Ever think your email signature is ignored or overlooked? Think again. This little slice of digital real estate is getting more and more attention (for better or for worse). When done well, it can be an extension of your company’s brand and serve as a new way to distribute content. But when it misses the mark, it could spur a variety of emotions (laughter, anger, distrust, judgment, etc.) from your audience.
Thumbing through examples of bad email signatures is fun (a lot fun actually). Reading the commentary about funny email signature fails is even more fun. And you can definitely get your pick in the Twittersphere. So we decided to scroll through the many tweets in 2016 about email signatures and share our favorites. As we gathered more and more tweets, a few themes started to form.
The Cause & Effect of Using Comic Sans
Effect: Your email moving to the trash bin
Effect: None (or a no-reply)
Effect: Loss of all credibility amongst your peers
Effect: Automatic disqualification from all future opinions
Effect: Trust issues
Misspelling Your Recipient’s Name
We feel you, Patrick. Trust has to be established before abbreviated names occur.
Bonus points to Kirthi for the perfect GIF reaction in this situation.
The Dreaded Inspirational Quote
Jason is right. It’s Monday…relax people.
Ally authored her own famous quote to show how she really feels about this issue. Well done.
We appreciate your honesty, Abigail.
The trust issues continue…
Valid question, Alexis.
We’re proud of you too, Texas Pro.
We sense some sarcasm here…
Other/Miscellaneous
1994 called. They asked if you could please remove your fax number…
We love Peter’s perspective above, but Craig took it to a whole new level.
We’re sorry, Charlie! We love the idea of central control over the company’s email signature (except when the admin starts playing pranks).
Credentials are important – especially grade school accomplishments.
100% agree. Take the time to remove “Sent from my iphone” from your mobile email signature.
This popular tag line doesn’t always work for certain types of businesses.
If you find out what Vikings like to drink, let us know. We’ll open a tab too…
Shelby-lyn, we hope you’re kidding.
As fellow Cubs fans, we fully appreciate and support this move.
We have never felt more #blessed reading about this funny email signature (and laughing). Now show us the actual picture!
Some people have zero tolerance for long email signatures.
Ever dream of funny email signature typos and wake up in a cold sweat? We do, too.
Attached images are the worst…
Make sure you take the time to build an email signature in your settings. Otherwise some people might get very offended…
This is one of the more outrageous examples we found, but we absolutely love it.
And finally…Margaret sums it up best.
Let’s face it, perfecting your email signature IS hard. Especially for those brand managers or marketing directors who are asked to manage their company’s email signature for 50+ employees.
That’s where Sigstr comes in! Let us know how we can help make your job just a little easier by standardizing company-wide email signatures (and bonus: using it as a new content distribution channel).
Business professionals in the U.S. spend an average of 6.3 hours a day checking and responding to email, according to The Huffington Post, based on research from Adobe Systems Inc. Collectively, that’s about 4.2 trillion hours in email every year, summed from statistics culled through the U.S. Bureau of Labor, McKinsey Global Institute and The Radicati Group, Inc.
But despite the impressive amount of email content people read and send each day, a huge majority of your messages are getting lost in filters. Nearly three-quarters of all marketers report having issues with email deliverability. Up to 85 percent of incoming mail is considered abusive. So mailbox providers (like Gmail and Outlook) are forced to blanket aggressive measures against all senders to deter spam and protect customers. As a result, marketers can get tangled in the filters. Senders need more control. They need more sophisticated tools to understand when emails deliver, and when they don’t.
Every email we send is meant to be opened, and 250ok helps you make sure it’s opened, with better inbox placement and engagement. The platform offers up real-time insights into brand reputation, DMARC compliance, and advanced engagement analytics to data-driven senders.
250ok has been a Sig-Star for almost a year, and they’re rocking their design and email content to inject into their signature. In November, the team saw an opportunity to add value with their latest whitepaper on the “9 Things Every Marketers Must Know About Email.”
WHAT WE LOVE:
The design grabs and holds the email recipients’ attention. Focusing first on the typography, 250ok designers amped up the intensity levels through each line of text by making each line larger than the last. And they kept the design simple. The clear call-to-action was easy to read and understand.
To really make the CTA pop, the 250ok designers played with a little buyer psychology by using the color red. To start, red is a warm and positive color. It encourages action and immediately catches the eye. In color psychology, read means energy, passion, action, strength and excitement. The color creates a sense of urgency to read the content. NOW. And, it has a physical effect on the reader, too. Because red is stimulating and energizing, it affects your nerves and the circulation of blood by raising blood pressure and heart rate. Cool, right?! Who knew colors could have such an intense impact on how we internalize email content?
This campaign was served up more than 16,000 times. And because of the simple design, it engaged 350 targeted readers.
WHAT (ELSE) WE LOVE:
We know the design is on point with the 250ok clickable CTA banner, but we love the value offer, too. They know their brand is more (way more) than a cool website and sleek logo. So they’re creating a differentiator by adding educational whitepapers in their signature. By doing so, they get more eyes on the content. And (more importantly) their contacts get nine tips and tactics to improve their own email strategy.
Of course the design is amazing. But what the reader gets when they click is applicable help for their email strategy. The whitepaper is actionable, not to mention well written and meaty. And, the 250ok crew keyed up a value add in every, single email they sent for a month by injecting the “must-read” piece of content into their signature.
Sigstr Shout-Out is a series that features the insanely talented and creatively driven Sigstr customer campaigns so you can see simple email signature best practices in action – and who’s nailing them.
Since November, the Sigstr office has been blaring kitschy holiday tunes and tempting visitors with a steady supply of Christmas treats. Nothing puts us in the spirit more than Mariah Carey and a few extra pounds around the middle! Now that Christmas is weeks away, we’re kicking it into high gear and using any excuse to spread the Christmas cheer to all those far and near.
Our affection for the holiday season explains our focus on the holiday email template, specifically the email signature. After all, if Harry Potter has an email signature, Santa should too! When approaching the topic, the only dilemma was selecting which Christmas characters to feature. With so many to pick from, how do you choose?
Buddy the Elf
Buddy’s Christmas cheer puts the Sigstr office to shame. With his childlike humor and zest for life, it’s easy to see why Buddy the Elf is a Christmas favorite. On a quest to find his father, Buddy unearthed answers to life’s most interesting questions and discovered truths he never imagined. His most memorable inquiry, however, was left unanswered…
Frosty
I think we can all agree that Frosty’s story is one of the most tragic Christmas tales. Not only does the poor fella have eyes made out of coal, but he’s slowly melting away! With this holiday email template, perhaps there could be a different ending – one where Frosty lives happily ever after all year round!
Rudolph
Does anyone know why Rudolph has a shiny red nose? No, but that’s not the point. Rudolph is the Christmas poster child for overcoming adversity and (reindeer) bullying. After that famous foggy Christmas Eve when Rudolph saved the day, he used his story to inspire the world.
Bumble, The Abominable Snow Monster
You can’t name Rudolph without including his adversary, Bumble, the Abominable Snow Monster. If there’s ever been a Christmas miracle, it’s the fact that the 1964 Claymation film is still televised on a yearly basis. Video production has come a long way since the 60s, but there’s nothing like the classics! Nostalgia aside, Bumble is a Sigstr favorite. He did help with that star, after all.
The Grinch
We’re not sure where Whoville is, but we’d like to relocate the Sigstr office there immediately. The Whos are warm hearted and welcoming and their houses are downright adorable. It’s no wonder the Grinch eventually gave in to their holiday cheer! This Christmas, Professor Grinch is likely cuddling with Max and listening to “Welcome Christmas” on repeat.
Scrooge
Much like the Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge despised Christmas and all those that celebrated it. Thank goodness for the Ghosts of Past, Present, and Yet to Come that showed him the error in his ways. These days, Ebenezer runs a non-profit with his partner, Tiny Tim, which is promoted in this holiday email template.
Kevin McCallister
Has there ever been a cooler character than Kevin McCallister? His addiction to junk food and ability to outwit grown-ups make him a Christmas stand-out. There are not many 8-year-olds that can single-handedly take on the likes of two woeful burglars. It’s no surprise Kevin honed his talents in adulthood.
Santa
He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. Sound familiar? Well, this year, you can do a little spying of your own. Contrary to popular belief, Santa is a pretty hip guy. He keeps up with the latest tech trends and recently introduced The Santa Radar. Mrs. Claus is relieved that she finally has a way to keep tabs on the man.
There is no better Christmas character to end on than Santa! Don’t want the fun to end? Feel free to check out the email signatures of Parks and Rec or Back to the Future! (Each of which are best enjoyed with a plate full of frosted Christmas cookies and a side of spiked eggnog.)
This post is from our partners at Contactually, a virtual assistant software for your email that discovers opportunities in your inbox by proactively suggesting next steps. Read the original here.
If you’ve ever worked in sales, you probably had to cold call prospects. And if you have ever had to cold call your prospects, you probably hated it.
Those of us in sales are constantly looking for ways to work smarter instead of harder. With new technology emerging daily and a strategic focus on inbound marketing tactics, outbound efforts have the potential to be reduced significantly without compromising growth or revenue. Can you imagine only having hot leads?
Making dials down a random list of cold prospects can often be a massive waste of time. Ask any sales manager what type of leads they would prefer their team work with, and they will say inbound every single time. Ask any real estate professional the types of leads they would prefer and they will tell you “referrals.” The quality of a lead matters. Every minute in a salesperson’s workday matters. Being mindful of where leads are coming from is the new form of smart outreach.
With a strategic plan and a focus on relationships, inbound leads will be your entire dial list. Effective inbound marketing tactics create an influx of leads without requiring the outbound outreach that every sales person dreads.
6 Ways to get better leads and avoid cold calling:
We know what you’re thinking. How can I grow my business without outbound efforts?Where do I turn for leads if not through cold calling? Below are a few inbound marketing tactics that are sure to land you or your team batches of hot, quality leads.
1. Referrals
Past sales and clients are your best referral sources. A referral is a hotter lead than any you could have prospected on your own. A current customer or past client has vouched for you. As your prospect walks through the door or picks up the phone, he or she already has higher level of trust for you simply because of their friend’s relationship with you.
Not maximizing potential referrals or allowing referrals to slip through the cracks is a mistake many sales professionals make. Staying top-of-mind with your current and past customers is essential for generating referrals. Providing great customer service and closing the sale professionally is usually not enough to maximize your referrals, either.
You should learn to ask your prospects if they know anyone else who may be interested in your services. Actively seek out referrals, because someone who just closed on a home and is getting ready to move in, doesn’t quite have referrals on the brain. They may need a gentle push or reminder in that direction.
2. Networking
In the age of technology, we tend to forget what actually drives revenue: people. Having a solid network and proactively attending events to meet people can be extremely beneficial in landing new leads. Carry business cards with you and make a point to start conversations. Mention your business without throwing a sales pitch.
Marketing can be just as powerful in person as it is online. Get to know local business owners or other real estate agents who could potentially refer you business, don’t underestimate the power of having a good business relationship with other professionals!
3. Revisit old leads
Some leads will pass on the purchase and then revisit the idea later down the road. Sift through your old leads and shoot them an email. Are they happy with the solution they chose? Or are they in need of your services again? This is your chance to rekindle the relationship because often, old leads are hotter than cold leads, and sometimes can pan out. Take advantage of the inbound marketing tactics you have already put in place.
4. Establish an online presence
Do you blog? You should. Do you have a professional website? You should. Establishing an online presence is essential for generating leads. When you make it easy to share your name and your business, more people will do it.
Engaging with your potential clients online (be it social media or elsewhere) can have a profound effect on you staying top of mind. If you are consistently maintaining a professional online presence, leads will begin to come to you.Plus, thanks to social media, you can connect on a more personal level with your leads and clients, building up that crucial trusting relationship.
5. Become a guest contributor
Do you know someone with a podcast or blog where you can guest-star? Maybe you know someone who sponsors a local event. Can you snag a speaking engagement locally? Establishing yourself as an expert in your field will most likely bring you leads. Reach out to the local newspaper, do they need a columnist or want one in your area of expertise? Check out blogs or news sites where they take submissions of articles and get writing!
6. Start giving referrals
In order to receive referrals, you need to give some, right? Try it out yourself by building up your network of professionals and others that you can refer your clients to. A strong list of referral partners is a key part to your inbound marketing tactics. Building relationships with other business professionals that you respect and trust can lead to a partnership for both parties. Giving a referral is appreciated by all and can truly aide in strengthening your own referral base.
Qualified leads are better leads
The next time you block off an hour to call down a list of cold prospects, ask yourself: could I be mining my own network for referrals? Could I be building a blog to establish thought leadership around my craft? Could I be speaking at a local event to generate interest in my business? If the answer is yes, there are still hot leads out there. You just have to look for them.
Every email we send is meant to be opened. To make sure that happens, countless hours have been spent decoding the best day, the right time, the funniest subject lines, the ideal length and the right amount of customization needed to get human-to-human emails opened.
We know, for example, emails are typically received with the best response when they’re chalk-full of customer-centric messaging and sent around 10 a.m. on Tuesdays. Of course that depends on your content, industry and the list you’ve uploaded. But for the most part, the guidelines work really well all year.
Until the holidays.
Every year, from November until January email behavior changes. Our metrics plummet and our carefully crafted email strategies are left useless in our holiday email marketing sends.
People care before Christmas
A 2015 study from Hubspot looked at more than 4.5 million emails sent over the previous holiday season. They found while almost 54,000 emails were sent daily through their platform alone, few were actually opened. And even fewer were responded to.
The exception? The week before Christmas. In fact, the five days leading into Christmas showed open rates for 1:1 holiday email marketing campaigns were up by 6 percent over average. But the spike didn’t last long, as the study found a 42 percent drop in opens on Christmas Eve and a steep 72 percent decline on Christmas Day. And it makes sense – between opening toys and enjoying family, there’s not a ton of time (or desire) to be checking our email.
But the bustle is over on December 26, right? We head back to the office and we’re ready to get back to the grind. We’re rested and prepped to tackle our to-do lists, aren’t we?
Of course not! At least I’m not. People aren’t quite ready to come out of their egg-nog-induced stupor. And so your email just isn’t a priority to them. Open rates sit at 33 percent and 35 percent lower than average on the two workdays immediately after the holiday, respectively.
Let’s talk next year
People stay in their jovial daze from Christmas until the new year. Some may be vacationing; others are simply taking time off to spend with their families. Still others will be in the office, but they’re not focused on your emails. These workers typically fall into one of two categories: Either they’re there because they’re buried under mountains of work to finish before the end of the year, or they’re out of vacation days.
Recipients don’t have the time to care about your emails before the new year. Almost 60 percent fewer than average emails are opened on New Year’s Eve. And 62 percent less are seen on New Year’s Day.
The drop off is brief, though. When workers show up to the office after the ball drops, they’re ready to start working. The Hubspot data showed a record number of opens four days after New Year’s Day.
Wait, what? Let’s Review
To get your one-to-one human emails opened by your business connections:
Do:
Send in the five working days before Christmas
Send emails four days after New Year’s Day
Don’t:
Send emails on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day
Send emails on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day
Optimize your human-to-human connection
So we know when to send emails this season, but how do we create meaningful and engaging conversations? We make the message about them.
Writing for email is one of the most difficult jobs in marketing. Different recipients, different segments each call for different messaging. And because so many people are concentrating on account-based and even people-based marketing, you have to be authentic and tailor your messaging. Oh and you have to think about the devices your recipient is using, too. What’s helpful on a desktop may be overly strenuous on mobile.
And subject lines? Yikes! Too often left as an afterthought in your email send, these few short words are supposed to convey the importance of your message and intrigue your reader into opening.
In the messaging, we need to offer focus to direct our recipient without wasting their time. Before we start writing, we need to know the one thing we’re trying to convey. It should only be one thing. Don’t have three or four calls-to-action. Have one. Be succinct and customer-centric.
Once you have a clear idea what it is you’re trying to say, craft a short message around why it’s important to your recipient.
What about the rest of the year?
A report from Coschedule sampled 10 studies looking at the best days and times to send business emails outside of your one-to-one holiday email marketing. The results, culled from studies of billions of emails, case studies and round ups, were diverse, but there were common threads to figure out your own best practices.
According to the report, Tuesdays are still the best day to send. Thursdays are great for follow ups while Wednesdays snag third place in open rates. Late morning send times are, in general, the most popular with 10 a.m. being the best time noted. The second favorite open time is between 8 p.m. and midnight, likely because people are checking email before bed.
Use this as an outline, but test your days and times to send and analyze the data to see when you receive the most opens.
Pacers promote ticket sales and add value to corporate partnerships with new digital channel
OPPORTUNITY
Sponsorship sales is a hard concept to grasp. The benefits tend to be ambiguous and intangible, and too often become something that’s not easily communicated. And sure, having a team on the rise helps with conversations, and sometimes makes it easier to get a prospective partner on the phone. But it doesn’t lock in a sale.
Partnering logos are starting to pay close attention to fan data. They care more about social reach and how the property’s business strategy grows audience, engages fans and reports the data. The Indiana Pacers have been looking for a way to up proven value and ROI for their corporate partnerships.
“The real struggle these days in selling corporate partnerships is finding the right mix of elements and benefits to drive the impact each individual partner is looking for. With an individualized approach, the success rate is higher and we’re able to offer our partner a tailored path to own.”
– Michael Lake, Corporate Partnership Sales Director
SOLUTION
Corporate Partnership Sales Director Michael Lake redesigned the Pacers’ sponsorship strategy to focus on hyper-customized plans that don’t hinge on the team’s performance, but rather measure the sponsor’s impact. To capitalize on their targeted audience, Lake implemented 175 users from the Pacers property onto Sigstr in April of 2015. He also enlisted the help of the Sigstr customer success team. By including a campaign design services package to create new designs each month, he’s driving new engagement.
As a value add-on for their corporate partnership, Lake had the Sigstr design team include the 2016 Opening Night game sponsor, Kroger, in their clickable call-to-action banner for the October tip-off.
The Pacers Sports and Entertainment Group saw fast results with the sleek design! In six days, the campaign was seen on every implemented employee’s 1:1 human email. Because of the exposure, they raked in 53,000 views and 228 clicks from an audience hand-selected by the NBA team.
By offering up concrete metrics, Sigstr allowed the Pacers to take measurable returns back to the sponsor. Sigstr helped identify the link between the investment and corporate KPIs for Kroger. And that correlation prompted the partner to sign an agreement, on the spot, to retain sponsorship of Opening Night for the 2017-2018 season next year.
CAMPAIGN RESULTS
OTHER CAMPAIGN DESIGNS
VISION
The Pacers implemented nine more campaigns in two months after ending their Opening Night Campaign, snagging another 300,000 views and 1,300 clicks.
The group’s use of Sigstr to accompany promotional advertising goes beyond the email signature. It’s also bringing content to a targeted audience selected by the brand.
Sigstr has improved productivity through the corporate sponsorship sales strategy because it facilitates the metrics to prove return. Sponsors value Sigstr’s dynamic nature, which updates the call-to-action banners automatically, even in messages sent prior to the update. And brands see, in real time, when their campaigns are viewed and interacted with. That insight offers up greater visibility and control throughout the engagement.
“We were able to show Kroger the exact number of impressions on each email, and to use this in tandem with the numerous other places we were highlighting their game night sponsorship. It was a huge value for us – and for them!”
– Michael Lake, Corporate Partnership Sales Director
The Pacers Sports and Entertainment Group continues to use the Sigstr design services to create tailored content and align promotions for each property within the organization. From the Indiana Pacers, to the Fever and Mad Ants to Bankers Life Fieldhouse as an event venue, the group has offered a value-add for corporate partnerships with tangible returns using Sigstr specifically for each property.
To view the full printable PDF version of this case study, click below!
Today’s tech-enabled world thrives on content, distributed through social, digital and mobile channels. These one-time fads have evolved from digital marketing trends to mainstays and they’ve redesigned the modern marketing landscape.
As these mainstays continue to evolve, they spur trends of their own. Some are simply a natural evolution of staples in traditional marketing while others underscore the changing scene of B2B marketing and the continued emergence of new and advanced marketing technology.
So what digital marketing trends are here to stay? Here’s a list to implement now:
1. Visual Storytelling through Video
Telling a digital marketer that video is important today is like boasting to a blogger 10 years ago that, “words are really helpful.” Thank you, Captain Obvious. Video, when done right, is both engaging and rewarding – bringing in real ROI. Snackable videos (like live streams, video blogs, client testimonials) are preferred by consumers as much as four times more than text content. Video is the most thoroughly consumed content format.
But, as this digital marketing trend becomes more and more a part of our strategy, we need to look at how people best engage. Stories surprise and delight us. They engage us. They put flesh on the dry bones of data and add narrative to your solutions. Stories help us navigate the world around us, they help show us the potential of what we can become.
Philip Pullman, speaking in a Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, once said, “We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.”
But stories must be lifted off the pages of your strategy. Don’t get me wrong, writing is still a vital part of your content marketing strategy, but video stories, visual engagement will boost conversions.
2. Native Advertising
Ad blockers and a general foul flavor left in the mouths of consumers after too many pop-ups and display ads are making it hard to reach customers with a hard sell. Push advertising is fading, soon to be replaced completely by native advertising.
Native ads are sort of the hipsters of ads. They’re the “I’m not an ad” of advertising. They look and feel natural in their environment. And they’re are favored over the “in-your-face” tactics by consumers. These ads unobtrusively deliver content that could almost be mistaken for organic posts, yet are clearly marked by brands as sponsored. Consumers love ‘em because they’re not an annoyance, or a distraction in their daily lives. And digital marketers are becoming obsessed with them because they fit almost anywhere, so they’re perfect for multi-channel marketing. Consumers digest them easier – about 53 percent better than display ads, according to a recent study by Sharethrough.
3. Customer-Centric Turned Customer-Obsessive
In our race to become more customer-centric, we’ve already toed the line bordering on obsessive. And we’re about to jump over with both feet. But can you blame us? We’re finally at a point in the digital marketing trends where we’re not being swallowed up by wave after wave of big data. We can use the information we’ve collected.
We can turn our data into actionable, meaningful interactions.
Digital marketers who put insanely personalized campaigns into motion will drive better results. The benefits of personalization are hefty – higher response, better conversion rates, brand loyalty, repeat customers, amplified reach, boosted relevance, I could really go on all day.
No company sells to another company – they sell to another human who works for another company. So market to that person.
4. Email Marketing
Email is one of the oldest internet applications, it’s died a million-and-one deaths and still proves to be an integral part of how we communicate. More than 205 billion human-emails are exchanged every day. But email’s been labeled the black sheep of marketing for the last 20 years. The internet’s red-headed stepchild, left neglected and taken for granted.
But open rates for email are steadily increasing. Seventy-two percent of adults say they’d opt to talk with companies via email While 91 percent say they’d like to see promotional emails from the companies they do business with. In the B2B space, 73 percent of companies agree email marketing is a core part of their marketing strategy. And a quarter of them rate email as their top channel in terms of ROI.
5. Content Distribution
Marketing teams are tapping into every resource they can get their hands on to have the time, brainpower and budget to create new, engaging content. And as content marketing begins the path to maturation, we need to figure out how to stand out.
We’re left with mountains of mediocre content tangling the interwebs, making it almost laughable to just put your work into the world with the hopes of it getting seen. The way we distribute our content needs to be more strategic. We need to get smarter if we want people to see through the clutter what we have to offer. Sure we’ll keep hitting up the usual activities. We’ll share to our social platforms and send out an email campaign to our already-collected list of loyal followers. Then we’ll encourage our employees to share. But what about new visitors?
New channels like email signature marketing puts your most relevant content in front of your most important contacts through human email. The average worker sends 40 business emails every day, according to a study by the Radicati Group. That’s more than 10,000 emails per employee, or more than five million emails a year for a company of 500. That’s five million emails which can deliver branded content tailored to who’s going to see it.
There’s no doubting Larry Bird’s pure talent. By adding smarts and most importantly grit, Larry became a legend.
Talent + Smarts + Grit = Legend.
Like every Hoosier, I grew up with a hoop in my driveway. Every day after school I’d play, trying to imitate Larry’s best moves. Of his top 10 plays, some emphasized talent – like the turnaround jumper over Jordan. Others pinpointed his creativity – like his bounce pass to Parish between the defender’s legs, or the time he swished a shot from behind the hoop.
But most of his top 10s, including number one, was a product of Larry’s hustle, heart and grit.
Unfortunately for my basketball career, I’m 5-10 and couldn’t shoot my way out of a paper bag. Hustle + smarts can get you onto the Freshman Team in high school, but that was my zenith without the talent.
Warning: Here’s the part where I make the cliché (but appropriate) analogy from sports to business. To become successful in anything, you’ll need talent and smarts. But you’ll never be legendary without grit.
Larry’s gritty play has made him the unofficial Sigstr mascot (read: role model), and I’m honored that via our customer the Indiana Pacers, Larry Bird uses Sigstr.
Below, I’ve included an excerpt from a recent Larry Bird interview where he talks about his approach to every game. To him, he treated each game as though it were the last. He gave the same effort in game 22 of the regular season as he did in the finals.
At Sigstr, we have another saying emphasizing grit: “If you’re a man (or woman) by night, you’re a man (or woman) by day”. (Credit to Brooksource). Meaning, whatever happened yesterday, should have no impact on your effort today. Prior to a game with the Hawks, it was rumored, Larry stayed out pretty late the prior night. The Hawks thought it could be an advantage. But Larry was a man that day. He scored 60.
We will all make mistakes. When our talent or smarts let us down, it’s effort and determination, our grit, that we always control. With Larry, you knew you were getting his best effort every night.
Legend. Thanks for being an inspiration to me and to the Sigstr crew, Larry!
