sigstr exists. What does each of those 10,000 emails each of your employees are sending out include? Thats right: email signatures. Sigstr powers smart marketing through the thousands of email signatures displayed to your most important contacts (your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, investors, and friends). Sigstr’s email signature generatordrives brand compliance and unlocks the marketing potential of your employee email signatures. With Sigstr, every employee email includes a consistently branded email signature template and graphical call-to-action. Marketers can easily update signature campaigns to drive awareness and engagement for any of the following key initiatives that are important to your company or Marketing team:
Events or conferences
Case studies or ebooks
Product updates
Company culture or job opportunities
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature generator? Check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
When we saw the recent business.com article entitled, Leave a Good Impression: The Best & Worst Email Signatures of All Time, you better believe that we read it (and laughed a lot). And of course, we had to share it with our readers as it also offers up some great pointers, which well share below.
Weve all seen a few doozy email signatures, and maybe weve even been guilty of of some of the no-nos: Comic Sans font, multi-color rainbow colors, inspirational quotes, links to all 10 social media accounts or distorted headshots. But as the article reminds us, Email signatures are the John Hancocks of the digital age. Often times, your email recipients will never meet you face to face (at least in the business world), so every time you send an email, you are making an impression on that person. And the email signature template is the most consistent aspect of those touch points. What kind of impression are you leaving on your email recipients?
According to the article, heres a rundown on what not to include in your email signature format, along with some tips for creating the most efficient email signature template possible.
Run the Other Way From These Email Signature Examples
Inspirational Quotes
This is your professional email, not your high school yearbook, Ricardo Casas stated in the article. As such, its not the place to feature aphorisms like, Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. A worthy piece of advice, to be sure, but the person reading your email most likely doesnt care.
A Reiteration of the Senders Email Address (Often Hyperlinked)
Kevin Zawacki at Slate.com likens this to, Placing two return address stickers on an envelope. First of all, it feels like youre beating your recipient over the head with your contact information.
And, from a practical standpoint, its completely redundant. The recipient already has your email address; if they want to respond to your email they simply have to hit Reply.
Too Many Fonts
According to Ricardo, Using more than two different fonts (particularly novelty ones) in your email signature is a recipe for a design headache. It looks cluttered and unprofessional.
Additionally, if youre creating a text signature and end up using a novelty font, you cant guarantee your recipient will have that same font installed on their computer, so the result could be a jumbled mess looking nothing like the way you intended it.
Too Much Text, Period
You may be familiar with these types of text signatures, full of information stacked line by individual line, said Ricardo. First, you have the senders name. Then their title. Then their work phone number, then their extension, then their email address, then their fax number, and so on.
A slight exaggeration perhaps (mostly), but the point is this: nobody likes to scroll and scroll to find the information theyre looking for. The key is to keep it simple.
Take Hints From This Awesome Email Signature Template
Simplicity
You dont need to bombard your recipients with a plethora of information, Ricardo advises. Stay short, sweet, and to-the-point. Give them only the information that really counts.
Just the Basics
As earlier stated, its unnecessary to restate your email address in your signature. Ask yourself what information is actually crucial, and what could be omitted for the sake of clarity, said Ricardo. Your phone number is almost always important to include, along with the name of your company. Your job title is also helpful so the recipient can have a better idea of your role in the company.
You may also find it helpful to provide links to your social media platforms, but only if they are relevant and there arent a hundred of them.
Clean, Eye-Catching Graphics
Ricardo explains that if youve chosen to use a customized graphic for your email signature, make sure its not a mess of fonts and colors. Its best to eliminate distractions by using only one or two colors (and as many fonts) in your signature graphic.
Introducing Sigstr for Email Signatures
For marketers, keeping the brand consistent across all employees can be a major struggle. Sigstr‘s email signature generator helpsmarketers create the bestemail signatures for their employees, which can be easilyimplemented and automatically updated.
Sigstr offers marketers complete brand control of employee email signatures withfonts, formatting, color, social links and more through its integration with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Insert a Sigstr Campaign (graphical call-to-action) into your email signature templateto utilize every employee’s email signature as a targeted marketing opportunity. Sigstr gives marketers the opportunity to promote the companys most important initiatives or content, such as events, press, case studies, ebooks, job openings and much more.
With Sigstr, marketers can be sure that every employee email signature formatis on brand and updated across the entire company with just a few clicks. Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin experiencing the power of professional email signatures.
Last week, Gary Vaynerchuk shared a Snapchat story with his audience that detailed the importance of email signatures. And that simple Snapchat story sparked some great interaction on social media.
First of all, who is Gary Vaynerchuk?
Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college he took his family wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years. Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Along the way he became a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Birchbox before eventually co-founding VaynerRSE, a $25M investment fund.
In addition, Gary speaks at many events and is an all around super cool guy. And he believes in the power of a stellar email signature template – what could be better?
Gary’s Snapchat Story Success
Gary’s Snapshat story caused quite an outpouring of comments, feedback, and even support for Sigstr in the form of tweets, Snapchats and more.
What Gary Says About Email Signatures
“Snapchat secret. Your email signature…huge opportunity for a call-to-action. I change mine depending on what’s most important to me. The email signature is the easiest place to get full exposure continuously because you’re always using it and you’re interacting with business people and…there it is.” – Gary Vaynerchuk
That’s why Sigstr exists. Sigstr powers smart marketing through the thousands of email signatures displayed to your most important contacts (your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, investors, and friends). The best email signatures drive brand compliance and unlock the marketing potential of every employee email sent. With Sigtsr, every employee email includes a consistently branded email signature, and marketers can easily update signature campaigns to drive awareness and engagement for key events, case studies, product updates, news, and job opportunities.
In 2010, SteelHouse set out to change the eCommerce marketing space because they saw the obvious flaws in online advertising: channel confusion, a reactionary system to consumer trends, blind trust in black box algorithms, over-spending, waiting forever on creative and even longer to go live. And, of course, deciphering attribution for performance.
SteelHouse has one simple mission: To create performance marketing that actually performs. As a result, they have pioneered a cloud-based marketing platform that gives their customers complete control, access to marketing channels, and delivers audience, creative, and performance – all from one beautiful user interface.
The company began using Sigstr, a platform for managing employee email signatures, in July 2015 as a way to deliver a consistent marketing message to their most important contacts. This includes those who are receiving emails from SteelHouse employees, such as prospective customers, vendors, partners, customers, thought leaders, and media.
Sigstr lets SteelHouse leverage the thousands of personal emails its 185 employees send each and every day. By building an email signature template within Sigstr, SteelHouse can now control portions (or all) of each employee’s email signatures to make sure each signature is individualized with employee-specific names and titles. A Steelhouse administrator can then centrally manage branding, content, and information. In addition, with the Sigstr Campaigns product, SteelHouse can automatically include a banner integration at the bottom of every single employee email, highlighting the latest marketing content with a compelling call-to-action.
Check out SteelHouse’s most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date promoting their newest resource, “2015 Holiday Digital Marketing Guide”.
The campaign generated 1,839 clicks in 3 months, which resulted in an extreme surge of visitors to their website and an increase in downloads.
A true champion of the Sigstr platform, Christopher had this to say about the partnership:
We look forward to seeing what results SteelHouse will continue to experience with the power of an email signature generator. Want to do more with your organization’s email signatures? Start your free 30-day trial here.
For more testimonials and case studies from other Business Services companies, check out this recent resource (with email signature examples):
If youre a B2B Services company, then you know just how important your people are to your companys success. Dont get us wrong – employees are an important part of every business, no matter the industry. Without good people who do their job and treat customers well, your business will not be successful. But for a B2B Services company, your people are your product – theres just no way around it: you need to build the best team you can, or risk it all by having mediocre talent reflect poorly on your brand.
For B2B Services brands, such as design or ad agencies, executive recruiting firms, law firms, consultancies and others, company culture is likely a very important aspect of building a great team. How else do you attract good talent that will represent your brand well? Most of the time, good culture and great people are inseparable. So as a B2B Services company, you need to stand out from the crowd, showcase your culture in unique ways, and attract top-level talent by offering them something they cant get anywhere else.