Legendary excerpt printed by the Indianapolis Star:
Boston Celtics legend and Indiana Pacers President Larry Bird was warned during his second year in the NBA that if he continued doing what he was doing to his body, he wouldn’t be long for the league.
“I remember my second year in the league,” Bird said in a recent Q&A with ESPN’s Baxter Holmes, “we were in the All-Star Game in New Jersey, and Artis Gilmore told me, ‘Man, you’re really a good player, Larry. You’re going to be great. But if you keep playing the way you’re playing, you’re not going to last long.’ I said, ‘I can’t play any other way. That’s the way I play.
“I think it was how hard I was playing. He never worked out. But I knew it. I knew I wasn’t going to last long. I knew I was breaking down. It was just the way it is. I had this desire to win every game and the only way I felt, in my mind, that I could do that was to be in the best condition.
“…my thoughts were always that that night was the most important game in the world. Everybody in the world was watching that one game. And I had to be the best player on the court and win that game that night. That was my mentality, and it stuck with me all the way through my career. But knowing that, I knew that I was going to pay for it in a hard way. That’s probably why, when I retired, after the press conference, I probably felt relief.”
This post is from our partners at Salesloft, a sales development software company designed to boost engagement by building, sharing and tracking sales cadences. Interested in getting a better look? Sign up for a trial to see how it works.
A traditional B2B marketing strategy – you know, the inbound lead generation, targeted demographics and psychographics, or detailed analyzation of carefully calculated metrics can still be risky business. They’re sort of like sowing a field of wheat. A farmer works countless hours, dawn-til-dusk, to cover as much acreage as possible. He’s planting with some abandonment in hopes of harvesting a bumper crop of the highest-quality produce, rooted in richness and saturated in potential.
Mr. Farmer, of course, has taken great care to make sure his conditions are favorable for success, but because of the unknowns – like the weather, the actual seed germination, vigour and size or soil health – success may never come.
Account-based marketing, though, is a more selective B2B marketing strategy. It’s a master gardener carefully nurturing an exotic plumeria in a meticulously controlled environment, and then watching his full-sized celadine flowers bloom just the way he knew it would.
The traditional B2B marketing strategy aims to fill the sales funnel as much as possible. With it, we’re jamming as many prospects inside their proxy of the funnel, whether they really fit or not. ABM, on the other hand, looks to flip the funnel, reaching fewer, but more qualified prospects. We’re limiting the leads in, sure. But on the other hand, the quality of the potential is higher because of the individual care.
According to ITSMA, the team credited with coining ABM, by shifting the funnel, the traditional roles of the sales and marketing teams become relaxed. Boundaries are blurred and collaboration between departments work to provide value – real, tangible value. Teams work together to help clients reach their goals.
If sales and marketing teams are client-first focused, the end result is success for the client and success for your company. So, what ABM principles should you be taking into into 2017 to pump up your B2B marketing strategy?
1. Play well with others.
Sales and marketing must be aligned. Period. They have to share knowledge, information, insights and they have to work together to understand the client’s needs to create a solution that works for the client and drives revenue for their company. Win-win. This focus works to boost revenue in your B2B marketing strategy from existing clients and adding new clients who’ve been carefully identified and qualified.
2. Know your customer. And talk directly to him with the information he wants (and needs).
Good data will give marketers the information they need to tag key accounts to focus on, instead of adopting a shotgun approach to fill a sales funnel with all manner of potential clients.
Who’s searching for your product? What do they need it for? What’s their business objective? What stage of the buying cycle are they in? Analytics will provide insightful information for identifying the customer.
Once identified, the customer can be targeted with specific messaging. Connect with them through direct mail, digital ads, on social media or video, or any channel that resonates. If you’re talking directly to a client, giving them the information they need now, you’re establishing a relationship they’ll value.
3. Technology is your friend.
With sales automation tools available today, marketers can identify key customers at any stage of the buying cycle.
In a cio.com report released last spring, Noah Elkin, painted the picture of how technology can empower ABM. “Automation enables marketers to do ABM at scale, with software tools for managing leads and relationships, scoring leads, providing predictive analysis and delivering targeted content creation, coupled with programmatic advertising techniques that let marketers target identified accounts and individuals at whatever stage of the buying process they’re in.”
Technology tools to manage data culled from web analytics, lead generation or email tracking, let marketers to identify prospects. And they can deliver a customized message based on real data to an individual client.
You know who your customer is because you have technology and data to give that information to you.
As content marketing continues to shape the B2B marketing landscape, marketers have loosened their purse strings to make more room for it in the new fiscal year. A report from PulsePoint and Digiday found that by next year, content marketing will grow by 59 percent from last year – potentially outpacing seach and social budgets.
Here are a few must-haves in our digital marketing budget. Each of these tactics can help you bolster your reporting, close the loop between marketing and sales and prove ROI on your 2017 digital marketing budget.
1. Content Marketing
It’s not exactly news to say content marketing should dominate your brand’s digital marketing budget and strategy in 2017. But the way marketers are approaching content needs to mature next year. With 88 percent of B2B marketers in North America already relying on some form of content marketing, it’s no surprise people are experiencing a sort of content shock. They’ve become almost numb to the mountains of content surrounding them.
No longer can we just create an onslaught of mediocre content designed to boost search results. We’re competing with everything that’s ever been published in the history of the internet. Quality matters a whole lot more now than quantity. Around 39 percent of marketers are upping spending on the trend in 2017 to stand out.
2. Video Marketing (and Live Streaming)
It doesn’t take Chewbacca Mom to show us how important visual storytelling has become. Consumers like to watch video – as many as four times as many consumers prefer to digest video over text. But video is hard. When you add in no ability to edit, limited consistency and a lack of strategy you’ve created a recipe for disaster to your brand. Scott Stratten of UnMarketing said Live Video is just content marketing’s latest shiny object. “Content shouldn’t be a training bra,” he said to those jumping in to the “Live” trend with both feet without a clear plan ahead.
But that doesn’t mean live stream videos will dissolve. In fact, we can expect the trend to go from novelty to marketing mainstream in the new year. Technology will allow the “consumer as voyeur” model to grow. Add in a sense of urgency to watch now or miss out, and we’ve hooked consumers – even in the B2B space.
3. Strategy Creation
Creating content for the sake of pushing something out the door is not a content marketing strategy. A slew of mediocre content stemming from a lack of commitment to your content strategy will hurt your brand far more than doing no content at all. Most (around 90 percent) businesses use some sort of content marketing and 78 percent of CMOs see custom content as the way of the future.
But here’s the problem, most B2B content marketers don’t have a written strategy. According to the 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report from Content Marketing Institute, only 37 percent of B2B marketers have a written strategy. It’s time to slow down and figure out why we’re creating – not just how. Be strategic and find your content marketing mission. Figure out who you’re trying to reach, what your goals are, when and where you can deliver content at any given stage of the buyer’s journey, and most importantly, why does it matter? Spend the time and put the resources to nail your strategy into your digital marketing budget.
4. Content Distribution
“If you build it, they will come” is a myth in content marketing.
In a world where 13 Potatoes That Look Like Channing Tatum is viral-worthy content, is good writing worth the effort? You bet. But good content is only noticed if sharing it is an integral piece of your marketing effort.
If you want to give your content a fighting chance, you need an engine to drive it. We can’t afford to create content projects without them ever seeing the light of day anymore. We need a way to get information in front of our most important contacts. Marketers are looking to decentralize content, according to Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2016 Report. Many are experimenting with taking their content to new channels to see what resonates with their audience.
Paid content can give you a small boost, but 90 percent of social clicks go to organic content and on Google, organic content commands 80 percent of clicks. Before we spend the time creating a piece of content, we need to ask ourselves, “Who cares” Then figure out why and build a network to amplify your work.
5. IoT
The Internet of Things means content, marketing and analytics are everywhere, from our mobile phones to our internet-enabled refrigerators. Experts are predicting a giant network of connected “things” to generate in the not so distant future. Anything that can be connected, will be connected.
IoT is a whole new world of endless opportunities to connect with consumers. The uber-network of connectivity will offer up more data in 2017 that can be turned into meaningful and actionable marketing strategies. And, it’ll lead way to more specific insight on consumer habits and preferences – equipping marketers to target their audience more accurately.
6. Cross-Device Marketing Strategies
The average consumer is connected through five addressable devices. That means as marketers, we’re looking at five times the work to make sure the content you’ve created is fit for consumption on all different platforms – even entirely new channels (like wearable devices) you need to account for in your digital marketing budget.
7. Invest in Social (But Focus on the Analytics)
Social media is still in its infancy. According to a DMA report, fewer than a third of businesses are collecting data from social media. Add that to a marketing spend expected to jump from 10.7 percent of your digital marketing budget to 23.8 percent in 2021, and we’ve still got a lot of learning left to do.
8. Account-Based Marketing
There’s been a seismic shift in consultant marketing that’s seriously looked at new customer-obsessed approaches that team up marketing and sales to gain long-term, high engagement revenue relationships with key accounts. ABM is flipping your lead funnel – concentrating on the best fit customers for your brand first, then giving marketing teams more stake in post-sale customer experience (CX) and ultimately driving advocate marketing as a key process for success.
According to Demand Gen Report, 69 percent of B2B buyers say the most influential aspect of a company’s website is content that speaks directly to their needs. Marketing needs to pinpoint to a specific persona, and talk to their pains. Technologies like Salesloft and Salesforce (among others) help tag a list of companies that fit our best-fit customer criteria, so stack them into your digital marketing budget.
9. SEO
SEO is, has been, and will remain, the lifeblood of online business. And now we need to look at SEO and content marketing as BFFs. But the shifting algorithms and changing search patterns are about as easy to master as a giant Rubik’s cube. And according to data released by SEMrush in July, most websites aren’t doing SEO well. Around 50 percent of websites host duplicate content while 45 percent have missing ALT attributions.
In 2017, we’ll expect to see an increase in quality content and content density – or content’s “per word” value. And UX is going to be an integral part of the SEO puzzle. The expectations from consumers are higher than they were five years ago. Sites with faster load speeds, mobile optimization and low bounce rates are going to be rewarded next year.
10. Email and Marketing Automation
Email needs a better PR agency. Everyone uses it, but if you listen to the tech pundits who’ve created the “next big <whatever it is>,” email is dead. Again.
Disclaimer: You can’t code creativity and you can’t program publishing. If you don’t have a sound strategy in place, no matter what technology you have, you won’t see maximum success.
With that out of the way, we just need to look at what technology and which tools to choose. There is no one-stack-fits-all approach. With somewhere around 4,000 marketing technology tools available, as highlighted in Scott Brinker’s mammoth marketing technology infographic, evaluating your options is the first step. We’re moving from a futuristic look to a reality of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Expect the unexpected technologies to solve problems you don’t know you have, and allocate for them in your digital marketing budget.
12. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing creates word-of-mouth advertising. It’s tapping into the network of people who are trusted in specific circles. Influential people say they like your brand, building your image, authenticity and credibility in the minds of their followers. According to a study from Nielsen, around 92 percent of consumers admit to valuing an endorsement from word-of-mouth recommendations over any form of branded content they’re served up.
Brands are looking to invest more time and resources to identify and align with the right influencers who believe in their brand and can amplify their message to the right audience.
Writing a follow up email is hard. You’re working to snag the attention of a prospect who has an inbox full of droning provocations and unsolicited gloom, laden with demanding sales folks prodding them to take action they’d, more often than not, rather skip. Emails with real value tend to slip through the cracks.
The “Delete” response on cold emails is so fast today. An average buyer gets somewhere around +100 emails a day, but only opens 23 percent of them, according to a study by Tellwise. Moreover, that buyer is only clicking on 2 percent of them. But, according to SiriusDecisions, the average sales person only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.
And I get it. You don’t want to be a pain in the keister. We all want to avoid being annoying at the risk of having to face rejection. But it’s our job to make sure we’re aligned with what our prospects want and need. The trick is to make your follow up email creative and useful so it doesn’t feel like a follow up. Here’s how:
1. Know who you’re talking to.
Do a little research on who you’re dealing with in your email. Understand your persona so you can figure out how best to relate to them in your follow up email.
To get a heat check on your prospect, hit their social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to see what kind of content they’re responding to and how they’re responding to it. These channels will help you gauge what tone you can use to approach someone without offending them.
Humanize your approach. Talk to your prospect like a person, not just a number on the spreadsheet. Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14 percent and boost conversion rates by as much as 10 percent, according to the Aberdeen Group.
2. Nail the subject line.
According to our friend Jay Baer over at Convince and Convert, some 33 percent of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on the subject line alone. It might seem like a tiny afterthought for your follow up email, but the subject line is the first impression you have on your recipients.
Creating a subject line is cinch. But creating a subject line that gets read? That’s a lot harder. Too many people lack creativity and end with a product like this:
Hello. My name is Annie of Arendelle. I’m with company XYZ. We specialize in…I can save you…for free!
If you’re going to be wasting your time and the prospects, then please continue sending opening lines like this. Nothing spells SPAM quite like a subject line with words like “free,” “trial,” “quick,” “limited,” or “save.” So skip those trigger words. If you’re following up on a cold email, keep it short and sweet. If you’ve had a previous conversation, inject part of your conversation into the header. The moment I read a subject line linking prior communication, I know it’s legit and not offering up a timeshare in the Bahamas. Your subject line counts, so don’t knee-jerk it.
3. Make the prospect your story’s hero.
Stop making your follow up email all about you. I know you can help solve a pain point and add value. You’re just trying to make an impact and <insert buzzword>. But if you can’t get their attention, you’ll end up with a fate no different than any of your competitors (hello, trash bin).
No one has to read your email.
Ask yourself why a prospect should care about what you have to offer. Shift the focus from what your product is to a solution answering their problem. Like Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers said, don’t amplify the act of progressing, amplify the value of it. Be customer-centric, look at what they need, what they want. And slide in your solution.
4. Get to the point. (And get there fast.)
In general, I think brevity always rules. As our friend Ann Handley said in Everybody Writes, if you can say something more simply, then you should. Skip the open-ended questions and be proactively specific in your messaging. If your goal is to schedule a meeting, then ask for it. Don’t waste the time of your recipient by beating around the bush.
People skim emails looking for the main highlights. Short paragraphs and bullets are great ways to make sure your key points are front and center. You have only a few seconds (8.5 seconds to be specific) to catch your reader’s attention. Get to the most important points, and get there fast.
5. Position your follow up email and value alignment.
The solution your company provides solves a real pain point for your prospect. You’re not selling something frivolous, you have something that will really help your prospect increase revenue. If only you can get them to listen and understand.
Some 70 percent of prospects make purchasing decisions to solve problems, while 30 percent make the decision to gain something. So reach out with confidence to align your product or service with their needs or wants.
6. Be human (and unexpected).
Most follow up email messages are straightforward and serious (and seriously boring). Mix in a little twist to craft the unexpected and get noticed. If you’ve done your research on the prospect and think they can handle it, throw in a little (tasteful) humor to mix things up. Get a pulse of their personality through their Twitter or Facebook – see what they’re talking about and what resonates with them.
Be aware, but not overly cautious. In general, if a prospect is ignoring you no matter what, sending a funny, unexpected message to show you’re still waiting on the other end is a great last-ditch effort.
And, bonus: According to Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be More Persuasive, business people who send a funny, inoffensive cartoon to their negotiation partners before negotiating creates higher levels of trust and 15 percent larger profits than those who didn’t send a cartoon.
When a life raft of happiness in the form of something funny comes along, people are quick to get on board. But to paraphrase Shakespeare, too much of a good thing can be too much of a good thing. Try not to overuse humor in the sales process. It can become annoying or off-putting at a certain point.
7. Be relevant.
Stay up-to-date with your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. You never know if you can find a little tidbit of information that’s relevant to your geographic location, education or job history that can make the world a little smaller.
Tools like Google alerts can also keep you updated with the industry and a specific company. Mention and compliment their current content – like a blog post, ebook or case study. This shows you’re researching them and you actually care about the thought leadership your prospect brings to the table. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. Every business has data. Make it meaningful and actionable to tailor your messaging.
If you decided to click and read more, you might be expecting a humorous and facetious blog post. But the reality is, I am being dead serious. We can learn a lot from the Yukon Gold Miners. Stick with me as I share a this short story. As sales professionals, we often see the defining moment of a deal cycle as the negotiation of terms. Whether you embrace it or fear it, this sales negotiation can have a lasting impact on the success of your “to be determined” partnership.
Last week, I was unwinding after a whirlwind trip in Boston at Inbound16 and catching up on one of my favorite shows, Gold Rush. (Short side bar, what an incredible conference HubSpot put on. Great company, great city and great attendees.) Back to the very timely topic at hand – sales negotiation tips to close in deals Q4 like a Yukon Gold Miner. In this particular episode, young mine boss, Parker, was attempting to renegotiate the terms of his lease agreement with Yukon legend Tony.
This is probably a good opportunity to provide a few important background details:
Parker has leased two plots of land from Tony but is currently only mining on one of those plots
Parker has been leasing from Tony for the past three years
The current lease increases royalties Parker owes Tony from 15 percent to 25 percent when production reached 3,000 ounces of gold.
Last year, Parker produced 3,000 ounces of gold from one plot of land
Tony expects Parker to increase production YOY
Parker slimmed down his crew to be more efficient and equal last year’s production, not increase it.
The past two seasons, Parker has tried to renegotiate terms with Tony.
Now that you’re up to speed, let’s dig into last week’s episode and discuss how it relates to sales. Parker was heading in for his first meeting (think one-on-one) of the new mining season with Tony. The agenda: Discuss this year’s goals and negotiate the lease terms.
He drove his Ford Raptor onto Tony’s claim and entered the office, full of hope. After a few pleasantries the two get down to business. As Parker began to outline his season’s plan immediately began to Tony challenge them. Parker expressed willingness to increase his goals in exchange for more favorable lease terms. In typical Tony-fashion — direct, abrasive but practical, he scoffed, “A deal’s a deal, Parker.” The conversation was short and both walked away dissatisfied.
As had happened in each of the last 2 seasons, Parker’s attempt was unsuccessful. Despite the opportunity and the mutual desire to find more gold, the two were unable to find a solution. “Worth a try,” said a dejected Parker as he traipsed back to his truck.
Does this sound familiar to any of your sales cycles? You’ve gained alignment around a common goal or interest yet you’re unable to solidify partnership?
How often do you get a deal here and then plummet on sales negotiation?
Everything is buttoned up, except the final price. Inevitably, in a sales negotiation like Parker and Tony’s, there will always be a winner and loser. One side gives up something, and the exchange creates an imbalance in the relationship. This asymmetry opens the door to resentment and leads to a lack of trust. Not exactly where you want to be after you’ve worked weeks or even months to build confidence, earn trust and outline business impact.
So how do you avoid a sales negotiation ending in a winner and a loser?
Develop a framework around interests, options and legitimacy. Use this framework to create an outcome that increases the overall value as opposed to focusing on how you “share” the current value. It’s surprising how often opportunity exists to “grow the pie.”
Let’s spend a bit of time looking at each element in this sales negotiation structure:
Interests: Take out a piece of paper and draw two columns. In the first, write out what your prospect needs out of the deal to make your product or service a success. Then, in the second column, dissect what’d make the deal a win on your end. What are the common threads?
Options: Think differently! Explore a solution for each interest on the list. Create the options first, and evaluate them after. List out all the options that could lead to success. Leave out nothing. After all of the possible options have been listed, go over each and figure out if they’re really solving the problem for both of you.
Legitimacy: Take yourself out of the situation as best as you can, and look at the options at hand. Are they fair to your prospect? How about to you? Can you prove the legitimacy of the option? Figure out acceptable standards of fairness and talk about them to reach an equally beneficial resolution.
Looks simple here, right? But anytime you have high stakes and emotions to manage, things get challenging.
Let’s take a look back to our friends Parker and Tony. As Parker was pulling away, Tony ran out of his make-shift office and did something unexpected – he proposed a solution. He set aside his emotional, ego-driven “need to win,” and instead focused on creating more value. In his proposal, he looked for a way to increase the value of the pair’s relationship without restructuring the lease agreement. He focused on their mutual interests, not finding a “balance.” Let’s look at those interests:
Parker wants to mine more than 3,000 ounces.
Tony wants Parker to mine more than 3,000 ounces.
Tony did what we should be doing as sales professionals.
He found a solution that was right under his nose that met their mutual interests while maintaining the integrity of the lease agreement. What did he offer? And how did this result in a superior partnership?
He offered Parker to opportunity start a second operation, using a different crew, different equipment and separate royalty structure on the second plot of land Parker had previously leased but was not currently working.
In doing so, he allowed Parker to mine gold at 15 percent from the two separate operations instead of aggregating it and forcing the increased royalty.
The result is what we all strive for in our professional relationships. Collaboration that increased the overall value of the partnership. Isn’t that what partnership is all about anyway? Generating additional value than you could alone.
Tony is now going to get 15 percent on 4,000 ounces, or an incremental $180k
Parker get’s to mine an additional 1,000 ounces worth roughly $1.2million
It’s amazing what two miners, one at age 19 and the other at 56 – living thousands of miles away from a major business hub, can accomplish.
Will every deal work out like Tony and Parker’s? Probably not. It takes a willingness to adjust personal perspective, from both sides. It took Parker and Tony three years to find this working relationship. As sales professionals, most of us don’t have three years to get it right with monthly, quarterly and annual quotas.
But when it does work out, when you experience this rare and beautiful kind of mutual sales negotiation, deals can become truly precious to your organization. Negotiating with a goal of deriving a higher value and then using a framework of joint interests to develop your options will end in better partnerships and bigger deals.
This series has quickly become one of our favorites here at Sigstr. And it was only a matter of time before we conjured up a host of funny email signatures for our favorite Harry Potter characters. Considering last night’s premiere of the ninth cinematic installment in the Wizarding World of J.K. Rowling, timing couldn’t be more perfect.
It’s been nearly 20 years (next year) since our world was first introduced to the Harry Potter universe. And a decade and a half from the time the “boy who lived,” hit the big screen for the first time. If you’ve been living under a rock for these last 20 years, be advised: Spoilers ahead.
Those we love:
For the characters we loved, we envisioned a life for them post-Deathly Hallows Pt. II.
Harry Potter
Harry was always exceptionally talented at the defense against the dark arts. He rose to the occasion in the era of Dolores Umbridge to teach his peers charms and spells to protect themselves. It seemed only fitting that, after he saved the world, he’d go on to teach the students of Hogwarts. Hopefully his tenure is much, much longer than the average Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.
Ronald Weasley
The realms most beloved ginger. Now that he is not chasing horcruxes around the world with Harry and Hermione, Ron has had the time to get back into his favorite hobby: wizard’s chess. He’s won two back-to-back world championships since Voldemort kicked the can. The match he is most proud of has been turned into a book, thanks to the help of his uber-successful fiancee , Hermione. (If you forget the life-size version Harry, Hermione & Ron played to retrieve the Sorcerer’s Stone from the grips of Quirinus Quirrell masked as Voldemort, here’s the highlight reel.) Ron has also joined his brother George as the sales manager of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes in Fred’s absence.
Hermione Granger
Hermione has been widely known as the smartest, nerdiest book-worm that’s ever walked the halls of Hogwarts. After the Horcrux hunt ceased, Hermione had plenty of time to put her brilliant brain to good use. Through the use of her time-turner, Hermione was able to discover the science behind the temporal paradox. She reached the breakthrough necessary to make time-travel possible for muggles! And was given the Nobel Prize for her discovery. She wrote a book about her studies, which received a Pulitzer and earned her a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list. And it landed her a gig as a speaker in the TED video series.
Luna Lovegood
Luna has always been the most enigmatic and fortuitous character in the series. Was there any surprise that Luna’s patronus was a bunny rabbit? Outsiders think she’s a bit of a lunatic, but those closest to her know that she is delightfully optimistic and just a bit quirky. Her fascination with the mythical and mysterious earned her a position as the new editor-in-chief of her father’s beloved Quibbler. She is able to write about all the odd conspiracies, imaginary creatures and kooky topics that she likes.
Neville Longbottom
From the time he was a shy, nervous and slightly portly little boy who stood up against his friends to protect the Gryffindor reputation, he’s been a crowd fave. Neville was lovable in his adorable attempts at wizardry as a neophyte, but has transformed into the humble hero. Thanks, mostly to Harry’s teachings in the defense against the dark arts, Neville honed his skills and put them to good use in the Battle of Hogwarts. Neville was honored for serving up the final blow to Voldemort’s horcrux-hosting snake, Nagini. The strike weakened the dark lord, letting Harry halt his reign. It also didn’t hurt when Neville hit puberty. Whoa. Adulthood looks good on him. After the battle, Neville has taken up a career in personal training, helping others snag the same transformation he did.
Those we lost
For the characters that we lost, we gave them funny email signatures tied to how we last saw them.
Dobby
Suffering the hand of the Malfoy family for ages before Harry tricked Lucius Malfoy into freeing the house elf by hiding a sock in a book, Dobby’s declaration of freedom was one of the most heartwarming scenes in a 90s kid’s childhood. His positivity radiates and his unwavering loyalty to Harry Potter – and the entire mission of the Order of the Phoenix – secured him a slot on our top loveables list.
Fred & George Weasley
OK so Fred’s still alive – we know that. But poor George was one of the most unfortunate casualties in the Battle of Hogwarts. We can only imagine considering Fred and George’s relationship that they would share one email. They’re using their email signature to promote their pride and joy: Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. Their store boasts a plethora of fun-filled items used to surprise and delight. Best known for their extendable ears, practical joke products that allowed students to eat a lolly and fake sick well enough to skip class, magical fireworks and love potions.
Lord Voldemort
Lord Voldemort sucked – good riddance. We are happy he’s gone. We only included him because we know he would have the most heinous looking email signature. If Voldemort were to have an email signature, he would want it to evoke some kind of horrible and annoying feeling.
Now showing: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the story behind Harry Potter universe. With five films already planned, this is mostly a stand-alone adventure that just happens to be set in the same world. Now that you’ve been prepped with these funny email signatures, we’ll see you at the theater this weekend!
Last week, a cool 19,000 marketers hung out in Boston at HubSpot’s 2016 inbound marketing conference. And I was one of them. My time was divided, mostly spent bouncing between Club Inbound (where my sales team was headquartered), and geeking out in the breakout sessions where I was left ferociously jotting down notes and listening to dozens of the marketing masterminds.
Some sessions were tactical – figuring out the how-to’s and why-to’s. Others were aspirational, evoking an excitement I thought had lost in a sea of mundane Mondays. A healthy dose of both left the marketers at the inbound marketing conference walking away with renewed urgency and motivation for greatness. Through the week, I was reminded to take time to structure and build a quality strategy. It’s just as important (if not more so) than the everyday execution and grind. You must have both to power an inbound and content marketing machine. But one comes before the other.
Here are three takeaways from last week’s inbound marketing conference:
1. Goals and Benchmarks
Yes, your marketing team is scrambling everyday to pump out content and build your brand. But, what’s the ultimate goal they’re working toward to help the bottom line of the company? Yearly, quarterly, monthly and even weekly goals are important for marketing teams to determine before the work starts. These incremental goals help your team to stay on task and stay focused. And they serve as a framework to answer the questions of how and where to spend time.
With the million-and-a-half requests, ideas and projects that pile up on a marketing team’s plate, goals can also help you say no to some tasks. Or at least, “Not right now…I’ll add it to our backlog of requests.” And, they can be used to explain why other priorities (like generating qualified leads with content) are more important.
2. Content and Keywords
Content is important, yet it’s up to you and your team to make sure it’s effective. Remember, no one has to read what you write. What you create must resonate. You’ve got to respect your audience’s time so you really must to understand what your readers what to know. And you know you’ve got to use the right keywords to help your content get found, but what are they?
Be picky with your keyword selection and eliminate irrelevant search queries using negative keywords. Figure out which keywords are too hard, too broad or just irrelevant to your audience before you spend 20+ hours writing and designing your next ebook or white paper.
Producing quality content takes time and resources. For a small marketing team supporting ambitious company goals, that time and those resources need to be allocated to the right priorities (because you can’t afford to waste either with sub-par content).
3. Understanding Your Buyer and Targeting Personas
Sure, casting a wide net may generate a few hundred leads for your sales team and gives your marketing team a warm and fuzzy feeling. But, those leads may never convert to qualified opportunities or closed/won business. Why? Because none of those prospects were your ideal buyer.
A sales and marketing team can start to understand their ideal prospect by analyzing their current customers (or past qualified prospects) and forming personas. Is “Mary the Digital Marketer” the type of prospect who will see value in your product or service and helps influence the decision making process? Yeah? Great! She should be one of your targeted personas for your next marketing campaign.
#INBOUND16 was incredibly valuable, entertaining and exhausting for my whole team (did someone say coffee?). These three keys I’ve brought will bring a renewed focus for this quarter (and then some). Want to know the best part of #INBOUND16? With hundreds of breakout sessions ranging across barrage subjects, someone else has brought home three entirely different takeaways.
On behalf of the entire Sigstr team, a sincere thanks to everyone (both familiar faces and new friends) who stopped by the Sigstr booth and spent time with us. Not only was I saturated with the valuable knowledge from the breakout sessions, but I also gained so much just by talking to marketing leaders on the Club Inbound floor and listening to their strategies, goals and challenges.
Let us know what your main takeaways from this inbound marketing conference by tweeting @SigstrApp! Until next year, Inbound!
It’s INBOUND season! HubSpot’s signature inbound marketing conference has brought more than 14,000 attendees, from across the world, to Boston to hear a boss line up of keynotes and session speakers. Featuring Anna Kendrick, Alec Baldwin, Serena Williams, Gary Vaynerchuk and others, sales and marketing teams are getting real-world best practices. While, at the same time, sessions with HubSpot pros like Matthew Barby and Jordan Benjamin and marketing masterminds like Ann Handley (YESS!) and Tesla’s Jon McNeill give attendees hands-on practice.
INBOUND 2016 is an industry event that fuels the movement. While there, learners hear the newest strategies and techniques for content and content marketing. Plus it helps with sales and marketing alignment and pushes teams to move faster, while becoming more in sync.
It’s not a HubSpot user conference, per se, but rather it’s an event chock-full of stellar speakers, content and entertainment for all marketers. (Though, HubSpot is the conference’s largest sponsor.) So, as a part of their marketing strategy for the event, HubSpot used Sigstr as a new marketing channel to drive engagement and registrations with their custom email signature.
HubSpot on-boarded members of their marketing team with clickable call-to-action banners for their first INBOUND 2016 custom email signature in September. The engagement spiked as the group targeted messaging for their end recipients.
WHAT WE LOVE:
Of course we love the custom email signature design! That’s a no brainer. The HubSpot pros know what they’re doing. They used no more than three focal colors for any campaign. And then they added a captivating (and clear) call-to-action. HubSpot designers also kept a consistent logo and placement for brand recognition for all of their campaigns prior to Inbound.
But what we really love is the way they used their campaigns.
The group used three different signature banners during the promotion of Inbound 2016. The first one focused on learning more about the event. It was the initial push for registrations, and injected onto the marketing team’s signature and a few in HR. This campaign was received more than 210,000 times.
Then, the company implemented an additional campaign, similar in design, that included a call-to-action for discounted tickets. This campaign was used, primarily for the sales team.
And as soon as the event kicked off, HubSpot changed their email signature design to promote their live stream on Facebook. Every email sent prior to the start of the event dynamically updated to display the current campaign. In the first two days, the latest campaign has been seen more than 16,000 times.
Sigstr Shout-Out is a series that features the insanely talented and creatively driven Sigstr customer campaigns so you can see custom email signature best practices in action – and who’s nailing them.
The day has finally come! We’ve arrived at INBOUND 2016, HubSpot’s annual event for marketing and sales pros. The event is following up last year’s slate of headline speakers like Amy Schumer and Aziz Ansari with Serena Williams, Anna Kendrick, Alec Baldwin, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates and the creators of the Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer.”
Last week, we talked about how excited we were about Club INBOUND, the expo hall with its own DJ, snacks, food truck lunches, drinks and refuel stations. Oh and a ton of stellar sponsors (like us) to make awesome conference connections! As we said last week, any expo hall that is referred to as a “club” is definitely something we want to get involved in.
Club INBOUND does not disappoint!
We are totally and completely blown away by the atmosphere here. It really has become a trip to the mecca of inbound marketing. HubSpot has created an electric vibe at every intersection. Their employees are accommodating and truly helpful. They want to make sure each of the 14,000 visitors has an amazing week.
This movement HubSpot has driven through Inbound has created a community unlike anything we’ve ever been a part of. The conference connections we’ve made already, on day one, has made this one of the greatest networking events for business folks and marketing minds from across the globe.
With this many brilliant marketers in one mega-sized, HubSpot-coated conference center, it was bound to happen (<<see what we did there?)
Inbound 2016 is a marketer’s bliss. Through innovation and some truly excellent marketing puns (see: the pitchbox – which will give winning startups more than $30,000 in prizes and a fantastic laugh), the convention center is abound with conference connections and pure creativity. We’ve been served up camaraderie with a side of brainstorming. In fact, we’ve had marketers come by our booth, hoping to get a look into Sigstr yet have walked away teaching us something (oh and they’re definitely learning the best in email signatures, too). We’re sharing ideas how we can market Sigstr, and then collaborating how we can help them market their brand.
The marketing brainpower in Club INBOUND is unrivaled.
Not to mention, the entertainment!
The DJ has brought the heat in providing a fun and energizing environment. They’re spinning tracks from Jackson 5 to Billy Joel. And then Bruno Mars to Nelly. We haven’t stopped dancing.
We’ve never been more excited to be a part of something.
It’s only day one and we’re already geeking out. Stay tuned to learn more about these Seaport Parties happening tonight. Like we said last week, we’re not entirely sure what these are, and what they entail, but we are absolutely sure we can’t wait to find out.
Are you at #INBOUND16 this week? If so, come visit our booth! And if not, follow along with the excitement on Twitter @SigstrApp!
What’s your visual style? In the B2B space, brands have become visual storytellers, creating content with a greater emphasis put on style and design to create a more compelling visual storyline. Through telling your story with design, it’s become a marketer’s marvel that lends a lighthearted visual punch line to a story that may have otherwise lost its lure. It’s happening on visual platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and it’s been applied to ebooks and case studies. Now, we’re helping you to incorporate design to craft creative email signatures as a way to drive marketing ROI.
But how do you know what works? What images are the most eye-catching? Which colors resonate with a viewer best. What kind of files should you use? Where should the CTA go? How do campaigns work in the email signature? What does success look like?
Tune into our webinar to learn how to design a creative email signature that will drive engagement and produce real marketing ROI.
Presenters: Michael Auer & Kolby Coy
When: Wed., Nov. 16, 2016, 2 P.M.
Length: 60 minutes
In this webinar, you’ll learn the secrets to designing Sigstr campaign banners like a pro, from our pros, to help your content resonate with your audience. From understanding the elements of a successful campaign to managing a campaign strategy, you’ll walk away with ideas to create salient styles to put into your human-readable emails (read: not your just your email marketing campaign).
Presenters:
Michael Auer is the lead designer at Sigstr. He’s the mastermind behind our design services and brings together content, web design and digital events to engage audiences through visual storytelling. Michael designs creative email signatures and campaigns with, and for, customers daily. And he’s produced more than 1000 campaign designs in the last 11 months. Take a look at his design process, and check out his post on Back to the Future for some of his most recent designs.
Kolby Coy is a senior customer success manager at Sigstr. She works with customers every day to make sure they hit the mark with their creative email signatures every time. She collaborates with marketing teams to shout their messaging through a digital microphone in the signature space and customize success in campaign strategies. Before coming to Sigstr, Kolby was a Global Marketing Strategist, which helps her to understand to a marketer’s dilemma in content distribution.
Who Should Attend?
Bring in your content marketers, directors of marketing, designers, product managers and email marketing managers. And don’t forget any marketer who is interested in stepping up their design game.
What Will You Learn?
At the end of the webinar you’ll:
Understand the elements of creative email signatures and campaigns
Know how to apply the best practices while designing campaign banners
You’ll know how to create a campaign design in Sketch (don’t use Sketch? That’s okay, the techniques translate well to Photoshop and other design application platforms.)
Find out how to manage a campaign strategy
See our favorite campaigns and use cases for design inspiration
How to Register:
Whether you’re looking to brush up your design skills or are looking into crafting creative email signatures for the first time, this webinar will help you hone your content distribution strategy through visual design.
Here at Sigstr, we love our fictional characters and enjoy imagining what their email signatures would look like. That said, we’re back with another post about movie characters and their email signatures. I love Back to the Future – it’s undoubtedly the best film franchise of all time. When I was asked to contribute to Sigstr’s blog, I knew exactly what I wanted to write. I know, for a fact, if these folks were alive in 2016 they’d each have a pretty cool email signature.
Doctor Emmett Brown
Doc, the unsung hero of Hill Valley, just finished up his latest time traveling adventures with his family and was invited to Harvard to talk about some of his research. This cool email signature is oddly eclectic, yet calculated.
Strickland
Strickland is an enigma to the students of Hill Valley High. He’s always acting grumpy and calling students “Slackers.” He also seemingly hasn’t aged a day in the last 30 years. Strickland has a “Nickel’s worth of free advice” for everyone which is why he’s written a guest editorial for the Telegraph. His email signature is clean and dull – just like himself, apart from that painful disclaimer. Are we surprised that Strickland would have one of those off putting and highly unnecessary disclaimers in his email signature?
Biff Tannen
Biff is an all around butt-head. He and his gang call the shots at Hill Valley High School, so getting on their bad side is not the best idea. He’s using his email signature to find some new cronies. Biff doesn’t use correct capitalization or spelling – his writing is… not good (George does all his homework).
George McFly
George McFly has found success in writing Sci-Fi novels including the book everybody’s raving about – A Match Made In Space. This week, he’s stopping by Cafe 80’s for an exclusive book signing. Tickets are going fast – get yours today! George keeps it simple with his cool email signature, touting his acclamation and advertising his mailing list.
“Goldie” Wilson
After working in a diner for several years, Goldie went to night school and worked his butt off to become “The Most Powerful Man In Hill Valley.” He proved everyone wrong by becoming the mayor, and now he’s running for re-election. A vote for Goldie is a vote for honesty, decency and integrity! Goldie has quite a few calls-to-action here, including a personal story and a call-to-arms for volunteers, all in addition to his campaign. Goldie is big on building brand awareness!
Marty McFly
Oh Marty. This slacker, wannabe rockstar and amateur time traveler just can’t seem to catch a break. After bombing out of the Hill Valley Battle of the Bands, Marty is turning to the road as a means to get famous. Marty’s email signature says it all. He wants you – to book The Pinheads at your next party. They’re “pretty darn loud” as Huey Lewis once told him but they’re pretty darn good, too.
Let us know if you think we got their email signatures right and what you would add! Better yet, you could make your own Back to the Future Email Signature or Campaign and send it to us. We’d love to see them!
For more email signature samples (the good and the bad) or tips on how to roll email signatures out to your entire company, request a demo or check out our most recent resource below.
Every flight I take, I go into it with such good intentions. “I’ve got hours of uninterrupted time, out of the office and no internet access to distract me,” I think to myself. “I’ll get so much done!” Then we board. And my intentions, met with no plan to actually get anything done, are left somewhere on the tarmac.
I’ve realized I need to be strategic and thoughtful if I’m going to make the most of my time in the air. Here are a few tips to increase your marketing productivity in flight:
For Productivity
1. Board last
A productive flight can start before you even step foot on the plane. Skip the hectic hustle of the long lines and flying elbows and hang back until the crowds have made their way on board. You’ll have more time to stretch out in the airport, you’ll avoid the unnecessary anxiety of the wait and you’ll be able to work a little longer in comfort.
2. Recognize your mindset
What does marketing productivity look like for you? How do you plan to achieve productivity on this trip? Remember, the mind creates the experience. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on a growth mindset shows evidence our realities are shaped by how our minds approach the situation. So be thoughtful and deliberate.
3. Chat with your neighbors
Headed to a digital marketing event or conference? Prime your networking game up for success by striking up a conversation with the stranger next to you. By practicing the art of making conversation with little to no information about a person will let you leave the plane with more confidence and ready to take on the crowds at your event! Plus you never know, you may find them as a helpful contact to have down the road.
4. Write down the top five goals you hope to accomplish with the trip
Write down the top five goals you hope to accomplish as you head off on your trip, and then reassess them on your trip home. Putting clear goals down on paper will help you create an action plan to make sure they get done.
5. Check your social
If you have Wi-Fi, take a look at your online profiles and make sure they’re all up to date. If you’re headed to a conference, you’ll be meeting hundreds of new faces and they’re all going to want to check out your details on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. So make sure you’re putting your best image on display.
6. Download and listen to a new podcast
Download as many as you can (here’s one of our favorites). Listening to podcasts uses less battery than watching a movie and are considerably more distracting than music. Grab a pair of noise canceling head phones and you’ll be set for the whole flight.
7. Plan ahead
Brainstorm your agenda for the trip when you’re on board. You’ve figured out what you want to accomplish during the trip. Now spend some time on making a plan to get it done. Be strategic and thoughtful, but keep your expectations realistic and manageable.
8. Stay hydrated
The low-humidity environment can cause headaches, stomach problems, cramps, fatigue and the like, but drinking plenty of water or sports drinks with electrolytes can help keep it at bay. Bonus, it’ll help your natural immune mechanisms to function better, helping you to avoid a cold when you get back home.
A good rule of thumb is to drink around eight ounces of water for every hour you’re in the air.
9. Relax
Take a nap. Meditate. Watch that cheesy chick-flick you’ve been eyeing. Just chill out. Whether your flight is two hours or 12, you can’t work nonstop. Remember, the human body is hardwired to pulse, moving through 90-minute rhythms during the day. We need off time to produce a better on time.
10. Keep your devices charged
As you travel from point A to B, it’s easy to forget that your laptop (with everything you need on it) is going to need a way to stay alive. So put your devices in airplane mode to save battery and travel with your device chargers. If you have a mobile power strip, slide that guy into your carry on.
11. Read
Grab a business book you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t had the time. Don’t have any on your reading list? Check out Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman or Welcome to the Funnel by the head of global content and social initiatives for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Jason Miller.
For Fun
12. Brown paper bag lunch
Let’s be honest, eating is (almost) always fun. But airplane food can leave a little to be desired. So pack yourself a meal and some snacks that you know will keep you going. Plus, you can make fun art on the bag!
13. Make up mad libs
Keep your team’s content creation skills on point by getting creative with clever mad lib games. Grab an activity book at the airport, print some out ahead of time or just open up your Sky Mall Magazine. Then go to town on the descriptions.
14. Get competitive
Bring some scrap paper in your carry-on and have a paper plane competition with your neighbor. Ask the flight attendant to be the judge and loser buys a round of drinks either in flight or when you land.
15. Go for a walk
Flight staff frown on gathering in the galley ways, but there’s no rule against walking on the airplane. The low air pressure in the cabin can slow your circulation which can lead to blood clots. Just try to avoid getting up when the food cart is coming your way.
16. Grab a cheap coloring book and go to town
Digital marketers are creative by nature, so pass the time by letting your creative juices flow right onto the pages of a coloring book. Coloring is mindless, therapeutic and, frankly, it’s just a lot of fun. And just because you’re a “grown-up” doesn’t mean you need to color inside the lines. But in case turning Queen Else into a hipster with full-rim glasses and a tie-dyed skirt isn’t quite your style, there are tons of coloring books made just for “adults,” too.
17. Whip out some airplane Bingo
Traveling with coworkers? Awesome! Find a Bingo board online and keep an eye out for five in a row. Use peanuts or pretzels to mark your winners. Make a few copies ahead of the flight so you can change out the squares with new things to spot, you know, for variety’s sake.
Heading off to Inbound 2016 next week? Swing by the Sigstr booth and say hi! Sign up for a demo and get a sweet t-shirt!
Next week, over 14,000 people will converge on the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center for Inbound 2016. One of the largest marketing events put on by the masters of inbound marketing at Hubspot, the digital marketing conference is a chance to collaborate with the smartest minds in the field.
In a marketing scene as ephemeral as Twitter, the opportunity to sharpen our skills with face-to-face training, killer content and hands-on learning (not to mention tons of networking), attending conferences is one of our top priorities every year. But at each conference, we tend to see similar personas filling the convention centers.
Check out the 11 personalities we’re psyched to see next week:
1. The Networker
The Networker wants to meet everyone and make lasting connections. This person is mixing and mingling, forming new relationships and strengthening existing ones. He’s charming you into meeting up for coffee, lunch or cocktails. And, he seems to be talking with someone new every time you turn around. The Networker is making real-time LinkedIn connections, handing out business cards and making friends with all the thought leaders.
After the sessions, you can find The Networker chatting up a multitude of different groups during the happy hour, then hitting the clubs with the right connections. Then somehow, after being the life of the party until 4 a.m., he arrives to each session, early, looking impossibly fresh and ready to take on a new day of connecting (oh and a little learning, too).
2. The Entrepreneur
Find The Entrepreneur walking around the convention center suited up in their cool startup t-shirt and blazer. They have a million and one things to do, people to pitch, t-shirts to give away. What’s that you say? You want to invest?
The Entrepreneur is attending in part to buddy up with The Networker and on the other hand looking to get inspired for their next brilliant product release.
3. The Salesman
Operation: Close-a-Deal is in full effect. The Salesman is slick, smart, cool and ready to pitch you with whatever they’ve got at a moment’s notice. The Salesman has a knack for finding and schmoozing the decision-makers of every pack. He’s making the right contacts and impressing the new-found brand champions so the group is ready to sign on the dotted line as soon as they get back from the digital marketing conference.
4. The Valedictorian
Soaking up as much information as possible, The Valedictorian is taking diligent notes, detailed enough to perform the session in its entirety when she goes home. She’s taking notes, live-tweeting the hot topics and actually listening all at the same time. The Valedictorian is quiet – you might not even know she’s there until she begins asking a barrage of well-thought out questions during the Q&A.
Don’t plan to see her hitting up the happy hour after hours. Instead she’ll be locked away in her hotel room, ordering room service (hey, it’s on the company, right?) and studying up on tomorrow’s sessions. She might be shy, so give her a quick smile and maybe a hand carrying her notebooks, laptop, smartphone and iPad to the next session and she’ll definitely let you copy her notes.
5. The Collector
Did someone say free shirt? The Collector’s whole purpose (or so they think) for being at the digital marketing conference is to collect all the free swag. You can spot them bouncing from booth to booth grabbing all the goodies they can carry. Free pen? Need it. Can Koozie? Want it! Mobile phone chargers? Gotta have it!
Of course this guy is picking up a few knowledge pointers in the sessions, too. But they’re not going to skip out on the Tchotskies.
(Yes, we’ll be handing out some sweet t-shirts at INBOUND next week when you register for a demo. Aww yeah!)
6. The Social Media Guru
No one really knows what the Social Media Guru looks like because they’ve not yet looked up from their phone. From Tweets to Snaps and a few posts, too, this person is #Social. In fact, they just added you on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.
The Social Media Guru wants the @world to know their every move in hopes it’ll generate brand excitement for their company.
7. The Fan Girl
OMG! ANN HANDLEY IS GOING TO BE AT INBOUND16! The Fan Girl is attending the digital marketing conference on a mission to meet the keynote speakers. If there’s even the slightest chance to meet the speaker, at say a book signing or a VIP sponsor event, count her in. And she’ll be live-journaling the entire experience so she can relive it over and over (and over).
Spot The Fan Girl by watching for the person who’s forgotten how to breathe, is hyperventilating and is shaking or crying upon seeing their idol.
(Note: The Fan Girl is not limited to only females. I see you, brah, struggling to keep your cool when Anna Kendrick enters the stage.)
8. The Leslie Knope
The Leslie Knope carries a binder with notes for each session. She’s wired a little tight, but you can’t help but love her. She operates on a carefully timed out schedule, and carries along maps with the fastest route to each lecture room in the conference hall laid out.
The Leslie Knope knows how to let loose and have fun with the crew, partying it up during happy hour. But she’s also insanely responsible, so she’ll be the first to call it a night.
Oh and she’s all over the waffle line at breakfast.
9. The Model
The Model is in front of the booth displaying the latest and greatest products his company has to offer. He may not know the ins and outs of the product as well as he should, but no one seems to notice – they’ll be too busy staring to care. He books a record number of demos and gives out all of the swag. On the first day.
10. The Spy
In an effort to check out the competition, The Spy goes undercover through the vendor booths with a list of detailed questions. Who are they? What are they doing? Why do they beat out the competitors?
After the digital marketing conference is over, this guy takes the intel he’s gathered back to HQ to be analyzed. Then he uses it to create an action plan to reposition the company’s differentiators and move deals across the finish line.
11. The Partier
The Partier is ready to play! He listens all day, and engages with each session he attends. But come nightfall, he’s the first to lead the charge to Happy Hour. He’s the guy that makes friends with everyone, and knows how to talk shop and have fun.
The Partier knows how fun conferences are and wants to make it exciting and productive for everyone he meets.
Whatever your persona is at a digital marketing conference, we can’t wait to chat with you at Inbound 2016! Schedule a demo and get a sweet Sigstr t-shirt while you’re there.
Once upon a time, image was everything. Big ad budgets helped you cast a wider net and swanky façades made the brand appear new and shiny. But now, in an always-on social scene, the mask has been lifted. The porticos and polish that once made the brand shine have been stripped away. Leaving behind just the core and beautiful heart of a brand. If you’re not ready to bare that to your customers, you’ll never earn their full trust.
We all know honesty is the best policy. But the trouble is, we too often believe it in theory rather than in practice. When we feel backed into a corner, stuck in a situation that’s uncomfortable either because you didn’t do what you said you would or you can’t do what they want you to in the time they want you to do it, we think lying, or withholding the truth is a better policy.
But we’re wrong.
Truth breeds trust, especially when there are problems. Sure, people won’t always like what they hear when you tell them the truth, but they’ll respect that you had the courage to own it.
Don’t be a seller of stuff, be a reliable resource.
People say they do business with people they like, but really, they do business with people they trust. The more trust you can create, the more a prospect will share with you. You’ll be in a position to earn the right to know their pain points. And, they’ll be more apt to share their hopes and needs so you can help them make their job easier, make them more efficient, get the raise they’re after. You’ll be able to help them do whatever it is they do, only better.
And when you know their needs, you can make a realistic judgement call whether what you have to offer is actually a good fit. When you’re honest enough to turn down a potential sale, you’re actually building a customer for life. They’re still going to tell their friends all about you and they’ll want to want what you have.
Harbor a community of honesty to lead the customer’s journey.
The key to ignited sales it to create trust through honesty. But creating trust takes time. It takes sales and marketing alignment to guide a deal from awareness to action. And it should be marketing’s goal to build relationships over time. Then, when it’s time to make the sale, prospects will already trust your brand and their ready to sign on the dotted line.
Build a trusting community by being worthy of trust over time. When a person first agrees to show interest in your brand, to read the blog your marketing department has posted online or watch your latest promotional video, they’re taking a leap of faith. They’re wary of you. You’re a new voice in the marketplace (at least to them). But they take a chance and put trust in you anyway because their interest has been piqued.
When they’re interested, prospects dig a little deeper. According to the 2014 State of B2B Procurement study from the Acquity Group, 94 percent of business buyers do some form of research online. So if your company is marketing consistently as an honest brand, and showing their integrity, it’s a good guess prospects will already feel more comfortable working with the sales team.