Culture, People & The Power of Employee Email
What is something all of your employees do every single day without fail? Sometimes even on the weekends? You guessed it – they send email. A lot of email! On average, a single employee will send 10,000 emails per year. So if your B2B Services company has just 100 employees, simple math suggests your company is sending 1M emails per year! Thats a million brand impressions and engagement opportunities being sent out to your most important contacts: those your employees are emailing such as prospects, customers, partners, community members, and more.
Every one of those 1M emails can either be a positive or negative brand experience. And sometimes – especially for B2B Service companies – email and phone calls may be the only interactions your contacts will ever have with your employees. So every touchpoint matters a lot to your brands integrity.
Why not use this high powered channel to attract your dream team? Email is a powerful engine for business services companies use it for your brands advantage.
Here are a few examples of how your B2B Services brand can make the most of the employee email signature to promote your culture and attract your dream team:
1. Showcase Company Culture to Pique Interest
Do you have an amazing company culture where every opinion matters and every team member is expected to grow? Does your company have fun traditions or does your team volunteer for service opportunities around your community? How about an awesome CEO thats vocal about employee success? Use the email signature as a way to highlight your team and the rewarding culture youve created by sharing a video from your CEO, a picture of the team, or stories about serving the community.
2. Promote Specific Open Positions
Your company is always on the lookout for superstars – especially those that are already aware of your business and the unique services you offer. Why not use the email signature (which is already being viewed by your most important contacts: prospects, customers, partners and community members) to drive awareness for specific open positions?
3. Ask For Referrals
Your employee emails are far reaching, so include an email signature that incentivizes your contacts to refer their friends to open job positions. Point email recipients to a landing page where they can either browse the current job openings (like the Radious example below), or direct them to a landing page where they can nominate rockstars for your team – and get rewarded if their referral is hired!
For more information on how your business services company can attract incredible content and showcase culture, check out these recent Sigstr resources:
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you. With that, brand consistency is equally important. Whether you business services brand offers accounting, banking, consulting, advertising, design, education, insurance, or whatever it may be, you’re always looking for new and innovative ways to give your brand and your reputation a boost.
According to a recent report in Select USA, a government agency, in 2012, the U.S. business services industry was comprised of about 760,000 firms with combined annual revenues of $1.5 trillion and employed 7.8 million Americans. The business services sector is growing rapidly. As a marketer promoting your services, it’s more important than ever to set your offerings apart.
We’re excited to share that, announced today, the Sigstr team has added Kevin Vanes as Vice President of Sales! Kevin will join the executive team, which now includes Dan Hanrahan, CEO, Dave Duke, Vice President of Customer Success, and Sam Smith, Vice President of Product. Sigstr has also doubled the size of its team making hires across marketing, product, sales, and customer success. It’s been a fast start to 2016 and we won’t be slowing down any time soon!
Our team is humbled to now serve over 100 customers and has a team of 20+ dedicated to the opportunity of email signatures. In order to keep up with our growing team, we’ve relocated to a new office overlooking Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis.
We’re continuing to aggressively hire top-level talent to support all functions of the business. For more information on open positions, visit: https://www.sigstr.com/company.
Want to see the power of Sigstr firsthand and try it out at your company? Sign up and start your free 30-day trial today. Create your own email signature template and start experiencing the power of email signature marketing.
The world of employee email is evolving and growing on a daily basis, and Sigstr is working hard to ensure our customers have a seamless experience using our email signature marketing platform. Email is a critical component in our daily lives and it’s our mission to make employee email signatures more powerful, more effective and now, more efficient. As many of our customers use Google to run their businesses, it has been a top priority for our product team to develop an incredible user experience for those using the Gmail email platform. And now, we’re excited to announce it’s here: Gmail Signature Sync!
Backed by a powerful integration with Google Apps, the Sigstr install process is simple and efficient. The integration removes the need for employees to install the application individually. Instead, the Sigstr administrator has the ability to push campaign and signature updates to each employee through the application portal.