Trust builds business, but honesty builds trust.
In a world of increasing transparency, authenticity, honesty and integrity are the only means to success. The best sales teams are honest. They’re willing to speak up if conditions aren’t favorable for the customer, even if it’ll cost them the deal. They’re willing to lose the sale if selling would mean violating their word, their values or their principles.
Sell with your heart and your soul, with honesty and integrity all wrapped up in a warm blanket of trust.
Set and meet (or exceed) realistic expectations for your prospects as they enter the funnel. When expectations aren’t met, trust is broken. And broken trust leads to missed opportunities. All despite the countless hours of hard work you’d already put into almost making something happen.
HubSpot’s Inbound conference is just around the corner and we could not be more excited. We have a rockstar crew heading out to Boston to rub elbows with the best and brightest in sales and marketing. As you may already know, we are big fans of HubSpot. We cannot wait to see what the marketing automation geniuses drum up at their biggest event of the year.
Here are the top eight things we’re most pumped about:
This is how we feel about Serena Williams being one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Inbound conference.
Serena is touted as the Best Female Athlete of All Time. But when handed the title, she quipped “Why not the greatest athlete of all time?” We can only hope she brings this level of bad-assery to the stage for her keynote. Having won 22 Grand Slams in singles, 14 Grand Slams in doubles, 775 career wins, 4 Olympic Gold Medals and a spot in Beyonce’s “Sorry” music video, we think Serena is more than qualified to speak on the topics of hard work, dedication and success.
All-star Line Up
Alec Baldwin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Anna Kendrick, Michael Strahan, Sarah Silverman, Leslie Odom Jr., the list goes on. HubSpot has brought the heat with the all-star line up of A-list speakers and celebs. We cannot wait to learn from some of the smartest in the business, laugh with some of the funniest and dance along with some of the most talented around.
Oysters and Lobster Rolls
Yum. This is one of our favorite parts about being in Boston. The oysters are unbeatable. There are a plethora of oyster bars that claim to have the best oysters in Boston, so to make it easier for you we found the list of the top 10 oyster bars you can charm your top customers or prospects with.
If you’re looking for a quick getaway lunch before heading back into a session, we have to recommend grabbing a lobster roll. They compete with the quality you will find in Maine. Be prepared to spend a bit more on the rolls than you would on an average work lunch. But don’t worry, it’s totally worth it. Here are the top 8 spots for you to grab a quick roll, with the Yankee Lobster Co being the closest walk from the conference center.
Club INBOUND
Any conference that refers to the expo hall as a “club” is a conference we would like to get involved with. Club Inbound will host it’s own DJ, snacks, food truck lunches, drinks and refuel stations, not to mention dozens of killer sponsors(Sigstr being one of them). We cannot wait to hang out in Club Inbound and network with other smart sales and marketing folks.
Boston
Boston is lovely in the fall. Truly, truly beautiful. As a group of Midwesterners, from a city that didn’t hit the map for 40 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it’s incredible to be in a city laced with so much history. When we were in Boston back in August for #FlipMyFunnel, we had dinner at the Lincoln Tavern & Restaurant. The back wall of the tavern boasted a gigantic American flag faded and shredded by time and war. A bar had a flag that flew in the Civil War. If you have a few moments (or hours) to spare while you are in Boston, see if you can check out one of these Top 10 Most Historic Sites.
Seaport Parties
Ain’t no party like a Boston Seaport party. We read that somewhere once. We’re not 100 percent sure what that means, but we are 120 percent excited about them! After working, learning and networking all day, you will have earned that seaport party.
Inbound ROCKS
The final evening of the nearly week-long inbound conference brings the biggest night of them all: Inbound ROCKS. Inbound ROCKS features comedians Sarah Silverman and Ali Wong. Sarah Silverman boasts a quick wit and politically-incorrect humor. Where Ali Wong has been a breakout star in the comedic realm when a section of her stand-up went viral. Ali brings light-hearted humor to the feminist movement while being incredibly awesome. And she’s a writer for the critically acclaimed hit, Fresh off the Boat. ABC’s new comedy on a Chinese family trying to live the American dream. And, obviously, we’re pumped for the after party, too.
These Awesome Sessions
This inbound conference provides a massive learning opportunity for innovative and curious marketers. We can’t wait to soak up all that marketing knowledge. Here are just four awesome sessions you should for sure be signing up for:
Ann Handley
ASAP (As Slow As Possible)
Jordan Benjamin
How Professional Athletes Train Their Brains for Peak Performance & How Sales Pros Can To
Jill Rowley
One Team, One Goal – Aligning Marketing & Sales for Successful Social Selling
Doug Davidoff and Doug Kessler
How to Swear in your F*^%$! Marketing
Oh, and we almost forgot! The ninth thing you should be pumped about is the opportunity to hang out with the Sigstr crew. Want to meet up with us? Let us know here! We will be the goofy group in green. The map up above will help you find us!
Something wicked this way comes. Tis All Hallow’s Eve and we’re feeling the spook!
As I sit watching the 90s-style cult classic Hocus Pocus for the dozenth time (this year), I can’t help but let my marketer mind leak a bit.
The Disney flick has been a perennial Halloween favorite, scaring up a new batch of youngsters every year since 1993. Starring Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker as a trio of evil witches, the film is a kitschy gem. The witches, known as the Sanderson Sisters, turn the tacky up to 11 through the film, becoming the scary movie for a generation of kids.
The witches are evil, that’s clear, but they’re pretty clever, too. There might even be a few killer marketing ideas I can get from them. Here are five reasons they’d make killer digital marketers:
1. They always try to rejuvenate their look
In the midst of the 1693 Salem witch trials, Thackery Binx watches as his little sister, Emily Binx, wandered off into the cottage of the Sanderson Sisters. There the Sisters, Winni, Mary and Sarah cast a spell on Emily to absorb her youth in an effort to regain their own. Winni’s potion will supposedly give them eternal life, as long as they have a continual supply of children.
While there is no secret potion that’ll dish out an endless supply of killer marketing ideas, we can learn a thing or two from the sisters in revamping our look. When your marketing goes stale, so does your business. The tough reality is, at some point in our careers, the world will change. And consumers will look for an experience that’s markedly different from what the company has been offering. Your company may be the first name in pagers, but now you’re dealing in a marketplace that no longer needs them.
If you can’t craft your own secret sauce to keep up with the changing times, you’re fated to turn to dust at daylight.
2. Loyalty wins
The Sanderson Sisters are witches from 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. When they died (the first time) there were no paved roads, or cars. They didn’t have lighters, or sprinkler systems. So on the one night they were to find the children and suck out their souls, they were met with unforeseen challenges. Throughout their adventures, they stuck together to help each other through the confusing situations.
Having a close-knit community is key in digital marketing because loyal customers and brand addicts will advocate on your team. They’ll help you to navigate the changing landscape of digital marketing and offer up killer marketing ideas to expand your network.
Don’t be afraid to be loyal to your friends and colleagues in the industry that have hung by your side, and remember to show them the love as much as you can.
3. They’re not afraid of the uncomfortable
Things didn’t go well for the Sanderson sisters on Halloween night in 1693. And, while they were uncomfortable, they didn’t shy away from their fate. Instead, they created an action plan – to return when a virgin lit the black flame candle under a full moon. The conditions had to meet a predetermined set of standards, but they knew it’d be worth the wait to get it right.
Marketing, in general, is uncomfortable. We’re tasked with pushing the limits of acceptable marketing. There’s a fine line between edgy and sarcastic and downright offensive, or worse yet, boring marketing. To get our message to resonate with our audiences we have to create action plans and act strategically. Even when that means we’re waiting for a while until conditions are just right.
4. They’re not pigeonholed
The witches have a target audience. They’re after the children of Salem. Sarah Sanderson sings her bewitching chant and lures the youngsters from their beds throughout the city, but they don’t only speak to the children. They party with the adults of Salem, casting a spell to make them dance.
And their language is decidedly retargeted from the days you watched the cult classic cuddled up between your parents as a child. The generation who grew up watching it can relive the adventure every October. And we can finally understand the too-adult-themed jokes that laced the dialogue. These jokes are hidden gems that provide the unexpected, and allow the movie to grow with you.
Have a holistic focus on your target audience, but don’t neglect other demographics. Killer marketing ideas only take legs when they’re relatable and unexpected.
5. They dare to learn new things
The world has changed dramatically from the 17th century to 1993, when the movie came out. Their perspectives are dated and the tactics they used to lure children are tired and ineffective. We watch the Sisters struggle to learn the nuances of technology in today’s Salem.
Just because something has worked for you in the past, doesn’t mean that it will still work. Go to conferences and industry events (like Hubspot’s Inbound next week – we’ll see ya there!) and continue learning the latest in marketing and in technology. It’ll help you stay ahead of your competitors and come off as professional and up-to-date to your customers.
The Sanderson Sisters are kooky evil served up with a side of nostalgia and a few killer marketing ideas. So, go sit on your couch with a plastic jack-o-lanter full of candy and turn on the cheesy 90s glory!
Halloween is Monday, and the pressure is on to figure out what to wear for your office party. Relax! Finding office halloween costumes doesn’t have to be stressful nor expensive. And you don’t have to admit creative defeat by grabbing a run of the mill costume found at every local party store. There’s still plenty of time to make use of your creativity and whip up the DIY costume of your dreams.
12 Costumes for Your Halloween Party – tomorrow
1. Fantasy Football
Grab your favorite team’s jersey and a pair of leggings, add on a wizard hat and beard and you’re the physical manifestation of your company’s fantasy football league!
2. Internet Explorer
Ah internet explorer, oh how we love to hate you. Put on your blue shorts, 1990s-style blue sweatbands on your wrists and head, and the classic Internet Explorer “e” logo. Bonus: move at a slower pace all day 🙂
3. Safari
In the spirit of Apple’s web browser, use the fun play on words and grab your finest beige blends. Khaki and beige mesh well with the colors of the savanna, so find your cargo pants or shorts and sturdy boots. Wear a pair of long white or neutral-colored socks with your boots if you’re in shorts. Put on a fishing vest over a white or beige button-down shirt. Add an Apple logo to the vest to complete the look.
4. Google Chrome
Find all the chrome! Wear a gray t-shirt with a Chrome logo attached. Hit up the hardware store and find the flex pipe and go nuts. And if people don’t get it by your appearance, just start rifling through all of their stuff for personal information (just kidding, please don’t do that!)
5. BSoD (Blue Screen of Death)
The scariest costume on the list (to Windows users, anyway), the Blue Screen of Death may be the easiest, too. All you need is a blue long-sleeved t-shirt, blue pants, and a massive, attached blue BSoD poster with white text. Customize the costume by editing the content of your BSoD with some witty text. You’ll be sure to give everyone in the office chills.
6. White Space
Designers know the importance of whitespace, and love the application. Don the look by dressing in all white. Paint your face white. Pull out your white shoes, and throw on a white wig if you’re ultra-committed.
7. Formal Apology
Take advantage of this punnerific costume, and put on your finest formalwear, like a tux or gown. Then with some construction paper and a Sharpie make a sign that says, “I’m sorry.” Tape the sign onto your outfit (or just carry it around) and Boom! You’re a Formal Apology.
8. Twitter
The social network has millions of users, but forces each one to communicate in messages of 140 characters or less, turning every last thought into tiny, unavoidable bullets of information. Cover yourself in tidbits by making use of that post-it stack on your desk.
9. Ghostwriter
A play on a classic, throw on a white sheet and cut a hole for your eyes and arms. Soak the bottom in black ink (Sharpies anyone?), and carry a notebook and pen. You’re a ghostwriter.
10. Adobe Creative Cloud
Did the whole marketing department procrastinate on their costumes? Dress as the Adobe Creative Cloud package. Marketing Director, you’re making a cloud out of white poster board and some string. Others in your posse can be the products. A light blue Placard against a navy background makes a Photoshop costume – go a step further and make a lasso tool out of painted wire. Another should dress in the Ai orange for Illustrator. You get the idea.
11. Snapchat
Another group costume to pay tribute to our favorite filters! Dress up as the butterfly filter, the flower crown or add some cat and dog ears made out of felt, hot glue and a cheap headband. Use costume makeup to draw the details of the face.
12. Candy Crush
Create a full jumpsuit emulating the Candy Crush board. Find a solid color jumpsuit or matching shirt and pants and cut out different shapes from felt you can get at the dollar store’s craft section. A little hot glue and you’re set.
What did we miss? Tweet us @SigstrApp and share your office halloween costumes! From the Sigstr team to yours, have a wonderful Halloween weekend!
Businesses pour an incredible amount of time and money into creating a positive chatter on social media. And while business development reps and account execs see a boost in return, marketing is stuck spending time and money figuring out the what and how. Should we create an ebook? Maybe a video? Will that fit well on the blog? Should we distribute this on social? Through email? Ads in the yellow pages? (Just kidding on that last one.)
But what if there were people, who knew your company better than anyone else, who actually craved the chance to spread your message?
Employee engagement ideas create employee advocates. Advocates become addicted to your brand. And brand addicts scream your message across their many social platforms online – organically spreading your marketing reach to all of their friends, family, neighbors and, really, anyone else who’ll listen.
On average, your employees have around 10 times more connections on social media than your brand has alone, according to a study from Social Chorus. That means your company with 250 employees on payroll can easily reach some 2,500 more people than your marketing department alone by creating brand advocates. A wider audience offers up a larger interest and a stronger start into the sales funnel. And, extra reach is helpful in creating a brand impression fueled by authenticity.
And getting the people who know your brand best to talk about it, in their own language, at their own free will, creates a better connection for prospects. In a 2015 Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today survey, more than 79 percent of respondents with employee advocacy programs in place reported boosted brand visibility. And 65 percent saw improved brand recognition, while 33.7 percent had stronger brand loyalty. Your people are powerful. They have reach and they have influence. So help them become addicted to your brand with a list of employee engagement ideas.
5 Steps to creating a brand addiction
1. Culture
Like my friend Jay Baersays, advocacy is born from culture. It doesn’t come from new technology or your latest marketing venture. Instead, it’s rooted in your employees’ wants and needs. Forget about the company and its shareholders for just a second, and you’ll see the people. It’s about finding their individual motivators.
The culture should be natural and authentic. Don’t try too hard. Offering up required tweets or posts is not advocacy and does not create brand addicts. It’ll signal that you don’t trust your employees enough to find something to share on their own. And it’ll show you care more about amplifying the message through them instead of nurturing their part in the company’s overall success.
Create a culture so your employees are impassioned and excited about their company’s products, environment and workplace and they’ll want to talk to others about it. They’ll be proud of their contribution to your company and encourage others to buy your products or to apply for a job.
2. Stand out
Clearly define your brand standards and offer up employee engagement ideas to encourage participation in an advocacy program. You can spend countless hours and resources developing and promoting your brand to your customers, but how well do your employees really know their company brand?
In a 2013 State of the American Workforce report from Gallup, only 41 percent of employees said they knew what the brand was or how it was different from competitors. If you expect your employees to become advocates for their company, they have to passionately believe their brand is top dog. And how can they do that if they don’t fully understand what the company stands for and how to present it to the world?
Figure out what the most confusing parts of the brand are, then formally define the brand by aligning the mission statement, core values and key message of the company. Go a step further and identify the differentiators in your company. What makes you stand out?
3. Co-create guidelines
Guidelines encourage participation in advocacy. Be clear, but not too restrictive to counteract the culture of trust and freedom you’re trying to cultivate. Shy away from actually imposing guidelines, instead opting to crowdsource them if you can. Make employee engagement ideas easy to understand and easy to stick to.
Your guidelines should enable your employee brand addicts. Offer up advice on what to share and how. Give employees an idea of where to put content and an outline of the incentives that employees can benefit from sharing.
Remember, first and foremost, what your employees want to share is entirely up to them. Whether you want them to share your latest blog post, hottest specials or company culture tidbits, it needs to be something they feel is relevant to them and to their followers. If they don’t think your content is relevant, it’s a good chance they’re going to skip sharing it. Create content to share that supports your brand, has a viral spark, and has real, authentic value.
4. Set them up with the right tools
People may be posting already, with no incentives. But you have no way to measure the impact because it’s happening irregularly. Provide them with a reason and the means to discuss something on social media – then reward them for doing so. Give them the right content, at the right time (Sigstr can help with distribution), and offer up the right rewards.
Show employees their Like, Tweet and Share are important, and let them see their own value. According to theAmerican Psychological Association, 91 percent of employees who felt valued said they were motivated to do their best work, compared to just 37 percent of employees who did not feel valued. And, 85 percent of valued employees said they’d recommend their workplace to others. Where only 15 percent of non-valued workers would.
See the impact your employees have. If your business is anticipating a new product release, or a hiring event, create a plan for communicating it internally first. Then, depending on what you’ve chosen as your primary business goal for the campaign, create employee engagement ideas to support it. If you’re looking to make the trending topics on Twitter, make a hashtag. If you’re target is share of voice, reward employees who’ve used multiple platforms in their messaging.
5. Co-create the experience
When you walk into an Apple store, an experience is immediately engaged by a T-shirt clad genius surrounded by the latest technologies. Or when a Lululemon addict shows up there for a yoga class. When a 30-something professional scans the barcode on a designer outfit at Burberry and it triggers a video of the designer storytelling about the materials and inspiration for the design – these are all co-created neurological addictive experiences.
They’re addictive because every time a customer co-creates the experience with the brand, they’re shaping the brand into the mood of the moment.
So co-create the same kinds of experiences when thinking of employee engagement ideas. It takes more than just a once-a-year holiday party to create an experience. Team outings – even for lunch. Or maybe a speaker series. Maybe it’s perks like a company yoga class. These experiences have value to your employees. They feel good, and because they feel good, your employees crave more. And they’ll share more, and more authentically.
Have you ever tried to corral information about a product you already own – maybe your dish washer’s owner’s manual or that warranty on your heat pump? Not always easy, right?
Lumavate, a SaaS application technology, was created to help by giving a digital voice to your products. It allows content to send through text, QR code or NFC directly from your product’s label or sticker to your smart phone at the exact moment you need it. Anyone from industrial drill operators to a standard homeowner can scan the equipment label to instantly access troubleshooting videos, manuals or even order product-specific parts.
The technology provides manufacturers a real-time, captive channel to reach customers to offer up relevant and helpful information. It solves customer’s most complex challenges while decreasing the manufacturer’s support costs and boosting revenue after the sale.
Finally! A way to decode the mystery language of manufacturers, in real-time, without the panicked Google search that returns results like, “10 ways you know your heat pump is going to blow-up tomorrow.”
Lumavate’s entire platform is built to provide companies a resource to improve customer loyalty by offering the right resources at the right time. So it makes sense they wanted to do the same for their customers.
Lumavate launched their first campaign at the end of July. Since then, they’ve added three more campaigns surrounding content resources like new ebooks and their blog. The group has added 30K brand-consistent impressions and they’ve seen an average .66 percent click-through rate.
Their team has created each of their four campaigns, then worked with our team to optimize design, reach and branding.
What we love [Campaign]:
Using resources like our email signature campaign best practices and our customer success team, the Lumavate team has knocked their design and branding out of the park with each new campaign. Our favorite, though, directed 1:1 email recipients to their (stellar) blog.
The first thing to shout out is their incessant desire to help their customers. Lumavate is a brand that screams brand loyalty and customer service. And the quickest way to a customer’s heart is to share a resource. They show they’re eager to provide value through education, instruction and support – all found in their blog.
Using the on-brand Lumavate orange as the primary color, the bold banner immediately becomes a focal point in the simple email signature. The designers kept the messaging clean and tight, using only three colors for visual interest while avoiding becoming too busy.
The Campaign’s call-to-action stands out, asking recipients to “click here” to read the latest and greatest blog posts from Lumavate. Which proved effective in application, gathering more than 14K impressions and a 0.66 percent click-through rate.
We also love how the group changes things up frequently. They refuse to become stale. This campaign ran for about a month before they switched up the campaign to promote their new ebook.
What we love [Signature]:
We talk with the Lumavate team almost weekly to make sure their Signature is the best representation of their brand. They’ve opted to use the simple email signature space to host the logo, creating consistent branding. And furthermore, the simplicity in the design keeps the visuals attractive.
They’ve used just two fonts, at varying weights. And only one color in the text and adding their signature orange in the logo.
The simple email signature style stayed consistent with their branding. Lumavate is a small but mighty SaaS team with insane potential and lofty growth goals. As they continue adding to their team, the Signature is scalable and consistent across the company to create cohesive branding.
What’s next:
Our customer success team will continue working with the Lumavate team as they add more names to their roll-call. The high growth market the team works in creates an ideal opportunity to leverage employee email as an owned marketing channel.
Sigstr Shout-Out is a series that features the insanely talented and creatively driven Sigstr customer campaigns so you can see simple email signature best practices in action – and who’s nailing them.
It’s not too early to get excited about Game of Thrones season seven. With the HBO hit’s sixth run now over, thoughts have inevitably turned to next year. I. Can’t. Wait.
Like most, I too have a nerdy obsession with Game Of Thrones. My colleague even called me out for it in his own nerdy post about Parks and Rec Characters and their email signatures. If you read the first post about Game of Thrones and email signatures, thank you and welcome back to part two! Why Game of Thrones again? Because we have been catching glimpses of the season seven hype posters and frankly, we’re dying to get back to alittle GoT to remedy the Sunday scaries.
WARNING: As with the last post, spoilers ahead.
CERSEI LANNISTER
We all join together in this wishy-washy state of loving or loathing the newly appointed HBIC (if you don’t understand the acronym, here’s some help from Urban Dictionary). She is both simultaneously the worst and best character in the series. Aside from being a total weirdo and being in love with her brother, Cersei has been consistently in a state of complete and utter lack of giving any cares in the world which makes her a freaking awesome leader of the new girl power movement happening in the series.
The only three things that kept her human and frankly, humane, were her children. The woman once said “the more people you love, the weaker you are.” Foreshadowing? Now that they’re all gone, we expect some pretty seriously powerful, badass acts of revenge by part of Queen Cersei.
She’s already off to a killer (pun intended) started with the nun that led the march in her Shame walk and the Sparrow and Margaery Tyrell, who burned along with about 100 other visitors of the Great Sept of Baelor deemed “collateral damage” by the Queen.
As you may have heard, we recently launched our Dynamic Campaigns feature that sends content based on your end-recipient (think internal communications versus externally facing sales emails). Cersei’s external signature is no-nonsense, just like her. No frills, no cool fonts, no quotes. All business. Cersei keeps her cards close to her chest, and doesn’t want anyone to think she has even an ounce of weakness.
Cersei’s internal signature reflects what only those closest to her know – underneath all of that toughness and hatred is a girly human that just loves wearing the color blue and braiding her beautiful blonde hair. It also shares a message she only wants those who work with her to know and needs the utmost surety the message remains internal (which is why she used Sigstr’s Dynamic Campaigns – shameless plug)
EXTERNAL
INTERNAL
SANSA STARK
Sansa has been dealt the worst deck of cards. The worst. Unfortunately, Sansa hasn’t been known for fighting that deck of cards or showing any toughness or grit. Lest we not forget when this girl thought she was in love with Joffrey and even said “he was the only thing she ever wanted in her life.” Puh-lease.
We didn’t see a glimpse into any hint of fire in Sansa until she finally bucked-up and fed Ramsay to his hounds. That hauntingly perfect speech followed by the Sansa-smirk-walk-away at the end of “The Battle of The Bastards” was the stuff of legends. Girl, finally. We have been waiting for this moment since Season 1 Episode 9 when your almost husband had your dad executed. Sansa is finally in a safer, much happier Winterfell.
Sansa’s up for a comeback, hence why we dubbed her “the Comeback Queen”. While Lady Lyanna Mormont (who we idolize, by the way) packed all of her support behind Jon Snow as the King in the North, we can’t help but think Sansa’s up to something. She already pulled the sneakiest move ever when she enlisted the help of Littlefinger (yuck) to ride in and save Jon Snow and his wildling army. Flashback to season one when Sansa quips that a “trueborn will always have the stronger claim.” Hmm. Sansa’s email signature is a nod to this thought and what we can only assume to be her character development in the upcoming season.
TYRION LANNISTER
Tyrion is another Lannister who is both loved and loathed. Why? His quick wit, sarcasm, undying honesty and affinity for women and wine. Tyrion knows and accepts it. “That is what I do. I drink and I know things.”
He befriends some of the most putrid characters, i.e. Varys the Eunuch. Varys has betrayed nearly every character throughout the show. Let’s review where he left off: He was with Cersei and the little late King Tommen in King’s Landing. Then, Daenerys and Tyrion at the Great Pyramid, before deciding he needed to take off to Dorne. Cersei just brutally murdered Queen Margaery Tyrell and her brother Loras. So, we can only assume her grandmother is out for blood. And guess who Varys meets in Dorne? Grandma Tyrell. We can’t begin to imagine the horror they are cooking up. I digress.
Back to Tyrion. He has been a key player since we first met him. Season 7 is going to be a great season for Tyrion (I think). We ended last season with Tyrion tearfully accepting Daenerys’ request that he become right hand to the Queen, her most trusted advisor. Tyrion has gained the trust of the lady with hundreds of ships, thousands of notoriously dangerous warriors and three gigantic, blood-thirsty dragons. Safe to say he’s on the right side of this, less can be said for his brilliantly evil sister. His new title, paired with his unabashed passion for wine, made his email signature all too easy to create.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
We are just going to come right out and say it: Brienne is a badass. This cannot be denied. She faced the Hound, arguably the greatest and most intimidating warrior in the Seven Kingdoms, and walked away smiling. How?! Brienne is unwavering in her loyalty to whomever she serves.
She may be best known for her size and strength, but I can’t ignore her dedication to honor. She has sworn service to countless fallen leaders throughout the series until she eventually falls into oath to protect Sansa. I’m hoping this is going to be a much longer term of service than those prior for Miss Brienne.
Winterfell is already treating her well. This is where she meets Tormund Giantsbane, the red bearded wildling. Brienne has, for her entire life, dealt with men sneering at her, mocking her size and disposition. When Brienne first rides through the gates at Winterfell though, Tormund can’t stop staring.
Brienne’s absolutely not used to the attention, so I’m anxious to see how this silent and slightly-awkward love story unfolds. You can’t deny there’s some sort of romantic tension between Brienne and Jaime Lannister. Brienne has an obvious crush on the Kingslayer. Now we’re left to figure out if Jaime feels the same. He certainly cares about here. Maybe we’ll see an all-out brawl between Tormund and Jaime for her heart? We can only hope. Brienne’s email signature is a not to her devotion to all-things honorable – and her crush on the best looking dude in the show.
TORMUND GIANTSBANE
Tormund is my absolute favorite addition to the show. We first met Tormund in the third season and he’s been an unpredictable spitfire ever since. We have gone from being extremely wary of him, to being downright scared of him, to adoring him. He’s a wildly effective and dangerous warrior, while also being a total goof and adorably uncomfortable flirter.
At this point, Tormund is a trusted ally and friend to Jon Snow. But let’s rewind a bit to the days we were still wary of him. When Tormund and his wildling warband catch wind the men of the Night’s Watch betrayed Snow and brutally murdered him, they attacked Castle Black. More proof Tormund is now a loyal friend to Jon.
Tormund’s loyalty doesn’t end there. His performance at the Battle of the Bastards was mind-blowingly awesome. He BITES Lord Smalljon’s THROAT OUT. Tormund has somehow found himself as the Right Hand to the King in the North. I don’t think he’s totally realized what he has gotten himself into.
His email signature reflects the unsurety that exists in how he is going to deal with this new development. Remember, in the Great Hall when Jon is proclaimed the King in the North, Tormund is one of the only not to bend his knee and hail the King.
Get fired-up, while the debut is later than usual, writers have set the stage for a disastrously beautiful season seven. It’ll be worth the wait.
If you thought Cersei’s Dynamic Campaigns were the bomb, you can read more about our newest update here:
We work tirelessly day-in and day-out to create that piece of content. You know the one, that piece we hope will go viral and produce a bajillion qualified leads for our sales and marketing strategy. It’s a grind, but us marketers, we live for days like those and will do whatever it takes to make it happen.
We want to be the hero. We want to be the guy who cooked up that genius campaign and brought in a gazillion qualified leads, put them on a silver platter for the sales team (who eventually bring it home and close the deal), then present a report to our boss showing an agglomeration of closed/won deals sourced from marketing efforts (after which we get a promotion, generous raise and sail off into the sunset).
But, reality says it doesn’t always go that way.
Sure, you may produce killer content and run an awesome campaign that brings in qualified leads for your sales team, but what happens after that? After a few follow-ups, the prospect never replies and your sales development rep or account executive moves on, and now you have a stale lead that isn’t being nurtured. I guess onto the next bajillion leads, right?
You worked hard to generate those leads – it’s what your team is measured on. But at the end of the day, the most critical metric around a sales and marketing strategy is the bottom line. But what if you, Mr. Marketing Director, still had some control after those leads were passed? Some control or influence on how they progress through the funnel all the way to closed/won business?
Sounds pretty good, right? Before I dig into that, let’s first take a step back and review the stereotypical relationship between sales and marketing.
The Classic Debate: Marketing vs. Sales
“I gave you 1,000 qualified leads. Why haven’t they closed or converted yet?” vs. “I don’t have enough qualified leads to fill my pipeline.” We’re all familiar with this back and forth. Winning cures all, and makes for the best company culture. But when deals aren’t closing, both sides will start feeling the pressure (and most likely start the “blame game”).
“Well, I did my job. It’s your job to close the deal.” True, in some sense, for the marketer to have this thought. However, it’s an attitude that’s ultimately ineffective to the overall success of a sales and marketing strategy. We’re all on the same team here.
Both groups need to shift their mindset and start thinking about how they can help each other. When both sides work together, good things happen and deals close (and each team makes the other side look good).
Marketing: think creatively about how your team can contribute past the lead to demo stage.
Sales: work with the marketing team to educate your prospects with the right content at the right time.
The Sales/Marketing Funnel
When thinking about a standard sales and marketing funnel, and which metrics are used to measure the success of a sales and marketing strategy, let’s keep it pretty straight-forward for the sake of this post’s word count. In its simplest form, our own sales/marketing team focuses on three main metrics: qualified leads generated, demos scheduled (and executed) and closed/won business. That’s it. That’s our formula for success.
Of course there are additional benchmarks, conversion rates and strategies that revolve around this funnel. But, all of these circulating benchmarks can become complicated, so it’s always nice to be able to refer back to a core set of metrics and goals.
The Right Content at the Right Time
Think of this funnel not only for metrics and goals, but also as a framework to determine which content to share and appropriate timing. After a prospect has been identified as a qualified lead, what content should she pay attention to next?
If they’re still a fresh lead towards the top of the funnel, blog posts, ebooks or whitepapers will keep the momentum building and peak their interest. Continue to be a helpful resource while also progressing them to the next stage (scheduling a demo or meeting).
For identified opportunities that are further into the sales cycle, point them to content that solidifies your credibility as a trusted partner. Case studies, testimonials or use cases that demonstrate your value prop in action, can help nudge them across the finish line (a signed proposal).
Example: Convert Qualified Leads to Demos
How is your sales development team following up with qualified leads? Beyond a few triggered emails and/or phone calls, 1:1 email (think gmail or outlook) is probably the most popular option.
Personalization is important here. Being helpful and sharing content that’s relevant to that particular prospect will help build value and gain trust. Having a call-to-action for the “next step” is even more crucial. Use each 1:1 email interaction to educate the prospect on your product or service, but also use each email as an opportunity to lead them into the next step.
End the message with a call-to-action to schedule a demo. Marketers, if you don’t work directly with your sales development team or if you don’t have time to review each follow-up message, ensure this next step is being communicated with simple, centralized control over your company’s email signature.
Example: Convert Demos to Closed/Won Business
For prospects that have already seen a demo, the messaging should be different. By now, they’ve read through a few resources and are familiar with the value prop. They might be reviewing the proposal, getting approval on pricing or weighing all options (and checking out your competitors).
It’s time to show them how others are seeing ROI. Share a case study, specific use case or testimonial. Show them how others (ideally customer logos they respect or can relate to) use your product or service to boost their business.
Create a Winning Culture Across the Entire Sales/Marketing Funnel
If sales wins, then marketings wins. And vice versa. Help each other convert leads into demos and demos into new business. Use content to your advantage by sharing the right resource at the right time (1:1 email and Sigstr can help).
What does your sales and marketing strategy look like? Do you keep it simple, or does it include multiple stages and detailed conversion metrics? We’d love to hear your feedback and how your team works together to increase conversions. Start a conversation on twitter (@SigstrApp) or drop us a line at interact@sigstr.com.
Dynamic Campaigns by Sigstr is a new, intuitive way to align internal communications with HR and marketing – offering up the most relevant content in every employee email, based on the end recipient.
You said you loved using email to communicate at work, but wanted a way to get targeted marketing content out without overloading a recipient’s inbox. We listened and gave you Sigstr. Then you said you loved the way you could use Sigstr to drive ROI by distributing content, boosting event registrations and upping website traffic, but wanted to put it into your email cadence. So we created a host of Sigstr Integrations.
Then you said you loved the reach of the owned marketing channel, but wanted to use it to rally employee engagement while keeping your marketing content distribution on point. We pretended we didn’t hear you, but today we gave in.
Introducing: Dynamic Campaigns by Sigstr. (Disclaimer: We were not ignoring you! In fact, we’ve been working really, really hard on this product.)
What are Dynamic Campaigns?
More than 82 percent of U.S. business leaders have called internal communications and employee engagement a top strategic priority, according to a 2015 TalentKeepers survey. And it makes sense because the strategy is linked to improved company productivity, profitability and customer engagement. Engaged workers support innovation, growth and increased revenue their company needs for success.
Yet, employee engagement has consistently averaged less than 33 percent over the last four years, according to a 2015 Gallup survey.
But today we’re introducing a new product that helps you share the content most relevant to the audience you’re emailing, whether it’s your next prospect, current customer or your office buddy Julie from customer success. By offering up relevant content, to the right audience at the right time, you’re creating an environment of authentic engagement.
Dynamic Campaigns by Sigstr sends content based on your end-recipient, without any extra work from you. (And without any extra emails hitting the inbox!) It allows you to roll out internal communications, like open enrollment dates for benefits or Employee of the Week campaigns while, at the same time, sending targeted marketing campaigns to contacts outside of your domain.
Using Dynamic Campaigns for internal communications
A 2015 survey by Waggl Human Capital Pulse found 97 percent of the business leaders, HR leaders and consultants among the 500,000 interviewed said listening to employees and incorporating their ideas was critical to an organization’s success. But how are you creating an environment of authentic trust?
Make employee engagement, well, engaging.
Dynamic Campaigns distribute engaging and relevant content that can help your co-workers. It lets you give them content that shows you know their value. If they feel good about the brand, they’ll feel good about their work. And by showing them they’re important to the company, they’ll be less likely to leave if another opportunity comes up. And frankly, they’ll do better work because they’ll be proud of it.
Here are a few ways to use Dynamic Campaigns for employee engagement:
Community involvement: Does your company host volunteer hours? Maybe you’re in a community corporate challenge? Dynamic Campaigns gives your employees a quick, easy and always-present way to get involved!
Events & Fundraising: Here at Sigstr, our team likes to go out and about together. To wrap up Q3, the whole crew went bowling for our company outing. To make it easy for our co-workers to get involved, we’re able to use an internal campaign that’ll give all the details on what’s happening and make it easy to sign up.
Employee Recognition: Employee engagement can turn your co-workers into company advocates, which will help create a genuine love for the product and service your company provides. Let them feel cared for and involved through recognition programs. Give them a way to nominate and vote for their co-workers. Then give a shout-out to your standout performers every month.
Content Distribution: Have training materials that need to go out? Maybe a new white paper or use-case study your co-workers will get value in reading? Inject your messaging into your email signature and make it easier for them to dig deeper.
Keep Marketing
When we created Sigstr, we set out to solve a very real pain-point felt in our own lives as marketers. We help you create consistency and take control over the email signature. We’ve helped you unlock a channel that’s been under your nose all along as a new, owned marketing avenue. And you’re nailing it!
So while HR has internal communications they’re promoting, you’re still able to roll-out your new content for marketing. At the same time.
Requirements
Dynamic Campaigns are available as a part of the Target Package. Want to check out Sigstr? Then sign up for a free trial here. Already a customer? (Good!) Customer Success (customersuccess@sigstr.com) can get you the details on how to opt-in.
Back in July, my colleague wrote a post about Game of Thrones characters and what might their email signatures look like in the professional business world. Why? Because she loves watching Game of Thrones and found a way to combine this nerdy obsession with her everyday duties (sharing email signature samples and Marketing Sigstr). Our readers loved it and it quickly became our most popular blog post so far this year.
So here I am, challenging myself to do the same, and displaying my own nerdy obsession with the show Parks and Rec. For those of you late to the party, Parks and Rec was an NBC hit series from 2009 to 2015 that snagged 15 Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe. Plus it takes place in the fictional town of Pawnee, IN (Sigstr is headquartered in Indianapolis so we particularly love this fun fact).
The more episodes you watch, the more you appreciate the quirky personality traits of each character. So, I decided to apply my overflowing appreciation to the question, “If Parks and Rec characters had email signatures, what would they look like?”
Donna Meagle
We’ll start with Donna, who likes to keep it cool and straight forward. She shows a little flash with her go-to color palette of pink and black, and lets her email audience know where they can find her on social media. Her sophisticated and luxurious Campaign banner was designed by her cousin, Ginuwine, and promotes her new book, “The Ultimate Guide on How to Treat Yo Self” (co-authored by Tom Haverford).
Ben Wyatt
Ben is a smart dude, a caring husband to Leslie and overall great guy. But he’s also a nerd, sort of awkward and sometimes boring. The same can be said for his email signature. The Indiana State flag shows a sense of professionalism, which we love, but is canceled out by his dorky Campaign banner and love for Cones of Dunshire.
Chris Traeger
Of all the email signature samples, this is LITERALLY the best one. If Chris were to express his enthusiasm about this email signature (and everything else), this is exactly what he would say. Chris calls everyone by their first and last name, so obviously his full name in this “digital business card” is a must. Overly positive and a little corny – both the signature and Campaign banner here fits his personality perfectly.
Ann Perkins
Ah, Ann Perkins (Chris Traeger voice). Her enduring companionship with best friend Leslie and concern for the town of Pawnee’s overall health makes her a fan favorite on the show. She’s sometimes awkward in social situations (and her professional headshot) and is secretly one of the funnier characters on the show. Say no to Sweetums Sodas!
Jerry Gergich
Classic Jerry. When Leslie sent a note out to the entire Parks and Rec Department, providing overly detailed steps on how to add an email signature in their settings, guess who forgot to do it? Dang it, Jerry/Larry/Terry/Barry/Gerry!
April Ludgate
As you can imagine, negativity and disinterest oozes out of April’s signature. A halloween font used for her name lets email contacts know she has a dark side. She doesn’t have an appreciation for phones, or the internet, but her warm side comes out in a Campaign banner that promotes the Pawnee Animal Shelter. Although she hates people, she loves Andy, and animals, and the email signature is a great place to promote what you’re passionate about.
Andy Dwyer
Andy Dwyer is a special kind of human being and one of my favorite characters on the show. He is clumsy, forgetful (he once forgot to brush his teeth for five weeks straight) and not quite “fit” for an office job. But he means well, is always willing to help and has a musical talent (and an appreciation for Dave Matthews Band). Unprofessional, but entertaining, is exactly what you see in his email signature (Comic Sans, cringe).
Ron Swanson
I strive to be like Ron Swanson (but admit sometimes I’m more of a Ben Wyatt or Tom Haverford). He likes to keep things simple and enjoys a nice glass of bourbon. He’s a man’s man with a secret love for jazz. Times New Roman font, minimal color variation and zero contact information makes for a perfect Ron Swanson email signature. Now that the secret is out about Duke Silver, Ron took advantage of this untapped digital real estate to promote his new documentary.
Tom Haverford
The swaggiest of swaggy office administrators, he wears pink “for the cool effect.” Always scheming a business plan, invention or company, Tom is an ambitious fella with an appreciation for luxurious living and music (aka “bangers”). Sometimes over the top and distracting? Yes. However, I respect the fact that he models his email signature much like his pitch presentations to investors: All flash. (Although we don’t recommend it).
Leslie Knope
I saved the best (and most overwhelming) for last. Leslie Knope, the crew’s fearless leader, has an unmatched passion both for her professional career and fostered friendships. Overdone, excessive, sometimes obnoxious, but always thoughtful. Leslie’s binders, political campaigns, gifts and love for waffles make her the most entertaining character on the show. Her email signature definitely lives up to the hype. Vote for Knope!
There you have it – ten of the best email signatures we recommend no one adopt as their own (just sit back and laugh instead). Hopefully this brought some comic relief to your workday, but also opened up your eyes to how employee email can be used to make a lasting brand impression and promote your most important initiatives.
For more email signature samples (the good and the bad) or tips on how to roll email signatures out to your entire company, request a demo or check out our most recent resource below.
They are the most credible voices on the plethora of topics surrounding your brand. They’re the experts on your company’s work environment, integrity, innovation and they’re the face behind the day-to-day grind. You value the work they do, otherwise they wouldn’t still be on your payroll.
Some 90 percent of brands have put an internal communication plan in place to pursue employee advocacy, according to the Altimeter Group. If your employees aren’t your biggest fans, you have bigger problems in your company, to paraphrase my friend Jay Baer.
Employees, he said, have an authentic perspective. They should genuinely love your brand, and love the work they do for your brand. Using them as another piece to your marketing strategy will boost morale and, ultimately business.
Your employees are a trusted source to customers, contacts and prospects. So create a desire to allow them to use their social posts to push your marketing messages. Creating a brand advocate in your employee can increase your marketing reach by 561 percent.
But how?
Humans are driven by purpose. Offering up a clear purpose and mission for your brand is the only way to get sincere emotional investment into what you do. And while everyone loves a little extra cash in their pocket, studies have shown financial incentives don’t work long term. People need to feel relevant and important. They need to feel needed.
But employee advocacy isn’t just sending out an email asking staffers to share your latest company news through their social profiles. We’ve all seen it – a single employee retweeting a company update verbatim, or sending out a clearly pre-drafted message is not an advocacy program.
What you need is your staff sharing information because they actually want to.
Starting your advocacy program at the point of distribution is like starting a political campaign on election day. It’s unprepared, unengaging and, likely, not going to win many fans. An advocacy program should start way before your content plan. To really succeed, you need to build an internal communication plan that provides your employees a culture of passion.
It sounds both idealistic and unrealistic at the same time. But the idea behind an employee advocacy strategy is to enable your staff to get involved. And, show off their professional expertise. Everyone likes to brag on themselves at least a little, right? Give your staff a reason to get involved. Make them want to share the message about their awesome company.
Daily engagement boosts advocacy 87 percent more than no engagement, while weekly engagement builds it 64 percent more and monthly engagement builds in by 49 percent, according to Strativity, a research and consulting firm. And you’re already emailing your staff every day, right, so try injecting empowering content into your internal communication plan.
Here are a few ways to empower your employees through your internal email signature.
(click on the infographic to enlarge)
What’s this?
Dynamic Campaigns allow for customizable picture thumbnails to appear in your email signatures (based on the end recipient).
In plain speak, it’s allowing contacts who have the same email domain (@yourcompany.com) to see one message (like the above), while at the same time, giving people outside of your domain your external-facing campaign.
Have you ever had a customer you knew was going to be a blast to work with? The customer that just “gets” what you’re doing, and knocks it out of the park on their first campaign. That’s the customer success story of Invoca.
Invoca is a call tracking and analytics company that helps users drive, track and automate inbound calls. The platform delivers personalized customer experiences across devices and channels and has been implemented at the New York Times, Salesforce and Mitsubishi to name a few.
With their Call Intelligence Summit 2016 on the calendar for the end of this month in Santa Barbara, California, they’ve been working to generate registrations through employee email.
The Summit will feature Yong Su Kim, VP Americas at a little place called Google. Maybe you’ve heard of them? They’ve also locked in Collin Colburn, a researcher at Forrester; Mitch Gray, the head of programmatic display advertising at Microsoft and Anthony Maroon, a product strategy lead at Google. This kind of line up means the company is going full throttle on marketing efforts to drive registrations through the roof.
Invoca fully implemented in September, and has since racked up more than 85k Campaign views with 85 employees on-boarded. They’ve seen a .25 percent click-through rate and they’re killing it with registrations.
Their team created their first campaign on theme with their Summit design while they worked with the Sigstr customer success crew to nail down a sweet (and consistent) signature.
What we love [Campaign]:
The Invoca team hit up our email signature best practices and our Sigstr customer success team then led the way with a stand-out design. The design team used a bold graphic while keeping the wording tight. It’s aesthetically eye-catching and easy to read, which bodes well for the engagement rates.
By using three core colors in the design, they created variation and visual interest, while preventing a design that got too busy. The Campaign used on-brand colors for the Summit and show a peak at Santa Barbara coast, which is fully revealed on their website. By using a gray-scaled graphic, the design color can be associated with neutrality and practicality.
Bonus, the awesome designers at Invoca were able to include the logo in the Campaign.
The group amped up the value-add by sharing information about their upcoming Summit while making it crazy easy to register. The “Register Now” call-to-action is front and center (literally) of the design and leads directly to the Summit site.
The signature and Campaign have become an extension of the Invoca brand, and they’ve used it rather effectively in conjunction with their full marketing strategy for the conference.
What we love [Signature]:
We spent a good chunk of time with the team at Invoca on the signature design. It was important to create an on-brand experience, but sans the logo as it was already in the campaign.
And, we wanted to make sure the team stayed consistent across the board(room).
Invoca kept the text in their sigs short and sweet, including relevant information and nixing the fluff. (For instance, cutting out an email address). They built it with fields that their recipients actually wanted to have access to.
They used one color, and applied different weights to the font, making it easy for recipients to scan and understand.
The signature style stayed on par with their branding. Invoca is a SaaS company with a lot of personality and insane talent. To pay nod to their innovative minds, they skipped a corporate-centric design in favor of a soft, but edgy text.
What’s next:
Our customer success team is working to create their next Campaign, which will be debuted after registrations are closed. The sheer volume of emails this group sends (they’ve increased their Campaign views by about 2000 in the last three hours) has created a unique opportunity to leverage employee email as an owned marketing channel.
Sigstr Shout-Out is a series that features the insanely talented and creatively driven Sigstr customer campaigns so you can see email signature best practices in action – and who’s nailing them.
How you close an email leaves a lasting brand impression. What if you could create brand consistency, share content or give your officemates the heads up about Hawaiian shirt day next week with just one click?
Sigstr unlocks employee email as an owned marketing channel. And we love to create resources our clients will actually find value in. Which is exactly why we decided to make another video! This time we’re giving you the how-to on creating powerful email signatures in 45-seconds.
Check it out below (and keep scrolling to get a look at the behind-the-scenes and video brief)!
Behind the video:
The roster of design talent involved the makers of our Sigstr in :60 promotional video, plus a few new creative masterminds. The work on this project echoed the techniques used for the former. It’s a gritty kind of animation that pans over a landscape of rising and falling illustrations. I worked really tight in the first round with Sigstr in :60, so it was important to add in new faces for this production.
Our team has been working to create a strong visual identity for our brand, separated from the usual tech-talk companies. This new style has provided a new life and, ultimately, a different language to the visualization of Sigstr.
Everything we created was based on a set of illustrations that transcended the simplicity of creating powerful email signatures. But to say the visualization was simple to create – well, that’d just be a bold-faced lie. It was fun, but it was hard. How do we get these themes across? How do we show people how easy it is to leverage and turn it into real dollars that add to your bottom line?
It was an insanely personal process, but we had fun with it. I’d create a rough storyboard, and we’d work together to edit it, then I’d go back to my drawing board and after about a dozen Sharpies (yes the pens, I’m obsessed), I’d have another draft.
We learned no idea is precious, every idea is a good idea, but some can be great when it comes from someone with a fresh perspective.
Video brief:
After creating Sigstr in :60 to describe the point to Sigstr and why it’s a marketer’s bff, we wanted to make something to show you how to use it. The idea was to find a way to show the build-add-launch-optimize process. Then, show you how to tell your story to your most important contacts with powerful email signatures.
Tone:
We stuck with a modern, friendly, professional and clean tone. Clean and crisp – like Baked Lays minus the salt residue.
Background:
One of the biggest differentiators about Sigstr is our services. We hold your hand through the entire process to create the most powerful email signatures based on analytics that’ll translate into real ROI. We build confidence into your Sigstr admin to take ownership, and we help to navigate the map of this owned marketing medium.
And, as a high-growth mar-tech company, we shift fast. And we’re able to extend use and functionality to align with customer wants and needs. So in the last several months, based on customer feedback, we created a way to bundle campaigns and on-brand signatures, a change we wanted to talk about in our newest video.
Opportunities:
The challenge at hand was to figure out how to honor the original social media while telling a bigger story on how Sigstr helps. We don’t always talk about email as a social channel like Facebook or Twitter, but in reality, it’s the original. (Don’t pretend like you don’t remember getting your first AOL CD in the mail and spamming your friends with kick-ass content).
We also wanted to pay nod to the analog world because email is, in its truest form, simply human connection. We needed to find a way to create a visualization for the connection. That’s where our tiles came in.
Throughout design school, I’d always been fascinated with the tiled approach for illustration. I really wanted to find a way to fit it into our new brand standards, which launched with the video. The illustrated tiles fit perfectly with the idea of saving time and energy – the idea behind Sigstr.
To bring that look to life, we created a sequence built around animated illustrations showing the functions of Sigstr. We show marketing teams how to take ownership of their brand and use email as an owned marketing channel.
Empathy is one of those words that’s quickly earned a slot on your sales office’s Buzzword Bingo card. It’s sales psychology that is overused and too often abused in the wrong way. But empathy is at the heart of trust – and people buy from people they trust.
The more trust you can create, the more a prospect will share their pain points, hopes and needs with you. When you know their needs, you can make a realistic judgement call to decide if your product or service is, in fact, a good fit. When you’re honest enough to turn down a potential sale, you’re actually building a customer for life – they’ll still refer you, they’ll want to want your product or service.
The first step to building trust is to be perceived as on the customer’s side, to show you understand them on an emotional level and that you’re working proactively to solve their problems. People care about what your product or service can do for them.
Frame your conversation – and the bigger story – in a way that offers real value to the customer. Create empathy and create a better customer experience. Here are six sales psychology tips to show empathy:
1. Slow your roll
When you head into a conversation, of course you’re going to want to have your talk track ready, but slow it down. Allow the exchange to develop organically. Listen to what your prospect says. And, pay attention to what they’re not saying. If you sense some hesitation or they offer you a cue into their pain points, pause the conversation and probe a bit more. Be respectful of their time, but ask questions and get them talking.
Do a little research ahead of the conversation so you can ask the right questions about their company and their role. Slowing down gives you a chance to hear their real struggles and positions you to offer up a real solution to a problem they’ve encountered. Letting a prospect know you care about them, and you understand them, can help to build rapport and show empathy. It develops a sense of trust in you, and innately in your product.
2. Say “I hear you” (and actually hearing them)
Buying is emotional, right? So listen to their emotions and get a grasp on their feelings. What is your prospect struggling with today? What are they afraid of/ What are their frustrations?