Does your company use Gmail to run your employee email? If so, the Gmail Signature Sync is as easy as the 4 steps below. Once you’re logged into your Sigstr account, simply:
1. Select the tools menu.
2. Navigate the Connectors page.
3. Select Connect to Google Apps and enter your Google Apps Admin credentials.
4. After authenticating, click Sync Signatures Now to push your Sigstr content to all users. Alternatively, enable Auto-Sync to instantly push out changes to Google Apps users whenever content is updated in Sigstr. The sync will push any signature or user signature field changes straight to users on your Google Apps domain. It will only affect users who are already provisioned in Sigstr.
WARNING: Make sure you have uploaded all employee data and are ready for a live launch before syncing.
Yep, it really is just that easy! We even put together this video tutorial below to prove it!
Still on the fence about employee email signature marketing? No problem! Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to experience firsthand the power of email signature marketing.
Still undecided? Check out the lastest Sigstr resources to learn more:
Congratulations, you’ve just completed an awesome new content resource for your company! SaaS marketers know that creating valuable content that will get shared, promoted, and downloaded is no easy task. But finishing the piece of content is just the beginning. How will you promote your newest piece of content in order to get the most leverage out of it and reach your prime audience?
As SaaS marketers ourselves, we know getting content out there can be a trick – but if you do it successfully, the content can pay dividends in terms of leads, opportunities, branding and exposure, and closed won business. From our experience, here are 5 ways SaaS marketers can promote content effectively:
1. Spread the Word With 3rd Party Relationships
Developing strong third party relationships can be incredibly valuable for your SaaS company – especially when it comes to partnering on events or content promotion. Relationships with those that offer a complimentary technology but don’t compete with your business can offer an expanded reach to individuals that will likely benefit from the content that’s shared.
Having trusted third party companies or thought leaders help spread the word about your newest piece of content can accomplish a few things: 1) When others share your content, it adds an additional “stamp of approval” for both companies participating 2) It creates brand exposure for both companies, as well as the potential for inbound leads that can be shared between the two companies 3) It create a 2-way relationship where the other company or thought leader may approach you for help in the future.
Third party relationships have many benefits, but perhaps the most powerful is the ability to help each other succeed and expand both audiences at the same time.
2. Leverage the Email Signature
Email signatures are a key part of every email your employees send. Several organizations have caught on to the fact that email is the lifeblood of their company (an average employee sends 10,000 emails a year), and a huge opportunity to drive incremental awareness and engagement with their marketing content. By automatically appending calls to actions to your newest piece of content directly to employee email signatures, marketers are finally breaking down the barriers of the employee email, and leveraging it to gain millions of brand impressions. Check out a free trial of Sigstr here.
3. Give LinkedIn Sponsored Updates a Try
If you haven’t used LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, give it a try. For SaaS marketers, it’s likely that your audience uses LinkedIn on a daily (if not hourly) basis. LinkedIn lets you post an update, then similar to other social media networks, you can sponsor the update and tailor the audience so it appears only to those that meet your criteria, such as: location, job title, education level, number of employees, and so on. In addition, you can use more characters than Twitter and can also include a catchy image to promote your newest piece of content. Once you define your audience, you can then “bid” on how much you’d like to spend on either individual clicks or overall impressions. Then, just set the campaign and watch the results come in once the update is approved! SaaS marketers loved LinkedIn for promoting content, so give it a try when you launch your next big piece.
4. Promote with Email Marketing & E-newsletters
Though email service providers (ESPs) such as ExactTarget, MailChimp and others have been around seemingly forever, email marketing is often forgot about as a channel for promotion of new content. SaaS marketers should leverage this easy way to send mass email to subscribers, especially since marketers can customize with dynamic information to target only those interested (such as Sales teams, Marketers, IT, etc). When using an ESP or Marketing Automation tool to send out emails to promote content, be sure to include a large image of the content, 3-4 key takeaways, and a quick summary – all “above the fold” so the information isn’t lost in the shuffle. But most importantly, include a call-to-action for the reader to download the content and share with peers.
5. Send Direct Mail Packages to Executives
Getting the attention of busy executives can be very challenging. While calling and emailing are always an important part of the prospecting mix, try breaking through to their desk by sending a direct mail box that includes the printed piece of content, a cover letter from the rep or an executive from your company, along with an object they can keep on their desk (hint: everyone loves a good coffee mug!). Once the package has arrived (be sure to use tracking), begin your follow-up process. Remember, follow-up is key! It’s unlikely that the executive will be the first to reach out, but since you took the time to send a package and tailor the note, you are likely to get a response – or even a shoutout on Twitter!
If you’re a SaaS marketer, what are some tips and tricks you use to promote your newest piece of content? What have you tried in the past that hasn’t worked?
For more information on how to promote your most important content and initiatives, check out these recent Sigstr resources:
Congratulations! You have officially launched your company’s new app. But now what? How do you share the excitement with current customers and prospective users? How can you give your app immediate exposure in order to quickly expand user growth and maintain momentum?
As a fast growing tech company ourselves, below are some of the tried and true methods we use to promote our company, and we’ve seen others implement successfully as well. We’ll let you in on the secret of our top 6 favorite ways to promote a company’s new app:
Use email signature marketing
Employees send an average of 10,000 emails a year, or about 28 a day. Simultaneously, marketing teams allocate significant time and budget on creating new content. An effective way of increasing prospect engagement is injecting marketing CTAs into the employee email signature. This allows marketers to gain millions of brand impressions on their content on every 1:1 email sent. Worried about how you might control that signature? Check out a free trial of Sigstr.
Create a demo video
You know that one of the most effective ways to gain ambassadors for your brand and to truly explain what your product does and who it benefits is to give a demo of your product. But giving demos to everyone that requests them may not scale with the infrastructure you have in place, and probably isn’t a great use of time for your sales reps if not all of the leads coming in are qualified.
While conducting 1:1 demos is great for promising prospects, you need a better way to expand your reach. A great way to circumvent this issue is to record a demo video of your product or app and use Vimeo or YouTube as a way to share the video and create a viral approach. With YouTube, you can use a link to prompt the viewer to learn more information about your company or app, and can also add tags so those searching for similar products or keywords will find your video.
Apply for awards or lists
Every city, state, and geo has awards for “best new tech” or “startup of the year”, not to mention lists and awards like Inc., Fast Company, TechCrunch, and Entrepreneur host each year. There are literally thousands of awards that your company or app could be eligible for, and oftentimes submitting these applications is either free or just a minimal charge (up to $250/application).
Not to mention, applying for awards and learning how to pitch your company or app in just a few short paragraphs (or sentences), can be very beneficial for fine-tuning your company’s overall messaging.
Join groups and communities on social media
Engage, engage, engage. Join groups on LinkedIn, follow topics on Medium and other publications. Start discussions about the industry as a whole, about the need you are solving for with your product or app, ask questions of the audience, and get a sense of what is being discussed – without trying to sell your product.
Use those discussions as starting points for your own blogs, customer dialogues, and even demo scripts. Getting “real life” information about the problems that exist and how technology can solve them is as genuine as it gets.
Pursue co-marketing opportunities
Do you have any partners, influencers, or friends in the industry that have a large reach of their own? Most importantly, who do you know (or should you know) that reaches the same audience that you’re pursuing? If your product is geared towards sales, what about SalesHacker? If your product is geared for marketing, what about HubSpot or LeadPages? The goal is to form relationships with others that are solving a different problem than you, but that are working to gain attention of the same audience.
Try forming co-marketing opportunities with these companies where you each gain something in return. Post blogs on each other’s site and share those posts via social media giving the other company or person a shoutout. Do a joint webinar with the other company that explains how together, you can add benefits. Or, do a case study if you’re a user of the other technology.
Launch on Product Hunt
Have you heard of Product Hunt? If you just built an app, chances are yes. There are a multitude of checklists and ideas for how to make your submission super successful, so we won’t cover those here (check out this resource for more information).