Saying “I hear you,” validates their emotions. Hearing their words alone isn’t adequate, though, in sales psychology. Work to understand their position and their perspective. Figure out what their struggles are and how you can help. Asking how you can help can give you a clear picture of the prospects specific pains and lead them down a path of strategizing a fix. This allows you to move the conversation forward as you develop a solution to their problems.
3. Say “I’m sorry to hear that”
You don’t need to be in the wrong to say you’re sorry. Empathize with your prospect’s pain and allow them an opportunity to vent if they need to. But be careful in your tone. Avoid coming across as sympathetic, which could create distance between you and your prospect. A sympathetic tone transfers blame of their situation (or at least the feelings toward their situation) onto your shoulders. With empathy you show an actually understanding of their feelings at an emotional level. And, it’ll strengthen your bond, creating a deeper sense of authentic trust in your relationship.
Pair saying “I’m sorry to hear that,” with active reflecting for maximum impact. Once you’ve listened and understood their pain points, now you can connect with them. It shows your prospects you understand and know them – and it creates a deeper connection. And, the beauty of reflecting is you don’t have to be right. Checking and correcting your understanding is empathy, and it helps you to get to know the person better.
4. Say nothing (listening is fun too, guys)
In my early 20s, I assumed the world was more interested in me than I was in it, so I spent most of my time talking, usually in a particularly uninformed way. I’d spout my insights on whoever would listen, rushing to be clever, thinking about what I was going to say next to someone rather than listening to what they were saying.
The real fascination lies in the conversation you’re having with someone else. What can you learn from them? What are they frustrated with? Listening with empathy is the most effective way to process someone else’s perspective. You’re offering up a shoulder to lean on for the prospect, and it helps them develop a sense of trust with you, giving them the confidence to share more – giving you a better understanding of how best to serve and help the buyer.
5. Practice perspective-taking
Do more than just put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Be in their socks, shirts, pants, hats, and gloves, and walk around in ‘em for a while. Create a deep understanding of your prospect with sales psychology – know their problems, their hopes and their dreams.
Think about what you would do in their position. Have you been in a similar situation? Imagine the implications if the prospect brought your product to their goals and situations. How would you feel? What’d be your reaction? Use your imagination, then sit in their shoes for as long as you need to help them.
6. Watch your signals
Be aware of your own emotions and how you’re responding. Assure your prospect listening has occurred and encourage continued communication. By giving appropriate replies through verbal acknowledgements, deep and clarifying questions and active reflecting. Be fully engaged with the sales psychology and the conversation at hand.
Do you want to make this sale? Of course! But thinking past the short-term could be beneficial for both sides. Your long-term goals are to help the client and build a lasting relationship.
In our always-on, agile, tech-obsessed society, we want what we want and we want it yesterday. We depend on fatter pipelines, fuller funnels and more prospects. And the only way to meet the rising demand is to work longer hours, without breaks, and stay connected at all times.
Every time we hear the chirp of our smartphone singing in a new email, we jump to respond. We check it in bed, at the dinner table, in the park with the kiddos, on family vacations. A 2012 study by the Center for Creative Leadership found 60 percent of smartphone-using professionals were connected to the office for an average of 72 hours a week.
We’ve become narcissistic drones, we’re told, lacking the will-power to look away from the soft glow of our iPhone 7s. We’re desperate to stay at the center of attention, and frantic to remain reachable at all times.
And it’s absolutely true many of us can probably chill with the social media frenzy. No one needs to know what you had for lunch, second lunch, dinner, snack or your 2 a.m. fridge-raid. But it’s becoming overtly clear the workplace demands propel a huge portion of the anxiety-induced phone-glancing.
When we slow down, we’re labeled a slacker. We’re led to believe we’re doomed to get less done. We slow down but the world races forward, leaving us in the dust.
But staying in the perpetual “on” position is completely contrary to everything we know about what makes it possible for humans to perform at their highest level.
The science of a slow down
The human body is hardwired to pulse – moving naturally through periods of higher and lower alertness. Nathaniel Kleitman, the sleep researcher who figured out the basic rest-activity cycle more than 50 years ago, said we move progressively through five stages of sleep each night, each lasting around 90-minutes. But did you know he also found our bodies operate by the same 90-minute rhythm during the day – and not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally?
Our bodies send us physiological signs when we need a break – like fidgetiness, hunger, drowsiness and loss of focus. But in general, we tend to hush them. Instead finding artificial ways to pump up our energy through caffeine, sugary snacks and even our body’s own stress hormones – adrenalin, noradrenalin and cortisol.
The cycle of success
The modern model for success is broken. The idea of hunkering down for hours in front of a computer screen, plugging away all day, answering emails immediately, even late into the night, and working until you drop isn’t helping you get more done. What are you giving up by working so continuously? Are you able to think as clearly and creatively? Do you produce the same quality of work in the tenth or twelfth hour of a work day as you do in the second or fourth?
Our bodies are designed to cycle. The patterns of organic labor are meant to shape our email productivity. Burned-out, neurotic employees who can’t unplug are neither productive nor creative. We need “off” time to produce a better “on” time. “On” is impossible without “off.”
Sprint and rest
The paradox isn’t in the sprint, but rather the rest. While it seems almost counterintuitive, the secret to sustainable greatness in email productivity is incorporating rests into your work day.
Work in sprints – highly focused for short periods of time, with breaks built in, instead of being partially focused for longer periods of time. Slow down. Think about what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it to produce a higher quality result.
We all know your inbox is the mortal enemy to email productivity, but use it to increase your productivity. Work in 90-minute sprints, punctuated by 10- to 15-minute rests in your inbox. But insist on predictable time off, as well – evenings and weekend periods where you’re out of bounds.
Set boundaries
Set firm boundaries to avoid allowing your email to become a sprinting rest. Email is incredibly addictive, and when you’re in it, it’s possible to get sucked into it for the rest of the day. Just as you should for your sprints, create a hard stop in your schedule for your rests.
Want more tips and trick to email productivity? Check out our newest ebook!
The success of your company is fundamentally entwined with the success of your customers. If your customer is a rock star using your product, they’ll keep using it and, in turn, you will succeed. At its core, that’s what we do as customer success managers. We make sure our customers are able to nail their next big event, boost lead-generation, improve conversions, get the promotion they’ve been pining after, go on the family vacation they’ve been saving for, pay for their kid’s ballet lessons. Customer success is exactly as it sounds, it’s creating success in partnership with our customers.
So as a customer success manager, what can I do to help drive home the message of achievement to my client list? I spend a large chunk of my day in my email chatting back and forth with my customers. I’m their point of content when putting out fires. When implementing our solution, sharing new marketing materials and updating them on new features and functionalities within our platform.
Because I’m already talking with them, I’m able to use my own product to connect deeper. Sigstr campaigns are another touch-point for customer success managers when you’re distributing pivotal content to an audience you’re already reaching on a daily basis.
While thedesign of a campaign is important, the content and effective CTA’s are what drive my customers’ interest to get them what I know they need to see. I’ve found, as a customer success manager, there are three themes to the core content my team has the most success with in a campaign: training, education and inspiration.
This trifecta of content empowers our customers to use our solution at a higher level and helps in creating an open line of constant communication.
Training
The better trained your customers are, the more efficient they become in their jobs. As customer success managers, we’re tasked with holding our customers accountable in understanding the application and implementation of our solution.
We teach our customers to fish so they can feed themselves for a lifetime.
By teaching a customer how to do something once, they’re able to repeat the action again and again. Our goal is to help influence our customers to become self-sufficient, and ultimately more efficient. Customers should still lean on us for guidance in tricky circumstances, but it’s our job to empower them. And to help them to feel more comfortable taking the reins.
By including effective CTA’s to tutorials, webinars, how-to content and instructional marketing material, customers are becoming more informed on how to use our application. This creates a feeling of partnership as we work hand-in-hand to meet and exceed their business expectations. And, it helps cut the amount of service requests we’re fielding, allowing us to help them with the trickier problems better and faster.
Educate
I use campaigns to highlight product, service and industry news. It’s my job to make sure they’re using the application to its fullest capabilities, and they’re fully in-the-know when new product release information is available. And, putting effective CTA’s into my email signature means they’re able to see it without the content getting lost.
Creating campaigns highlighting services allows customers to see offerings they’re not aware of yet, like design or implementation packages. And adding industry news or information can help customers to keep their business in perspective to the ever-changing industry standards. The better we educate customers on applications they’re using, the more value they’ll see in its use. The more value I can provide, the better they can do their job.
Inspire
Inspiring your audience should always be a theme as you are working to create your effective CTA’s. If you are not inspiring your customers in some fashion, what is the point? You’ll fail to reach them on an emotional level, and you’ll see less engagement.
Think about the problems you are solving for your customers, then align your content strategy to close their gaps. Show examples of other customers’ designs (as long as they’re not competitors!) that are performing exceptionally well, link them over to a particularly innovative blog post.
If you can encourage your audience to do more in partnership with your business, the better served they are. And, the more likely you will see conversion.
When McDonald’s lifted the once-ironclad 10:30 a.m. cut-off for tardy breakfast-goers late last year, customers hit the chain in droves, lured by the simple novelty of being able to chow down on an Egg McMuffin any time they want.
The idea is so simple! The chain is using an avenue they already own, but in a new way – and it’s working! In Q4 of 2015, the fast-food joint saw same store sales jump by 5.7 percent and pushed growth into territory the global company hadn’t seen in more than four years.
So what if we thought about employee email like McDonald’s thinks about breakfast?
You already send a ton of business emails every day. It’s a channel you own – you dictate the message and the recipient. But are you using the channel to its fullest potential? Here are five things your custom email signature can learn from the all-day breakfast menu.
1. Beat the crowd
McDonald’s snags most of their revenue during the lunch and dinner hours – hamburgers are just more expensive than hotcakes. Breakfast has, traditionally, been something of an afterthought for the entire fast food industry. But it’s taken on an enormous importance as of late. First-meal sales have jumped by almost 5 percent year-over-year for the fast food behemoth from 2007-2012, where the traditional marque meals, lunch and dinner, have remained flat according to The Motley Fool.
To sustain growth in the overly-crowded fast-casual restaurant sphere (where the money-spenders are looking to go), McDonald’s execs realized it was going to be near impossible to find new ways boost sales during the typical peak hours with the same marketing and advertising initiatives they’ve relied on in the past. Instead, the Golden Arches poured a huge effort into expanding the potential of a hit they already had grips on.
Now look at your custom email signature. Often an afterthought, it has this enormous potential to break through the overly-noisy marketing industry by opening a new, owned distribution channel. No longer can you just buy more advertising and expect to see more results.
So change up your game and play in a space you already control. In 2015, more than 205 billion emails were sent every day, according to The Radicati Group. And that number is expected to continue growing, reaching 246 billion emails by the end of 2019.
You’re in your email. Your customers are in their email – 122 business emails are sent and received every day. Rethink how you’re using the space and inject marketing messages when you create a custom email signature.
2. Be convenient
Mickey-Ds is insanely convenient when you’re on the go. The company grabs around 70 percent of their sales through the drive-thru. They make it crazy easy to get your hands on bacon, egg and cheese sandwiched between an English muffin, still steaming, at any time day or night.
And sure, you can make a similar Egg McMuffin at home with a little extra time and effort. But do you want to give some deliciousness to your whole family? Plan to be in the kitchen for a while. It’s going to take more time, more effort, and you know as well as I do your four-year-old is going to start whining about the cornmeal on your store bought muffins, refusing to eat it.
Now shift to the office. Deliver convenience to your contacts by adding a call-to-action in your custom email signature. Offering up content through your CTA lets you break through the noise to reach your custom audience.
Plus your CTA could be anything! Direct people to a new case study, send them to a registration page for your next big event. Deliver your content to your audience and make it easy and convenient.
3. Speak your customer’s language
McDonald’s has, in recent years, put a concentrated focus in bringing healthier options to the table. More than a year ago, they moved to use real butter over the preservative-laden margarine in their Egg McMuffins. They’re sourcing chicken raised without antibiotics and are in the process of transitioning to use only cage-free eggs. The chain is cutting the fat by using grass-fed beef and ditching artificial preservatives in the sausage, omelet-style and scrambled eggs. And, in several markets they’ve worked to expand their gourmet coffee options.
Why are they doing this now, in conjunction with their all-day breakfast plan? In a word: Millennials. The millennial generation has been wooed by fast-casual restaurants, like Panera Bread and Starbucks, who put a focus on where their food comes from and what it does to your body. And the craft coffee offering brews a top concern of customization for the largest generation since the Baby Boomers.
But up until now, Millennials have failed to become loyal patrons of McDonald’s. So to compete, the company is in the process of making a significant shift toward healthier and better food that will change the perception of the chain in the fast-casual market segment.
The chain is working to fit in where their customers already are. They’re talking their talk, walking their walk and feeding them how they want to be fed. And they’re doing it without being a distraction, instead offering it up all day, every day.
Feed your customers how they want to be fed. Hit their inbox, without driving fluff-mail. Use your custom email signature to drive engagement. Skip using distracted Franken-speak, and instead use clear CTAs in the signature space.
In your sign-off, don’t use repetitive language (like your email address, coming from an email from your email address). Stick to the basics of what you need to include – name, phone number and a link to your website. Graphics are great, too, but don’t overdo it. Attract new visitors, new leads and drive conversions by using a space that’s been under your nose since the beginning of time (or at least since 1995, when AOL hit the scene).
4. Be flexible
McDonald’s totally changed the breakfast game last year when they started serving breakfast items all day. But diners gave the initiative a lukewarm reception when they realized the extreme regulations to the menu. No location would serve both biscuit-based and English muffin-based breakfast sandwiches after 10:30 a.m. But now, after nearly a year of limitations, the national nightmare is over! The Golden Arches announced last month an expansion of their all-day breakfast menu as an answer to their customers’ requests.
They were flexible. They found an avenue that worked in breakfast. And they pushed it to work harder with all-day breakfast, now they’re working it smarter with an expanded menu.
Be flexible in your custom email signature. Find a way that works, and tweak it to work better, to work harder for you. Testing is the secret sauce for any digital marketing program. Compare the performance of several different campaigns over time to help you figure out which graphics, images and CTAs increase your conversion rates.
5. All-day strategy is only a piece of a bigger pie
The breakfast frenzy gave a badly-needed sales jolt to a lumbering fast-food giant that had long been struggling to boost a sagging sales trend. But all-day hotcakes and McMuffins aren’t the only approach the chain is using to jump sales. Less-talked-about initiatives, like the company’s McPick 2 program which offers diners two items from a select, limited menu, have effectively replaced the Dollar Menu. And the drive-thru, where the company makes up a huge majority of their sales, is working to be faster and more accurate, even going so far as to adjust the font size on the order screen to prevent cooks from misreading the order.
“We don’t want to be a single initiative turn-around plan,” said CEO Steve Easterbrook in an interview with Buzzfeed. “So we continued investment in food quality. The development of this value platform. And as we continue to reinvest in the fabric of our restaurants, we’re confident the in-store experience will continue to improve.”
Your own marketing plan is fluid. It’s ever-changing and multi-faceted. You’re using paid, earned and owned channels to get your brand in front of the customer, right? So use them more efficiently. Use your custom email signature to promote your latest blog, push a case study, a new product release, look for registrations for an event. Opening a new marketing channel doesn’t mean you’re neglecting your current marketing efforts, it allows you to expand them.
This post is from our partners at FormAssembly, a form creation and data collection tool that helps organizations of all types gather important information and streamline workflows. Interested in creating the forms we’ll discuss below? Sign up for a free trial of FormAssembly to see how it works.
At FormAssembly, we believe you can make forms for just about any purpose. But after you’ve created a form, you need people to fill it out. What’s the best way to get your form sent out to as many potential respondents as possible, you may ask? Email. Sixty-four percent of companies consider email marketing their top channel in terms of effectiveness; and VentureBeat data shows that email marketing yields an ROI as high as 222 percent.
Put customer satisfaction, donation and survey forms into your email signature and get it noticed. Here are some examples (with screenshots of a few of our templates) of forms that work well through modern email signatures.
Customer Service Ratings
If you miss the chance to snag your customer’s feedback on your website, give it another go through an email. Linking a campaign to a quick customer service form in your email signature can be just the reminder your customers need to deliver their feedback.
Something to think about, though, if your goal is to increase feedback response, realize your customers are probably short on time. I know I’m guilty of replying “No” when even one of my favorite apps asks me if I want leave feedback. Even the shortest of customer feedback surveys can seem like a chore. Combat this by highlighting how quick and easy the form is to fill out with copy like, “Fill out this 2-question survey!” or “Do you have 45 seconds? Let us know what you think of our customer service team!”
Surveys
Your audience is a huge source of valuable data. Conducting surveys can help you uncover insights about your customers and help you to create a stronger product or more targeted service. When conducting a survey, you should consider a variety of promotion tactics so that you take all opportunities to get it in front of your customers. Email and email signatures should definitely be included in these tactics.
Another piece of advice on making the most out of surveys? Keep them short.Concise surveys are less intimidating to your customers and they can force you to choose more focused, strategic questions that will ultimately deliver more useful data.
Special Offers
Gated content is a pretty popular tactic in inbound marketing. It’s content that users can access in exchange for their email addresses and other information. Using an employee email signature service like Sigstr, try including a link to your company’s latest content offering. That way, you can get it in front of more people and have the opportunity to capture more lead information.
You could also include a link to the content and the related form in an email that’s part of a lead nurturing campaign. HubSpot’s research shows lead nurturing emails had nearly three times (8 percent as opposed to 3 percent) the clickthrough rate of other marketing emails sent.
The form below is a simple contact form that could be modified for gated content. Ask for specific information and deliver a file download after it’s been submitted.
Donations
A well-crafted donation request email with a link to a donation form can be an effective fundraising tactic. Be sure to give potential donors a good reason to donate by using your email as a vehicle to explain your mission and giving examples of what kind of impact a potential donor’s contribution could have.
With any form, make it as simple as possible for your customers to take action and fill it out. Donation forms present a unique challenge, but there are several things you can do to improve the experience of payment forms and increase conversion:
Simplify the design for a better user experience.
Allow easy donation by offering more than one way to pay.
Organize and break up long forms into multiple pages.
Enable SSL to put visitors at ease.
Be clear, concise and direct in any copy.
Effective form creation is tough, that’s no secret. It involves just about equal parts psychology, copywriting and technical skills, plus an eye for design. Don’t let your hard work go to waste. Use email, and modern email signatures, as an owned channel to promote your forms and increase conversions.
We’re facing an industry shift, no longer is publishing alone good enough to drive more traffic to your site and leads into your funnel. But what comes next in the content marketing lifecycle?
Content marketing has been lingering in the awkward adolescent stage a little too long, it’s been unsure of how to mature into the next phase of its evolving life. Marketers have had ideas, both good and bad, on how to make it better, but has it worked? Maybe? Sometimes? Sorta?
It’s time content marketing grows up. Move out of its parents’ basement, stop spending their money on crazy experimental theories that may, or may not, have been a good idea at the time (go ahead, content marketing, try to explain how that last social campaign helped your branding and ROI). It’s time content marketing ends the pattern of immaturity, loses the short-sided and (sometimes) lazy attitude in its “strategy.” Content marketing needs to stop talking so much about itself and think about what the customers need, and what they want to hear.
It’s time content marketing stops publishing for the sake of publishing – stop valuing quantity over quality.
Sure, quantity is important – companies who publish 16 or more blog posts each month see around 4.5x more leads than those that publish between 0-4 monthly posts, according to a study from Hubspot. But as we mature in the field of content marketing, more just isn’t enough.
Why More Won’t Win the Battle Alone
Content marketing is the only marketing that matters. Your department is investing more time and money into content than ever before – you’ve found robots with algorithms to write your posts, tools to optimize them and technology with viral mics to amplify them. The more you publish, the more traffic you’ll see, right? The theory has held so far, though you can’t really explain why.
But something’s wrong! Chugging out post after mediocre post isn’t delivering the same high traffic results anymore. More is no longer enough.
From its highest to lowest points last year, the output of content per brand increased by more than 35 percent per channel. Nearly every brand in existence has bought into content marketing. Around 78 percent of the world’s CMOs recognized the tactic as the way of the future. But while output spiked in 2015, consumer engagement took a sharp downturn, dropping by 17 percent according to TrackMaven, a marketing analytics software.
Content absorption is a finite resource. There’s a limit to how much can be consumed, liked, shared, pinned, retweeted, posted, etc., and brands are in competition against each other for their share of the eyes (and buys). The fight to be heard in the increasingly cluttered landscape is merciless.
No longer can you solve your marketing woes through buying more advertising space – the space is just too crowded. A mature b2b content marketing strategy uses preparation, planning and promotion. It’s authentic and simple, though not simplistic. It listens to customer needs and solves their challenges as they face them. It predicts their questions, and proactively seeks to share the knowledge without the direct aim of benefitting the company over the consumer. If content solves consumer problems, they’ll talk about it, telling others about your product or service and bringing more traffic (read: more leads) to you.
Mature Content Isn’t Short-Sided (or shorthanded)
Creating ridiculously good content isn’t enough alone, either. If you put all of your energy into producing the highest quality content, but only publish it once in a blue moon, no one will find it. You can’t bank on content that succeeds only in a bubble. Google looks for, and actively rewards, sites with relevant, useful and consistent content.
Mid- to large-sized companies that publish 11+ blogs a month see almost twice as much traffic to their sites in comparison to their counterparts publishing one or fewer pieces of content each month, the Hubspot researchers found. And, posting new content daily leads to a 5x jump in site traffic over posting just once a week.
Compiling a rich catalogue of content helps your SEO rankings because there’s more for a search engine to look through and it gives your visitors more to click through. B2B companies that have an index of more than 401 posts generate almost three times more leads as a b2b content marketing strategy that has under 200 total posts.
Moral of the story: Blog early, blog often – as long as you can do it well.
Doing Content Better
High quality content is a must to build a strong, trustworthy rap online. And, keeping a hefty stash of posts uploaded to your site keeps visitors happy and coming back for more.
As a b2b content marketing strategy matures, it should focus on becoming more strategic – more real. It needs to look at planning, processes, strategy, frameworks, creativity, relatability, usefulness and metrics.
Posts that dig into a single topic significantly outperform their vague counterparts, according to an SEO analysis report from Backlinko. The study suggests pushing out focused content, to a focused audience, helps SEO rankings and boosts traffic.
A b2b content marketing strategy is more than blogs, though. Visual content boosts site viewership by about 94 percent. Videos on a landing page bumps conversions by around of 86 percent. And infographics are liked and shared on social media up to 4x more often than other content.
The grown-up b2b content marketing strategy is holistic. It’s strategic, with laser focus on relevancy and consistency. No longer can it choose either quantity or quality. It must see both as the tactic to succeed. Content marketing is maturing – are you ready?
In today’s digitally-obsessed world, content is king. Google’s search algorithms look for and actively reward frequency and relevance of content, it helps brands develop awareness and authority in a saturated marketplace and it provides fuel to your social media fire. But as we jump into the informational age of marketing, are we making the most of our content?
In a marketing scene as ephemeral as Snapchat, one where 140 characters equals fully-formed thought processes, the idea of repurposing content in its entirety is tired and ineffective. Atomizing your content – or breaking it down into smaller pieces (you know, like atoms) – makes your amazing piece more searchable, more findable and allows the content to be consumed more.
Ann Handley, who co-penned the book Content Rules with C.C. Chapman, said it best, explaining the concept of taking one big idea and creating multiple executions from it increases efficiency, exposure and meets today’s consumer needs.
“We recommend that businesses reimagine their content, but that they don’t recycle it,” said Handley. “It’s not about taking a blog post and just putting it on Pinterest and on Facebook and on LinkedIn. You’re just filling links that way. It’s important to reimagine it completely. Take something and create something new out of it.”
It’s time to work smarter, not harder.
One of the hardest pieces of today’s content-focused marketing industry, though, is the practice of actually developing really good content. According toAltimeter, 70 percent of B2B marketers struggle with creating valuable content. It’s hard! It takes time, money, effort, attention span and, usually, at least some form of collaboration with your peers. This is where repurposing content comes in.
Take your brilliant ideas and use them with a cohesive strategy. I’m not suggesting more ideas or even a ton of additional work. Rather, take your already awesome idea and turn it into several smaller ideas. Stop creating the “mother of all” whatever it is and instead take on the larger number of less massive content executions.
Content atomization can’t be an option anymore.
Repurposing content has to be part of your strategy for success. Atomization isn’t a new concept; marketers have been using it for generations. Charles Dickens, for example, was one hell of a content marketer. He published every one of his novels in serial form, shifting between weekly and monthly episodic fiction. Breaking his content down into bits made his work more accessible to the masses.
Fast-forward to today, we have infinitely more avenues to create accessible content. Through blogs, social media, email signatures (we know a thing or two about those!), websites, ebooks, podcasts, video, audio, visuals; our users are no more than the push of a button away. But somewhere between Dickens and Kardashian, the marketing industry shifted to a “bigger is better” mindset. Consumers are looking to see the pendulum swing the other way again, creating a need for repurposing content. By breaking down stellar content into bits we’re able to cover more ground, reach more people, create hyper-relevant content, and amplify our reach.
Think small to reach big.
Mammoth companies like Disney are feeding the atomization machine, capitalizing on identifying where their consumers are in marketing process and delivering content to their fingertips. Take the record-shattering success of the latest Star Wars film, for instance. Obviously, the fan in me was engrossed by the movie, but as I stood in line opening night, some of my marketer-mind started leaking out. I was intrigued, I know Star Wars is revolutionary, but this crowd was insane! How’d they do it? How did Disney create such an intense and relevant hype about this release?