But consider launching on Product Hunt in conjunction with your press release or announcement. Product Hunt on its own can create a ton of great buzz and immediate feedback, but amplified by a launch when more people are attuned to what you are sharing (finding your link, following you on social, commenting on your LinkedIn announcement), you will get a lot more out of your Product Hunt submission.
Congrats again on your new product or app! We hope this quick checklist gets you started down the right path of maximizing exposure and building long-term relationships.
What other ways have you found to be helpful when launching a new product or app? We’d love to hear them! Send us your ideas at: interact@sigstr.com.
Marketing trends are constantly changing with time. In order to stay competitive with your company’s marketing strategy, consider trying these 5 marketing tips.
Email Signature Marketing
Employees send an average of 10,000 emails a year, or about 28 a day. Simultaneously, marketing teams allocate significant time and budget on creating new content. An effective way of increasing prospect engagement is injecting marketing CTAs into the employee email signature. This allows marketers to gain millions of brand impressions on their content on every 1:1 email sent. Worried about how you might control that signature? Check out a free trial of Sigstr.
Personalization
A generic email suggests that your product is generic as well. Doing some research before you email a prospect is worth the effort and makes it harder for a prospect to ignore you. A subject line that reads “Congrats on your promotion” will be opened far more times than “Time to connect?” Spend some time on Linkedin, learn what matters most to your prospect and relate your product to their most discussed pain-points.
Visual storytelling
Videos are an exploding trend for several industries. Companies are sharing their story via short video clips to help the prospect understand the personality behind the brand. Whether it’s a product demo recording or a recruitment plug, videos contain a human element that cannot be replicated via text.
Webinars
Your prospects are smart people. Smart people never stop thirsting for more knowledge, especially when it is relevant to their industry and helps them to improve their own performance. Webinars are an effective way of sharing information about your product in an educational fashion. The ability to be (semi) anonymous in participation creates a non-threatening environment for prospects to enter your world and see if what you are doing pertains to them. Have your BDRs follow up to get their feedback on the webinar, and ask if it makes sense to have a further conversation.
Proximity
Marketers get hundreds of emails on a daily basis. Imagine if you changed the script from “let’s connect on the phone for 30 minutes,” to “I’d love for you to swing by our office for lunch on us.” The old school ways of dropping off handwritten notes will gain far more attention than today’s emails. Being close in proximity to your prospects allows this extra step to be more feasible. Also, prospects will be more familiar with your current local clients, gaining your brand more credibility.
Digital marketing strategies will change with the constant advancements in technology. When it comes to driving awareness to your brand and getting noticed, these 5 quick tips are sure to help. Give us your feedback via twitter at @SigstrApp or connect with me on Linkedin to share your thoughts!
As a salesperson, your main goal is to close more business and generate more meaningful conversations with prospective customers, right?
However, there are always a few steps leading up to closing business, with the most important step being, you guessed it, activity. As a sales rep, business opportunities are created by those that work hard to prove value, build relationships, and hustle. You are responsible for driving activity, which can come in the form of researching, picking up the phone to call (gasp), sending prospecting emails, following-up, sending relevant content, inviting prospects to events, following-up, sending direct mail – and did I mention following-up? This activity is for one goal: create sales opportunities in order to have the opportunity to close more business. And speaking of activity, did you know the average employee send 10,000 emails annually? That’s a LOT of email activity. How can you put that employee email to work, beyond just the content you type?
As a sales rep myself, I’m in your shoes every single day. I’ve learned 5 ways to generate more business through relevant pieces of content that I add to my personal email signature (think Gmail or Outlook) to drive more action, which results in more opportunities to showcase our solution. And today, I’m sharing those 5 campaign ideas with you:
Request A Demo – Likely the easiest and the most obvious campaign with the most desired outcome: a prospect requesting a demo of your product or service. Request a demo campaigns are effective, but must benefit the customer in some way – get creative on what your prospect will get in return for the 30 minutes they will spend with you.
Case Study – Creating a compelling call-to-action around a relevant case study in your email signature provides a helpful resource for the viewer to see, with the intent of urging them to learn more.
New Marketing Offer – Giving prospects some type of “deal” for agreeing to learn more, they will have a more urgent reason to click on your campaign. This could be a free month of your product, a gift card, early bird pricing to your conference, or even a free cup of coffee if they sign up for a demo. The key is to ensure these offers aren’t continual, but have an explicit end date to create scarcity.
Blog Post – Very similar to a case study, showcasing blog post calls-to-action will provide the reader with more information around specific topics that they care most about, or tips and tricks of how to get the most out of your product or service.
Homepage/Website – If you have a strong marketing website, driving people to your homepage or a specific resources page to learn more, will in turn serve your company well for SEO purposes.
With all of these pieces of content, the goal is to drive awareness and give something of true value to the reader – not just another sales pitch (which you can be sure they’ll tune out – wouldn’t you?). There are some very easy ways to start testing how the employee email signature could help market for you, such as a graphical call-to-action campaign in the employee email signature that points prospects to easily “request a demo” as explained above. In addition, testing a call-to-action campaign pointing prospects towards new, helpful resources like case studies or a recently awesome blog post, you are giving the reader more information and resources that could be helpful to them.
New marketing offers are unique and should be short lived campaigns. Try using teasers like “this week only”, or “for the new 48hrs!” This way the reader will be getting something extra out of requesting a resource, signing up for an event, or giving you 30 minutes of their time for a demo. It is then up to you, the sales rep, to make ensure the content or the demo is worth every bit of the time they give you.
With all of these pieces of content, you can direct your recipients to a landing page that first that requires some basic information such as name, email address, and company. By having them fill out a bit of brief information, you can generate better qualified leads. If they are engaging with your campaign enough to get to the landing page, they are at least intrigued by your provided resource.
Want a super easy way to start using employee email signatures to generate more sales opportunities and closed business? Sigstr can help! Click here to learn more about how, and start your FREE 30-day trial.
Call-to-action banners in email signatures (as shown in the illustration to the right) can play an instrumental role in customer success. These interactive banners can include important company initiatives in the hundreds (or thousands) of the emails your customer success representatives and other customer-facing employees are sending every single day. Turn your email signature into a conversation starter to help customers feel further connected to your brand. Take, for example, a few of the use cases below of how several 
TechPoint
Want another opportunity for your marketing and content to cut through the noise? Your employees send thousands of emails every single day, each with an opportunity to be visually appealing. Use Sigstr for your html email signatures so
Well, what can I say? I graduated. It’s over. I did it.
Today marks my one-month anniversary here at Sigstr. During that time, I’ve gone through a crash course on Marketing, Sales, tech, how to iron a shirt, and everything else in between to prepare myself and close the knowledge gap. Google searches included (but were not limited to):
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.
“Employee email represents a tremendous, and largely untapped, opportunity for marketers, and we are just getting started unlocking that potential. We can’t imagine being better positioned for the future, and the decision to scale our business in Indianapolis is a huge part of our competitive advantage.”
Evercontact
Weve recently enjoyed following along with 
“One of the best ways to improve in your conversion rate optimization is to have an explainer video on your site that tells your audience why your site or service is for them. If you ever take a look at the top selling products on ClickBank, you will notice that nearly all of them are using explainer videos on their landing page. Extremely long sales pages worked well in the past, now it’s all about the sales video. Make it engaging, interactive and of course ending with a call to action for your target audience. Be sure to check out my how to create killer explainer videos article for how to create one for your site.” 
“Storytell. It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve conversion rate. Tell me why you started your business. Tell me how you are using your products. Tell me what your customers are gaining from working with you. Let me feel your pride and emotion. If I don’t feel something on an emotional level when I visit your website, then I’m just going to compare on price and then you lose. Storytell more for improving conversion rate optimization.”
Secret #3: Sean Smith (
“I recommend investing in great visuals for improving your conversion optimization rate. The prospective customer has to be able to visualize using the product, and if you have gorgeous visuals and video, you help the customer break the buying barrier. Research indicates products on a white background work better than a busy background. Investing in great visuals is beneficial for both sales and website conversion.” 