From the day Disney signed the deal to acquire Lucasfilm in 2012, they began releasing limited bits of information about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The first teaser (88-seconds of mind-blowing brilliance) was released more than a year ahead of the 2015 opening. A second teasers was out nine months prior and the official trailer debuted about two months before the film’s release. From October until opening week in December, it seemed like new content was surfacing every few days. And, the marketing team at Disney hardly limited their efforts to visual engagement. New information was released in bits (read: atoms) on their website and on social media. With each new release on every platform anticipation grew and left you wanting more.
Classic atomization.
Right, but how?
So I’ve sold you on why you should do it, but now you need to know how. Let me paint you a picture: You’ve spent hours and hours researching data, and you’ve created a detailed whitepaper that addresses the behemoth of topics for your clients. It has several sections of information in it and is backed by a hefty amount of data, it has quotes from your customers, measured ROI analysis, a lifelike pictorial of Ryan Reynolds doing his daily 5 miles, you get the picture. You publish it on your website, but then what?
Repurposing content is the name of the game. Each section offers opportunity to be the subject of a blog post. With some creativity and a touch of graphic design you can maneuver it into several infographics. Social posts are a given, too.
Another space to break it down and spread your knowledge is in your email signature. On average you send around 10,000 emails a year to your most important contacts. Including a call-to-action for your new ebook adds a new marketing channel. Sigstr, an email signature generator, helps you cut through the noise and share your most important initiatives automatically through your signature block.
Need more ideas to use your email signature block design for marketing? We know a thing or two on the subject. Check out this handy resource:
Last week, our Sigstr CEO, Dan Hanrahan chatted with Joel Book and Heike Young on the Salesforce Marketing Cloudcast – a marketing podcast that dials into the minds of today’s thought leaders, practitioners, authors and innovators on the trends, technologies and topics of tomorrow.
Covering ground from employee email to leadership idols, Book and Young scaled the gamut of marketing topics with Dan to uncover how – and why – employee email signatures are your brand’s secret weapon.
Listen in to the full 30-minute episode, and check out a list of our most notable takeaways from this marketing podcast.
Key Takeaways
1. Finding a new, untapped marketing channel that’s not paid, not earned, but already owned is insanely rare. And, Book said, while some of today’s savviest marketers have already thought about the concept – to use employee email (think Gmail or Outlook) to promote event registrations, new products and the like, industry standards have been inefficient at best.
But Sigstr swings the pendulum the other way, Dan said. The channel provides centralized control of your branding and injects customized calls-to-action through your employee email. And it does it all without depending on anyone else in the company.
2. Employee email signatures should be part of your owned media presence. You own this medium, Young said. Just like your website, your blog and social channels, you have control over the employee email space. You have the power over who your emails will reach – and all marketing starts with reach, Dan said.
We already know we spend a ton of time in our email. The average employee sends around 10,000 emails each year, if you break that off and have, say, 100 employees, that’s a million emails a year! That reach is huge. And, your audience is hand-selected by the people who matter most to your brand. Your employees. Other channels, paid, earned and even other owned channels take time to build a list to scale and to get the results you want and need for success. But you’re already using employee email every day. You already have a full inbox and bulky output.
3. Employees are brands’ new marketers. They’re the marketers who create the story, the people who make the most relevant content possible, said Dan. And, your employees are the most consistent and frequent touch point with your customers. They influence current customers and prospects alike, representing your company with each and every connection.
Employees are your brand. Sigstr gives them a way to align sales and marketing without interrupting daily operations (meaning they’re more efficient) and they’re on brand every time.
4. New marketing is content driven. But according to SiriusDecisions, around 65 percent of all content goes unseen. You’re pouring your blood, sweat and tears into this content, Dan said. But how in the world do you get people to notice it?
Sure you can post it on your blog, but will people find it?
You can pay to promote it on social media. Or send another email, but your audience is already bombarded with content from so many different areas. Or, you can use the little slice of digital real estate at the end of every email you already send. I might be bias, but it’s really a no brainer here, guys.
5. More and more marketers embracing the idea content is the way of the future. And they’re using Sigstr as a new channel for distribution, Young said. But how do we measure it? And how can we track conversions and ROI?
Conversions, of course, can mean a ton of different things, Dan said. But in terms of dollars and cents, he pointed to a use case from A&A Logistics. With 90 employees signed on to Sigstr, they closed a $10,000 deal with a new customer in the first month. That was a 20x ROI on their spend on Sigstr for the year.
Sigstr is for marketers, from marketers. We’ve gone through the regiment of sending the 6-step copy and paste signature updates. We want you to be able to use our channel, prove ROI and get expand your brand, expand your impact, solve a problem, get a promotion or sell a product.
Want more from this marketing podcast? Check out the Salesforce Blog!
Some days, it’s you against the world. Errr, well, maybe your team against the world in the case of marketers. Marketing teams are scrappy. But we have to be able to squeeze every last morsel out of campaigns for maximum value. Getting the most bang for your buck is the holy grail for marketers, who are consistently known for spending the majority of a company’s expenditure budget.
With this reputation on the line, we need to be absolutely sure our selected digital marketing channels will bring in the maximum impressions, clicks and conversions without breaking the bank. Many times marketers will turn to under-the-radar campaigns like social media promotions or risky high-dollar programs with third parties. What some marketers tend to forget, however, is your employees are emailing thousands of important contact each and every day – thousands of valuable individuals who are right there in the palm of your hand.
Using employee email as an owned channel is cheaper, and more effective, than traditional paid digital marketing channels that may have half the outcomes at twice the cost. In this post, we’ve outlined some comparison rates to help illustrate how employee email stacks up against the rest of your digital marketing toolbox.
Employee Email Vs. Pay-Per-Click
One of the biggest misconceptions about pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is high visibility doesn’t always mean high conversions. In order for a PPC campaign to work effectively, it must target a clear set of keywords that people are actually searching. Then there is the additional hassle of optimizing your ad or landing page and making it compelling enough for your searchers to click. On top of this, every click costs money so it won’t take long for non-converting searchers to get pretty expensive.
Compare this to employee email, which is an owned channel with minimum risk. Your audience is hand-picked to be high-converting and your messaging is already compelling. Looking at PPC from a purely cost-per-lead perspective, email is an exponentially better bet when comparing the number of emails sent per employee per day to the number of non-converting searchers per day.
Employee Email Vs. Display Ads
The sad truth is most people actually ignore display ads. Can you remember the last time you clicked on one? The average display ad click-through rate is a meager 0.06 percent. Hootsuite even said you’re more likely to complete Navy SEAL training than click on a banner ad. Not to mention your team fails to retain 100 percent in control of where your ads appear, leaving room for error and missteps.
Employee email signatures, on the other hand, have a click-through rate of around .5 percent. Plus, most have a very hard time ignoring all emails that come through their inbox, especially ones from those they interact with regularly. Employee email is seen as a low-spam risk channel compared to banner ads which today are often blocked thanks to plugins and widgets. That’s a whole lotta money to spend on a campaign that might not even be seen.
Only 37 percent of marketers can measure the results of their social digital marketing channels
35 percent say they are really not sure if they are measuring ROI properly
28 percent of marketers say they don’t know how to measure social media marketing ROI at all
For a marketing channel that is so widely used, there is little in the way of metrics that can sustain this as a scalable distribution effort. Without the ability to track leads back to certain social campaigns, marketing teams can expect to see their social advertising budgets dwindle.
Employee email, on the other hand, can be easily tracked and monitored. Open rates and delivery rates can be gathered with little manual effort to determine the effectiveness of campaigns. Leveraging an employee email signature solution, such as Sigstr, means built-in analytics that calculate click-through-rates, content conversion rates, and overall campaign effectiveness.
Employee Email Vs. Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting is when your website visitors are ‘cookied’ and then served product advertisements as they search the internet or browse their favorite sites. This marketing channel often makes prospects leery and can make it seem like you are ‘following’ their every move on the internet. Highly-segmented retargeting campaigns are often exorbitantly expensive and can come off as abrasive, which can lead to fewer clicks and even fewer conversions.
Employee email, on the other hand, posts a friendly vibe that counteracts any scary stalker awkwardness. Plus, if someone is opening an email, they are already predispositioned to click on the links or image provided in the signature area. Your audience is already segmented based on your employee email patterns, which means your message is right 100 percent of the time.
Ready for a new addition to your mix of digital marketing channels? Request a demo of Sigstr today to see how employee email can help you make the most of the channel already used most often.
Think about all the emails you receive every day. How often do you notice something that is so irritating that you can’t even read on? What started out as a promising email exchange quickly spoiled, and the convo hit your Trash. It’s bad email etiquette we experience daily, but have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, you could be guilty of these email faux pas as well?
1. Blast the “eblast”
Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all approach to email. Crafting just one message and blasting it off to your entire list every week, hoping it resonates with the multiple personalities you service just doesn’t work. There are few things more annoying than receiving a batch email only to realize any prior communication with the company meant nothing – you’re just a number on a spreadsheet.
The MarketingProfs post, “Six Email Habits That Are Alienating Your Customers,” puts eblasts and the concept of “Batch-and-Blast” right at the top of the list of email etiquette practices that grate on our nerves. Here’s why they hate it:
“…think about the impression you’re making with customers who also have relationships with merchants that more fully understand their needs and desires. Customers who sense you don’t care will delete, ignore, or unsubscribe, so focus on sending the right email at the right time for the right reason.”
2. Short-sided segmentation
Today’s technology allows us to get a closer look at our audience, which is so handy in the micro-fragmenting world in which we live. Contacts have been trained to expect to be grouped into simple segments (think your standard demographic charts). If you’re not segmenting by age, gender, location and the like, it’s really no wonder your open rates could…err…use improvement.
But that’s just the tip of the segmentation iceberg. Group your audience by buying behaviors, use dynamic content, allow subscribers to let you know which topics pique their interest. Know your buyer personas, identify your ideal consumers as they stand as individual personas. Then break down your groups to drive a more relevant message. Relevance ramps up revenue.
3. Rambling about nothing
It’s tough to take anyone seriously when they’re rambling on and on about “client user group A” or their “customer advocacy programs,” when there’s really no point to what they’re saying. The best way to get, and keep, a customer’s attention is to get right down to business. And get there fast. Brevity and clarity matter now more than ever.
Take as long as you need to get to the point in your messaging, but take no longer. Ann Handley, the human-powered content engine who literally wrote the book on writing, said brevity isn’t stripping your content down to its skivvies, but rather taking the time to tell the story without the fluff.
“The notion of brevity has more to do with cutting fat, bloat and things that indulge the writer and don’t respect the reader’s time,” she said. “Keep it tight.”
We’re living in an era of low trust in society as a whole. Just 18 percent of consumers say they trust business leaders today. At its core, business is human. No business actually sells to another business; we sell to a person who happens to work at another business. Consumers want to do business with those they can relate to. They want to buy from people who have been in their shoes and have found the hidden key to success. They want to work with, and spend money on, companies that are honest, authentic and dependable.
5. No clear CTA
Make sure you have clear calls-to-action that are easy to see and simple to understand. Your customers shouldn’t be left wondering what you want them to do or how they should do it. Basic email etiquette says every note should include a CTA, whether it’s a simple reply back, a resource download or a link to watch your newest video. Clear CTAs can also lead to higher click-through rates and customer engagement.
6. Failure to fine-tune
Most email marketers spend about 80 percent of their days in the office creating campaigns, so it’s easy see why monitoring and measuring often fall by the wayside. Consider this stat from MarketingProfs: Only 29 percent of marketers look at ROI metrics to evaluate email effectiveness, according to the DMA (UK), and one in five have limited to no skills in email testing. But without measuring and monitoring, you’ll never truly understand what’s the best email etiquette. Easy fixes include testing dynamic variables within your emails (subject lines, sign-offs, etc.) and tracking your deliverability, open and click-through rates. Just making these small changes can help your team make strategic decisions that show customers you truly understand what they want.
7. Crazy email add-ons
Picture this: After an email sign-off, but before the signature, you see a two-paragraph text block detailing the company background, mission and vision. Where do you focus? No where – and the email hits the trash bin faster than Usain Bolt hit the pavement in Rio.
Don’t be that guy.
Cut back on the frivolous definitions and unneeded text for maximum value. Add in a couple hyperlinks that take customers to your social pages or website to highlight your vision and mission.
8. Simple slipups
Just thinking about all the times I’ve had to send the dreaded, “Oops, attachment actually included,” email makes me cringe. Little mistakes like this can add up over time and annoy your customers.
Pay attention to your subject line: 63 percent of people will delete or ignore an email after reading the subject line, according to the DMA.
Pick a friendly “From” or sender name so that your subscriber doesn’t dismiss your email as spam. And please be sure to set aside time to catch typos – the fastest way for an email to be disregarded is a misspelling.
9. Irrelevant timing
You’ve honed your message, you’ve gotten into the mind of your buyer and you’re ready to hit send. But when you deliver your message is just as important as what you’re saying. So optimize it.
Triggered emails based on the information you already have on your buyer (Is it their birthday? Did they just buy something? Do they have something sitting in their cart?) makes your timing more relevant and increases engagement. Use a Welcome Program to find out the inner-workings of your clientele and their email etiquette.
The Epsilon Email Marketing Research Center said triggered emails have an open rate of 46-53 percent and click-through rates that range between 9 and 11 percent. People listen, if they hear the right message at the right time.
10. Lack of contact information
This one should be a no-brainer, but we threw it on here to remind everyone how important this often-overlooked email aspect is. Your email signature not only tells the recipient who the email is from, but it can also help re-establish your relationship with your customers and promote your brand and messaging to your clients. At Sigstr, we recommend including social media handles as well so people can follow the latest news and updates – this can feel like a special personal touch, especially to customers.
Looking for more ways to improve your email etiquette and add value to your customer conversations? Request your demo to see Sigstr in action and learn why employee email may be the answer you’re looking for.
Imagine being able to earn a Ph.D, but not able to pick up a pencil. Being a mother of four and not able to hear your children call your name.
Imagine serving your country in combat and now being unable to turn on a light. Assistance dogs from Canine Companions can do all of this, and so much more, for people with disabilities.
Stefan’s Story
Five months into his deployment in Afghanistan, US Army veteran Sgt. Stefan LeRoy stepped on an improvised explosive device while trying to carry a fellow soldier to a medevac helicopter. He lost his legs and his platoon member in an instant. Fast-forward to February 2016, when Stefan gained a four-legged battle buddy named Knoxville from Canine Companions for Independence.
Knox is trained to retrieve dropped items, turn lights on and off, open doors and even bring Stefan his prostheses. “I have Canine Companions Service Dog Knox to help me go further. He knows 40 commands to make life easier. In situations where I don’t feel comfortable with my disability, Knoxville makes me feel more comfortable.”
The 411 on Canine Companions
Canine Companions for Independence breeds and trains highly-skilled assistance dogs for adults, children and veterans with disabilities. Since their founding in 1975, Canine Companions has matched over 5,100 exceptional dogs like Knoxville with people with disabilities like Stefan, entirely free of charge. Each remarkable assistance dog costs approximately $50,000 to breed, raise, train and support, funded solely by private donations.
Sigstr is a part of transforming lives every day. With Campaign banners and Sigstr’s email signature editor, every email communication from Canine Companions for Independence connects the public to their stories.
The clickable banners not only raise funds to place assistance dogs like Knoxville, but also spread awareness around Canine Companions. Whether it’s a call-to-action to make every day Independence Day or to change a life four paws at a time, the Sigstr email signature editor is being used to make a difference. It’s helping give the gift of independence to a person with a disability.
Hollister Visits the Sigstr Office
The coolest part? We had the opportunity to hang out with one of their assistance dogs (Hollister) last Friday. We quickly learned that Hollister is a fun-loving dude that enjoys being around people. Needless to say, he was a big hit at the Sigstr office.
Thanks again to Canine Companions for letting us tell their story. If you’d like to learn more, or make a donation, be sure to visit their website.
You’re addicted to referrals – to the allure of trusting your clients to pass word along over creating a new business strategy, with new hires, new ideas, new practices, to generate leads.
I get it, leads that stem from referrals convert at a higher rate, and tend to have a higher lifetime value, than any other lead source for an agency. About 90 percent of ad professionals rely mainly on their referral pipeline to drive new business.
Plus, new business programs are hard. They’re hard to create, hard to maintain, hard to hire for, hard to keep up with, and frankly, most digital marketing agencies just aren’t very good at developing them. You’re already fully engulfed in the intricacies of marketing, creative, design, digital, social and content development. And new business is, well, new. It’s different. You just don’t get it. The “normal” rules simply don’t apply.
So, inevitably, referrals become the backbone to your new business generation, which isn’t all bad, but it’s certainly some risky business (cue an underwear-clad Tom Cruise sliding in to a little Bob Seger).
Referrals definitely have their place, but a singular focus is not a strategy. What happens when your lead-gen cycle starts to run dry? Leads aren’t quite up to snub for your agency, and you’re stuck dumping hours into their success while your profitability takes a hit? What other new business programs should be on your radar as your agency aims toward growth?
Referrals are great – until they’re not.
If you build it, they might come.
If you do good work, good leads (might) follow. Referrals deliver social proof. It means someone has used your services and are clearly happy. If they’re happy, they offer up a referral. The referral gives you a warm lead, an approachable lead.
It makes sense to logic, but can I let you in on a little secret? Prospects don’t give a damn about logic. We all know about hundreds of phenomenal digital marketing agencies with top-notch talent and happy clients that have gone under simply because their lead-gen pool ran dry.
Trusting your clients to pass along new business is just bad business. It puts an enormous amount of control over your company, your growth, into the hands of someone other than you. What happens when you hit an economic stumble? Or your network is left parched?
I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but…
We’ve all been there. Let’s set the scene: your friend is giddy with excitement, “I’ve found the perfect guy for you!” she squeals. He’s the typical tall, dark and handsome type, with a great job and an affinity for buying his mom flowers.
He sounds like a great guy, but after a few dates, the fit just isn’t right.
Now, imagine that in your referral program. A client sends you a prospect who comes from a fantastic company, but the relationship just isn’t a good fit. Maybe they don’t meet your minimum, or there’s a disconnect in expectations or even personalities. Absent of a polite way out – and always looking to up your ARR – a sense of obligation kicks in and you take the client.
“They’re a small account,” you rationalize, “it’s not going to be that bad.” And sure, the arrangement might work for a while. And you’ll bring in (a few) dollars that weren’t there before, so that’s something.
But now you’re stuck investing time and draining resources you could be using to invest in your best relationships. You’re squashing productivity because you’re forced to focus on “fixing” the fit to maintain a relationship with your new client and, usually more importantly, the reference. It’s a dangerous, and expensive, game you’re playing just to keep them happy.
Referrals aren’t a consistent or scalable source.
In an industry that makes its living on selling marketing services, why do so many digital marketing agencies miss the mark when they’re marketing themselves?
Referrals are insanely important. Referral clients have around a 25 percent higher lifetime value than non-referred clients, and are about 25 percent more profitable per year. And, they provide social proof, which warms up a prospect’s psychology into spending.
If you don’t have a process to drive referrals, go make one. NOW!
With that said, though, it’s dangerous to rely solely on referrals. They’re not a consistent or scalable source for new business generation. Referrals come from relationships, and unless you keep feeding your relationship pool with new contacts, the referrals will dry up. Sooner or later, you’ll run out of leads in your pipeline and it might be too late to change the tide.
So what’s New Business Development look like?
New business is more competitive than ever right now. More digital marketing agencies are fighting for the same volume of new business. Larger agencies are looking to smaller accounts just to keep growing. Their smaller counterparts are becoming more aggressive in the search for business outside of their typical domain.
As the economy slowly improves, the feeding frenzy will only continue. Consumers are spending more, driving an upturn in demand, and more demand means more opportunities to sell. Those who sell want to be heard. The sheer number of digital marketing agencies trying to get a piece of the action is just insane – somewhere around a half million across the globe.
And marketers are just loving it. They’re working to up agency competition and drive down costs. You’re left falling into the trap of under-charging and over-delivering just to stay in the game.
Now get this: 66 percent of agencies report they don’t have a business development plan. What?!
To get started, conduct a brand review to make sure your current brand, story and service offerings create market differentiation. Create your buyer personas to know exactly who you’re selling to and how they want to be sold. Remember, people hate to be sold, but love to buy.
Then create a compelling brand story, driven by your history, services, offerings and most importantly your personality. Be authentic and empathetic to your ideal client.
Need some ideas on brand-building and connecting with your clients? Check out our newest resource!
It’s time to face the facts: Marketing is expensive. It’s one of the largest expenditures a company will dish out. And, despite our collective industry obsession with metrics, marketers still struggle to prove ROI with their marketing budget plan. Almost two-thirds of today’s CMOs have trouble quantitatively proving the impact of their efforts. What’s more, nearly three out of four CEOs agree, saying marketers are constantly on the ask for more dollars, but rarely can explain how much incremental business the money will create.
On the flip-side, though, CEOs are looking to their marketing departments now more than ever to help fuel growth. Marketing spend reports are including engagement rates, audience type, click-through rates and view, but can they tell the CEO (and CFO) what kind of boost in lead-gen those dollars are creating?
Unfortunately, according to Harvard Business Review, around half of paid media impressions fail to reach the targeted audience. This means that half of those dollars from your marketing budget plan are essentially wasted.
A Better Way to Segment & Target Your Audience
Thankfully, there are marketing solutions designed specifically to address how you segment, target and speak to your fragmenting audiences. Sigstr’s email signature marketing solution ensures that your audience is always hand-picked.
Your employees are the most knowledgable group when it comes to your target customer, and they’re emailing these individuals each and every day.
By using the employee email signature, marketers have the ability to not only create specific campaigns to promote conferences, resource downloads, or demo registrations, but can also segment users into designated groups. By harnessing employee knowledge and your marketing savvy, your team can send the right message to the right audience 100 percent of the time.
If your Client Services team, for example, emails regularly with existing clients, they might want to promote content that has higher engagement rates with clients:
Your Business Development team, which targets prospective customers versus existing customers, can highlight upcoming webinars, conferences and other educational events that their audience – early stage or cold prospects – are more likely to interact with:
With detailed analytics available through Sigstr dashboards, your team can track what’s working. You’re able to see which content is being clicked on and read. You can use this newfound knowledge to replicate those campaigns that are performing well and scale back on those that may not be as effective.
Because Sigstr leverages the power of employee email signatures and enhances the communications your teams are already sending out to their most valuable contacts, it becomes the perfect tool to reach a targeted audience (and get more out of your marketing budget plan). You can learn more about Sigstr’s email signature marketing solution by checking out our latest resource below, or request a demo.
Finding new ways to distribute content can be one of the most daunting tasks of any marketing team. Not only does this mean some of your go-to campaigns are running stale (looking at you, drip campaigns) but it also means that you now need to tap into the creative minds of your teammates and come up with some new and exciting ways to spread your message.
But how do you actually know you need to find new content marketing tools? Luckily, your friends at Sigstr (that’s us!) want to help you skip a couple steps and get right to the brainstorming. We put together a list of five signs it’s time to find new ways to get your content noticed:
1. The numbers just aren’t adding up
You’ve signed a contract, your content is proofed and your campaign is ready to go. No matter what traditional marketing efforts you’re planning, if you spend money on a campaign and aren’t pulling in the corresponding number of leads, something is up. Instead of taking the easy way out (“Why don’t you give us a discount on this send and we can try again next month”) it may be time to reconsider your options.
The best place to start is research. What types of campaigns are you running? How much are you spending per campaign? Per lead? Start gathering information from all of your current content marketing tools so you can make informed decisions when it comes time to create budgets and marketing calendars.
2. Conversion rates are dropping
Let’s say you have a tried-and-true direct mail campaign. Your team can confidently send out a batch once a month and see measurable results every time. Then, out of nowhere, your conversions hit a wall. Nobody is responding, and your business development team is calling upon deaf ears. It’s finally happened – your brilliant idea is no longer ‘brilliant’. Creative ideas do, unfortunately, almost always eventually become stale and overused.
Think of how many marketing emails, mailers and calls you receive daily. Your prospects easily receive that many or more. Your message is just one of many in the pile on their desk or in their inbox and you need to be constantly competing with these unseen opponents.
3. Your lists are slowly dwindling
This is one of my most anxiety-driving nightmares! You work so hard to gather names and vet prospects, just to see them slip away over time into marketing purgatory. Obviously, the only way to combat this ‘list fatigue’ to to backfill with new names over time. But what if you hit a wall with those new names?
Sometimes, a new distribution avenue opens up an entirely new audience. Do you attend multiple tradeshows? Try sending follow up emails to people you didn’t meet with at the conference and highlight some of the things they might have missed at your booth. Finding new content marketing tools can help re-engage silent prospects and uncover new ones.
4. Your best-performing content just isn’t cutting it anymore
We all have our ‘best of the best’ content that is guaranteed to bring in the clicks. It can be a go-to whitepaper, a stat-heavy case study, or a credibility-boosting press release. Whatever it is, your team turns to it like an old friend when there is a lag in new leads. But what if it doesn’t work? Your secret weapon suddenly fails you, and your team has nowhere else to turn.
You can fiddle around with subject lines, HTML layouts and templates all you want, but sometimes the truth is in the packaging – your campaigns just aren’t cutting it. Your best content is the best for a reason, and people respond to it for a reason. Come up with new and exciting ways to get this content in front of your prospects and it will be back on top in no time.
5. The team is feeling the burn
This is a pretty common problem across marketing teams. Scrambling to figure out why your campaigns are lagging, or why your numbers aren’t where they should be is a huge indicator that it’s time to find new content marketing tools. Hopefully your marketing team is full of smart, qualified creatives – if they’re struggling to find answers that aren’t there it might be time to take a step back.
As marketers, sometimes our heads can get too bogged down in day-to-day execution. Re-evaluating processes and procedures from a distance can help expose underused areas or uncover new distribution channels. Maybe it’s time for a team offsite where you can take a step back and brainstorm new ideas.