The Sigstr office is completely open, adorned with a bright green wall, trendy artwork, and an assortment of desks that are frequently rearranged to make room for our growing team. The thought of cubicles lining our walls is almost laughable. Personal space is not a concept we are particularly familiar with.From my seat, I can easily communicate with anyone in any department. While distractions are frequent, we benefit immensely from the increased level of collaboration.
At the end of last quarter, Sigstr hosted our first ever Sigstr Field Day. The company spent half of a Friday playing whiffle ball and other miscellaneous games. It was glorious. That evening, I told a friend about my day at work. She rolled her eyes and joked about the “difficulty” of my job. While the teasing was lighthearted, the problem was that my friend didn’t know the whole story. Sigstr Field Day was created in celebration of the fact that we had exceeded quarterly goals. Ironically, the day was the RESULT of hard work and dedication. The Sigstr team may have a lot of fun, but the company’s success is always our number one priority.
Beyond the hard work, there’s also a high level of uncertainty in working for a start-up. Sigstr has proven it is a viable business, however, there is a certain level of ambiguity in ongoing strategy and direction. Hard-hitting questions are asked every day. What’s our next step? What features are the most important? Are we targeting the right people? Should we go in a new direction? As a result, big decisions are made that impact the whole team. Anxiety certainly ensues. The only solace is to have faith in the vision and experience of our leadership team.
Email signatures by themselves are like tequila without the lime and salt. For us, our lime and salt is our Campaign piece. 
The awesome people at HubSpot preach the importance of landing pages and how each one should be connected to a HubSpot campaign – which is what we do here at Sigstr. And so, by connecting my Sigstr campaign to the right HubSpot landing page, I can connect the two and see the impact of employee email signatures within a specific HubSpot campaign.
Thanks to another Sigstr customer, 
Author: Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner of 
“Building an exceptional and easy-to-use product is incredibly important to the Sigstr team,” said Sam Smith, VP of Product at Sigstr. “Our customers are replacing their manual and time consuming ways of updating signatures, and we have built a product to make this process seamless. These new product updates are critical to our users, and we are hard at work building further integrations and product updates that will deliver incredible ROI and brand cohesion.”
Weve all been victims. A well-intending colleague sends out a company-wide email about leftover pizza in the breakroom and all hell breaks loose. One person unintentionally asks the entire office if there is left-over pepperoni at the same time the office jokester replies with a GIF of stampeding elephants. All of a sudden, inboxes are full and everyone is annoyed, confused, or best case scenario, entertained. Whatever the situation, do not be tempted to reply-all to tell everyone else to stop replying-all. You are part of the problem.
If any email signatures in your company look like this, youre doing it all wrong.
The third and final step of my campaign design process is building out the format of the campaign. When I start to assemble my campaigns, I almost always start at 400 pixels by 96 pixels and adjust from there. I then take all the information that I know I want to include in the campaign and just throw it inside to see how much information I need to work with. Visual hierarchy is a huge part of how a campaign comes together for email signatures. Always be sure to prioritize the most information. 
For marketers, keeping the brand consistent across all employees can be a major struggle. 
Check out SteelHouse’s most successful Sigstr Campaign to-date promoting their newest resource, “2015 Holiday Digital Marketing Guide”.
Email signatures are a key part of every email your employees send. Several organizations have caught on to the fact that email is the lifeblood of their company (an average employee sends 10,000 emails a year), and a huge opportunity to drive incremental awareness and engagement with their marketing content. By automatically appending calls to actions to your newest piece of content directly to employee email signatures, marketers are finally breaking down the barriers of the employee email, and leveraging it to gain millions of brand impressions. 
Getting the attention of busy executives can be very challenging. While calling and emailing are always an important part of the prospecting mix, try breaking through to their desk by sending a direct mail box that includes the printed piece of content, a cover letter from the rep or an executive from your company, along with an object they can keep on their desk (hint: everyone loves a good coffee mug!). Once the package has arrived (be sure to use tracking), begin your follow-up process. Remember, follow-up is key! It’s unlikely that the executive will be the first to reach out, but since you took the time to send a package and tailor the note, you are likely to get a response – or even a shoutout on Twitter!