Has your team ever thought of leveraging employee email as a new channel for content distribution? Request your demo to see Sigstr in action and learn why employee email may be the answer you’re looking for.
Terminus, an account based marketing platform, has created the ABM Cloud, a partner program for the top ABM tech providers that help you design, integrate and scale your existing marketing ecosystem. We are proud to announce Sigstr has joined the ranks of more than 30 elite solutions, extending a partnership with Terminus to open email signature marketing to ABM Cloud users.
For those of you wondering what this could mean for you, we’ve answered some FAQ’s below:
What Exactly is Account Based Marketing?
Account based marketing, or ABM, is a fancy term for a 1:1 personalized marketing strategy. Individual prospects and accounts are thought of as single “markets,” aiming for hyper-personalization in messaging and strategies, and individualized solutions and products. ABM campaigns are usually used by organizations looking to “land-and-expand” within large accounts.
At Terminus, strategic ABM efforts help marketing teams target the most-qualified prospective accounts, engage decision-makers and influencers across the organization, and accelerate the marketing and sales pipeline for continued growth.
Why is ABM Important to Marketers?
In your marketing role, you’re already well aware of the difficulties in nudging prospects across the finish line into customer territory. In reality, less than 1 percent of leads turn into customers. Marketing teams are constantly looking for new, exciting and cost-effective ways to convert leads into closed-won opportunities.
ABM opens the door for marketing teams to engage decision-makers and influencers on their own terms, moving the needle and accelerating their sales pipeline velocity at scale.
Tell Me About the Account Based Marketing Cloud
An invite-only partner program, the ABM Cloud gives marketers a toolbox of technologies that support account-based marketing strategies at scale. With 35 best-in-class ABM technology providers signed-on for integration into your favorite CRM, you can build the perfect tech stack to optimize your business processes.
The ABM Cloud is a game changer at every stage of the B2B marketing lifecycle, from demand generation to pipeline acceleration and onto later-stage support. Cloud users are also given the framework for a comprehensive ABM strategy framework to help plan and execute campaigns, each solution aligning into one of the five core components of ABM: identify, expand, engage, advocate and measure.
How Does Employee Email Fit Into the Mix?
As one of these integration partners, Sigstr adds email signature marketing to your ABM campaigns. Metrics and analytics are seamlessly integrated into your CRM for a holistic picture of your marketing operations.
Every email an employee sends (over 10,000 a year!) has the power to grow relationships, inspire action and leave a lasting brand impression. Sigstr’s email signature marketing ensures an on-brand close with every email sent – seamlessly adding a personalized touch that is so important in account-based marketing campaigns. Add in Sigstr’s interactive call-to-action banners, customized for specific campaigns and individual departments, and realize email signature marketing just might be the missing piece in your current ABM strategy.
What’s Next?
So glad you asked! You can request your free demo of Sigstr today to see how you can optimize the amazing potential of employee email in your ABM efforts. You can also sign up here to receive more information on the ABM Cloud as soon as it becomes available.
Want more information now? Check out our latest resource below:
Think of the most common thing you do during the work day.
If sending email isn’t the first thing you thought of, I bet it is at least in your top three. While the body of your emails should already be used to the fullest potential, oftentimes one difference-making section can be overlooked: the email signature.
It’s no secret the team members here at Sigstr are true believers in the ever-versatile office email signature. We love seeing our industry colleagues share our enthusiasm! When we saw Glenn Leibowitz’s Inc.com op-ed, How a Simple Tweak Can Turn Your Email Into a Powerful Marketing Weapon, we just couldn’t hush our excitement! Leibowitz gave a detailed look at email signature marketing, calling on our very own Sigstr founder and CEO Dan Hanrahan for advice on best practices.
Leibowitz, who is currently the head of communications at a global management consulting firm and recently named by LinkedIn as a “Top Voice in marketing and social media,” used the article to highlight six easy and creative ways to take the office email signature to the next level. We agree with these steps, so much that we outlined his recommendations below:
1. Include a CTA That Changes Frequently
Include CTAs in your email signatures so your team can gather more information on your audience and readers. You’ll also be able to track who is clicking on what links to turn your email audience into potential customers. Keep your CTAs updated and change them often enough so the content doesn’t get stale.
2. Use Graphics…But Not Too Many
As Leibowitz pointed out, graphics can bring an otherwise dull (read: text-only) email signature to life. But he agreed with Dan Hanrahan, your graphics shouldn’t overwhelm your message – keep them to a max height of 100 pixels. Plus, some email providers strip away all images automatically, so make sure you have backup text options in place, just in case.
3. Include Social Icons
Your social media channels are the voice of your organization and, therefore, are often the best place for potential customers to get to know who you are and what you do. Pick your top two or three platforms and highlight the icons in your signature for maximum impact – and maximum followers.
4. Minimize Variety of Colors & Fonts
Keep your color palette limited to your brand’s most recognizable colors, and only pick a few to highlight. Also stick to one or two fonts in your email signature to keep it looking clean and professional. Your email recipients should be able to understand your message and pick up on your CTA quickly without wading through a mess of colors and fonts.
5. Use Design Hierarchy to Catch Your Reader’s Eyes
What’s the most important part of your email signature? Is it your name? Your company logo? Your CTA? Use design hierarchy rules such as font size, color and line weight to draw your reader’s eyes and attention to what matters most in your signature.
6. Stick to the Basics
Leibowitz saved the best for last here. Don’t try to push out too much information – stick to your name, contact info, social icons and a clear CTA for maximum interactions and engagement.
Need Some Email Sigspiration?
Here are a few examples of great email signatures that our team loves, and we think you will too:
Ready to put your office email signature to work at your organization? Schedule your Sigstr demotoday to see how you can kick-start the “marketing secret weapon” that is employee email signatures.
As a top digital marketing agency, you’re tasked with positioning brands to create an intuitive and relevant customer experience. By watching trends and finding new ways to educate, entertain and inspire your clients’ consumers, you forecast the connected age of tomorrow. Sigstr helps to define your branding standards through employee email.
Employees are your agency’s greatest asset, representing your brand in every exchange they make. They’re sending thousands of emails each year, casting your identity on each of their contacts. In fact, on average, a single employee will send 10,000 emails annually. Offer them a vehicle to shift employee email to an owned marketing channel while you create another avenue to boost your brand identity as a top digital marketing agency and stay on the cusp of marketing technology.
Your Agency Can Use Employee Email to Promote:
Content (resources, ebook, case studies, articles)
Service offerings (current or new)
Consultation, audit or assessment
Rebrand
Newsletter
Events, podcasts or webinars
Career opportunities
How Sigstr Works:
Every employee email sent should close with a branded email signature driving real marketing ROI. Sigstr unlocks this owned channel by providing simple, central control over your company’s email signatures.
On-brand signatures: With a simple installation and centralized control, every email sent from your employees will have an on-brand and consistent signature.
Dynamic campaigns: Tailor your content delivery on a human-to-human level with a clickable call-to-action that highlights your latest content.
Examples From Other Agencies:
Direct Feedback:
Ready to Learn More?
Our team would love the opportunity to help your agency open up employee email as a new owned channel. Get started by scheduling a demo or access a few additional resources below:
A week ago, after traveling some 1600 miles (give or take a layover or two) from the terminals of the Indianapolis International Airport out to Boston, then back, I’d just finished a whirlwind day at #FlipMyFunnel – Boston, an account-based marketing conference put on by Terminus. The entire conference was dedicated to the new ideas surrounding ABM. Okay, I realize traditional sales methods have pointed toward ABM for most of recent history – and definitely all of my sales career, but the sales funnel, the idea of attracting those accounts, making the most of the customer’s journey, is upside-down.
The traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel is lead-based. It’s based on the idea leads come in at the top of the funnel then follow a straight path from awareness through purchase. It starts untargeted with the goal to grab as many leads as possible at the top, then drop them into an email cadence. It totally overlooks deeper engagement through the customer journey and ignores the psychology of customers.
#FlipMyFunnel
The #FlipMyFunnel conference, though, turned the funnel on its head. The idea is to find, first, the best-fit customers, then expand reach, engage prospects and then create advocates. It’s redesigning lead generation by introducing marketing technologies to engage contacts at scale.
Calls and emails can only go so far, Terminus CMO Sangram Vajre said in his recap of the movement. Instead of blasting a single, monotonous message to thousands of people, we can optimize content and campaigns for the right accounts.
Today’s new sales staff is socially active, digitally savvy and creates their own content to catch the attention of buyers. Marketing has the keys to these targeted accounts’ attention span, but all stakeholders have to be aligned to reach company goals.
Realigning your ABM strategy,Vajre said, has the power to surge your consumer engagement – just like Invoca’s Julia Stead did last year. A certified ABM Superhero, Stead targeted the right accounts and upped engagement by 200 percent.
Breaking out into sessions, I was caught up-to-date on the 2016 State of B2B Marketing, a discussion led by Vala Afshar, the chief digital evangelist at Salesforce.
Each touchpoint with your brand is a chance for a customer to strengthen their engagement with your logo, he said. But it’s time to flip the scenario. Every time a customer touches your brand, learn from them. Each contact, no matter through which medium, should drive holistic erudition from your customers’ needs. In turn, you’ll be able to create a strategy to more efficiently market, serve, build and sell to your marketplace.
This year, he added, more than 50,000,000 B2B emails are sent each day. But marketers struggle to gain insight through the channel. They just don’t have control of it, which means they’re wrestling to deliver an elite brand experience through it.
Of course, I couldn’t help thinking how much we help marketers take ownership of this until-now elusive channel. Sigstr is opening the door to employee email as an owned marketing channel – it’s giving companies control of an overlooked marketing opportunity. Want proof? Check out our new eBook.
Matt Senatore is boss.
I have serious respect for Matt Senatore. He’s the Service Director of Account Based Marketing at SiriusDecisions, a top research and advisory firm in the B2B space. His keynote hit on the alignment of marketing and sales in his clients’ strategies, and specifically EMC.
Brave enough to bring up his fandom of the New York Yankees on stage at a conference in downtown Boston, even going so far as to clearly note their win from the night prior, his contagious personality was still irresistible. Post-presentation, in a candid one-on-one I unabashedly explained my life goal: To be him. Next. I look at the knowledge he has, the leadership he’s earned and the authority he’s created. I want that.
You should have seen the look on his face! Shock served up with a side of awe, he admitted this was a first. But I’m a firm believer, nothing beats an honest, personal touch when you’re meeting new people.
I wasn’t alone on the trip, a few of my esteemed colleagues were on hand at the conference, too. Here’s what they had to say about the experience:
Michelle Baques, Sigstr
In the sales world, we’re constantly challenged with breaking through the noise and getting time with our most important prospects. In Tyler Lessard’s breakout, “How to Make Your Target Accounts Love the Fact You’re Targeting Them,” I learned new, creative ways to prospect. Lessard, who is the CMO at Vidyard said it’s time to get personal. Not just “personal,” but really personal. By using hyper-personalization and direct mail, you can create an experience your prospects will actually look forward to hearing from you.
While Vidyard is focused primarily on video, Lessard shared several other ways to get connected that make others in your prospect’s network want to be prospected by you, too. Everything from personalized videos that call out your name, totoasters that toast your face on bread.
Vidyard, you can prospect me anytime you want!
Bailey Roberts, Sigstr
The sales and marketing SaaS platform world is exclusive. Through our partnerships with Salesloft and Terminus, Sigstr has quickly been initiated into this illustrious group. #FlipMyFunnel marketed the official launch of the Terminus + Sigstr partnership after the announcement of Terminus’ ABM Cloud.
When we arrived at #FlipMyFunnel, we had a moment of appreciation for the company we keep. Looking around the sponsorship hall, we saw some familiar faces, and many new ones – each insanely successful in the ABM and mar-tech world. Our sponsorship table, where I was stationed, was set-up two booths away from Act-On, where we had a blast learning how to juggle with members of their team (using the kick-ass light up balls they handed out throughout the day).
Hanging out at our Sigstr booth, we saw more than just standard conference elbow-rubbing, but instead a sort of reunion. Our community has become a family. Even as a newcomer to this space, we were able to reconnect with awesome people we met in March at Salesloft’s Rainmaker event in Atlanta.
Despite the airline losing the luggage with all of our promo items, the day was a resounding success. We used the break between the conference and the FlipMyFunnel Birthday Party to celebrate our team, and dream about what’s next. We went to Lincoln, a local restaurant that has an old Civil War flag mounted on their back wall (next time you’re in Boston, be SURE to check this place out, it’s phenomenal!). We celebrated our first year anniversary with Sigstr. It was an incredible way to end the day and reflect. We ended the night dancing to some killer violin covers by Rhett Price.
For more on Sigstr and how it can help with your ABM efforts, check out our latest resource:
When you’re creating Sigstr Campaigns, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. With so many marketing mediums at play, it’s difficult to be continuously innovative in emerging channels, like employee email. Oftentimes, design resources are allocated to long-time players like search, social and paid advertising. Meanwhile, channels like Sigstr and your email signature block receive far less attention.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned situation presents a missed opportunity. Your most important prospects, customers and partners receive emails from your employees. This audience of influencers are more likely to view your email signature (and the clickable call-to-action banner located underneath) than any other piece of marketing collateral. With this level of exposure, it’s imperative to make sure the signature designs you’re promoting make a lasting impression.
If you’re a Sigstr user, you may have the sudden urge to rethink your entire creative strategy. It’s totally normal (and easier than it sounds)! To get started, step one is to review Campaign best practices. Once you are familiar with the basics, you can move on to exploring more complicated design elements. Below, we’ve highlighted three design principles that turns Campaigns from mundane to extraordinary.
Think Beyond the Box
Who says Sigstr Campaigns have to mimic traditional marketing banners? Feel free to use subtractive space to make design elements pop or ditch the rectangular shape altogether. Four straight lines do not need to dictate your entire creative process.
Create Dimension with Layers
There is nothing more uninteresting than a Campaign made with just blocks of color and text. Create the illusion of depth by layering images, abstract shapes, color overlays and patterns. A multi-dimensional Campaign pulls the viewer in and encourages conversion.
Tell a Story with Illustrations
It’s true what they say – a picture is worth a thousand words. Campaign illustrations are an effective tool in creating brand identity. Instead of filling your Campaign space with lengthy text, use illustrations to catch your audience’s attention and make them feel connected to your brand.
Your employee email signature block is prime marketing real estate. Don’t waste the opportunity to promote your latest marketing initiatives by leveraging an unmemorable Campaign. Create content that stands out and entices viewers to take action.
For more email signature and Campaign banner inspiration, check out our latest resource below:
At Sigstr, we focus on unlocking employee email as a new owned marketing channel. Sigstr Campaign banners, placed within the employee email signature, allow you to put your content in front of your daily email contacts and bring attention to relevant resources, events or efforts.
Our primary focus is on our customers, and helping them create the best email signatures possible. This includes designing Campaign banners both internally and through our Services offerings. With that said, we thought we’d share a few insights after A/B testing some of our own Campaign designs.
Promoting a Case Study
First, we wanted to test two different variations of a Campaign banner, each promoting the exact same resource (for this we chose the Angie’s List case study). Although the 2nd Campaign was live for a longer period of time, we found that more color with a clear call-to-action (in a bold color) performed better overall.
CAMPAIGN BANNER #1
Views: 4,987 Clicks: 19 Click rate: 0.38%
CAMPAIGN BANNER #2
Views: 14,179 Clicks: 74 Click rate: 0.52%
CTA’s and Picking the Right Color
We recommend your Campaign design include a clear call-to-action with a bold or bright color. A part of the Sigstr brand color palette, peach and green are a few of our favorite colors to use for CTA’s. Here is how each color performed:
PEACH
Views: 29,175 Clicks: 295 Click rate: 1.01%
Views: 13,872 Clicks: 72 Click rate: 0.52%
GREEN
Views: 13,221 Clicks: 44 Click rate: 0.33%
Views: 6,809 Clicks: 31 Click rate: 0.45%
A Few More Best Practices
File Type: PNG files are recommended.
Size: We suggest an image size of 295-450 pixels wide x 60-100 pixels tall. Sigstr accepts images up to 600 pixels wide, but a mobile optimized version will be shrunk to 295 pixels.
Preview: In the Sigstr app, be sure to toggle between the mobile and desktop previews of your campaign. The previews are located on the right half of the “Add Campaign” screen.
Resolution: Until Sigstr supports high resolution displays, please upload images at 72 dpi.
Strategy:
Use a call-to-action
Help the customer first (think product guides, tips, tricks or release notes)
Test, test and test again
The best email signature design includes eye-catching images
Get the word out (promote your newest ebook, case study or video)
Keep it fresh (we switch out our Campaigns once a week)
Divide and conquer (assign different Campaigns to different groups)
We Want to Hear Your Feedback
What works best for you and your company’s email signatures? How do your metrics compare? Does your company have the best email signature design? We’d love to hear more about how your team is using employee email to distribute your content and promote important company initiatives. Tweet @SigstrApp and show us your Campaign banner designs!
For more on Sigstr, check out our latest resource below:
81% of marketers invest in content marketing, making it the top marketing investment of 2016, according to the recent B2B Customer Experience Benchmark Report from Kapost. That’s a shockingly high number, right? The reason is simple, content builds authority in a subject matter, helping brands cut through the clutter of traditional advertisements and marketing by providing true value. That’s probably why you and your team are investing in content distribution, right?
Content marketing has become so important that marketers should consider these key stats from a recent Business2Community article:
67 percent of the typical B2B buyer’s journey is now done digitally, and 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions. (Lenati)
80 percent of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles over an advertisement. (Stratabeat)
Content between 3,000 and 10,000 words receives the most social shares—even though publishers are producing 16 times more short-form content than long. (ClickZ)
The two most popular types of brand content for consumers/buyers are images (22 percent) and video (15 percent). Ebooks and white papers are least favored (at 3 percent each). (SocialTimes)
Traditional digital content mediums still work best for reaching global business leaders. 85 percent prefer text-based articles (vs. 5 percent for video) for helping to make business decisions. (MarketingSherpa)
But that won’t last forever. Nearly half of all B2B researchers are Millennials, and already, 42 percent of total B2B searches are via mobile. (Branding Bricks)
Marketers truly believe content distribution can produce great results for their businesses, which is why they’re investing so much time, energy and resources into creating incredible content. But consider this last important statistic by Business2Community:
Brands spend 25-43 percent of their marketing budget on content, yet only 23 percent of CMOs feel they are producing the right information for the right audience, and delivering it at the right time and correct format.
Consistency across content, teams and channels is the backbone of an effective customer experience.
Key internal stakeholders agree that inconsistency across content and messaging has a negative impact on the customer experience
“Consistency across content is the final milestone marketers should aim to achieve to successfully deliver an effective customer experience. But first, B2B organizations have a lot of work to do to overcome process inefficiencies and internal misalignment, the two biggest barriers to content consistency,” the article said.
Revenue is Priority
Organizations that are spending significant resources – whether time or money – want to see a return on their investment in content marketing. While it may take months or even years to fully realize the value from the investment, the measurement is of extreme importance. CMOs and marketing leaders need to know the resources they are spending on marketing, and specifically content marketing, are making a direct and measurable impact on the bottom line.
“Content conversions between sales stages are the most important metrics to measure for a complete performance review of the end-to-end customer experience.” Kapost explained. “Marketing organizations that have the right infrastructure to accurately track content conversions at every stage of the buyer’s journey have a clearer view of how content works and are better positioned to identify opportunities for optimization.”
Which Metric is Most Important to You?
Every organization is different and has various goals and processes, so it’s important to first understand what the most important metric for content is at your organization. Content distribution? Conversions? Something else entirely? The Kapost article asked the question, and the results include:
Understanding how content impacts metrics is “critical for organizations aiming to deliver, measure and optimize great customer experiences.”
How Are You Putting Content to Work?
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 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 use employee email for content distribution, we’d love to help! Check out the latest Sigstr resource to learn more:
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:
This post was originally written by Katharina Cavano, the content strategist at Contactually. You can read that post here. Contactuallyis a virtual assistant for your email that discovers opportunities in your inbox by proactively suggesting next steps to take with your most important contacts.
When was the last time you made an ask of your contacts within an email? Whether you wanted them to sign up for your latest webinar or check out a blog post you were featured in, you probably created some sort of call-to-action, or CTA. How effective was your CTA? How many of your contacts actually followed through on the action you asked of them? If the number is low, it may be time for you to reassess how you create your CTAs and even what they look like.
Better yet, think about the last time you got a promotional email in your inbox. It had a compelling enough subject line to get you to open it, and once you opened it, did you click through to shop or open their website or sign up? Or did you open and close it back out in quick succession?
That compelling CTA – or not so compelling one – is a great starting point for creating your own call to actions in your emails. Keep in mind the three factors that go into creating a successful CTA: color, message and placement in your email.
Creating a more effective call-to-action
Before you start your CTA creation, think about what you want your contact to do. It’s a call to action, and you want your contact to take immediate action, so what’s going to get them to do that? Because, we’ll bet that the basic ‘click here’ won’t entice too many folks in to actually clicking there. You need to give them a reason to click, so what will they get out of it if they do go ahead and click?
Perfecting your message
Your CTA should provide your contacts with direction and be clear on what you want them to do or what they’ll get out of it when they do click.
Three factors to keep in mind while writing your CTA message: does it convey value, meaning what will your contact gain by clicking on the button? If you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, you could just use the verb subscribe, but you could also convey the value they’ll get out of your newsletter with words like ‘learn’ or ‘discover.’
There’s always the enticing factor of creating some sort of urgency behind the action because you likely want to get your contacts to act now. This is especially useful for sales or last minute webinar sign-ups. Create the urgency with timing or the fact that there’s not many spots left, and leave your contacts wanting to grab what you’re offering before it’s too late.
Take a look through your own inbox, was there a particular email that grabbed you and made you feel the urgency of making a purchase or checking out a sale right away? Test out that language or try to invoke that emotion you had within your own contacts.
When all else fails, be direct. Ask yourself, what’s the catch here? There’s no room for you to be unclear, and you don’t want to give your contact a moment of doubt as they take a look at your button. It’s too easy for them to close out of the email and keep scrolling through their inbox, leaving you and your CTA in the dust. If you’re looking to book up your next webinar, then your direct message should be along the lines of ‘reserve your seat today.’
Your contacts will know exactly what they’re getting when they click on that button and won’t face that moment of confusion or doubt that could lead them away from your email.
If you’re inviting your leads to your latest open house, doesn’t the CTA “Find Your New Home Tomorrow” sound better than “Sign Up For This Open House?” Be colorful and if possible, invoke some real emotions with your words here.
Using the right color
There’s a lot of debate around the subject of the best color used for a call-to-action button and plenty of studies done around it as well. While there’s not one definitive answer on the best color for a CTA, there’s some color psychology that we can use to assess whether your button choice will express the purpose of your action.
A lot of the psychology around color can be fairly subjective or personal, but across the board, there are particular emotions evoked by these basic colors of the rainbow that can be used for getting your contacts to take notice and action.
Certain well-known brands often exude a particular emotion simply based on their choice of color for logos and branding. And while it may be an assumption that ‘green for go’ would be the perfect choice for a call-to-action button, green has been found to be more associated with feelings like ‘peace’ and ‘health’ rather than something more action-oriented.
Instead, it’s blue and orange that often win out in the color ‘wars’ of CTA and isn’t that interesting considering that within most websites and emails that a hyperlink out to another page is automatically in a blue font?
If you’re able to include a button in your email and go above and beyond the hyperlink that may appear hidden within the text of the email, then by all means, do it. Keep it simple but make it stand out. A pop of color is one of the best ways to get your contacts’ attention right within the email.
Depending on your button color, use either black or white text for the message – don’t use two bright conflicting colors for both the button and the text. When you’re picking your CTA color, keep in mind the emotion or action you want your contacts to feel or do and ensure that it won’t get lost on the page. You want it to be clear where they should click, and leave them with no questions.
Asking at just the right point
Where do you put your button or link within the body of your email? If you’re making an ask of your contacts, generally you should be pretty upfront about it and place it near the beginning of the email, lest your contact lose interest and not make it till the end of the email. But CTAs can be tricky, if you want your network to sign up for a webinar, you wouldn’t put that CTA first thing without any explanation, right? While you want to draw their attention to the call-to-action, you also want to build up to it as they work their way down the page or down the body of the email.
When you’re placing a CTA on a landing page or website, you have a lot of options for where exactly you’ll put it, in an email you don’t have as much room or real estate to play with. Because of this, you have few choices and a small time frame to get the clicks within. As of 2015, the average human has an attention span of about 8 seconds.
This is a great illustration of how it’s better to get to your point in a succinct fashion and make it clear what you’re asking from the email. Your CTA should be towards the top, but not the first thing your contacts see they’ll need a little context in order for you to get them to click after all!
You’ll be action-oriented in no time
What’s the takeaway here? Overall, keep it simple and actionable. The last thing you want is to overwhelm or confuse your contacts within the email and leave them with that moment of doubt where they can choose to close out the email and take no action at all. Use strong action-oriented words, and enticing colors to draw them in and get that click.
There’s no shame in getting inspiration from all those promotional emails sitting in your inbox right now. Scroll through those emails and see what catches your eye, even better…what gets you to click on it. Is it the ‘Shop Now’ button placed midway through the email? Or maybe it was the ‘Watch the Video’ button that enticed you after you read the subject line. Luckily, most of us send a lot of emails, which leaves a lot of room for testing.
Try out the new button color or placement on the page. Does the 72 word trick work or do you find that a CTA on the bottom of the page works best? There’s always room for testing and further improvement when it comes to your calls-to-action, because once you find what works, you may be hard pressed to change it up anytime soon.
For more on effective CTA’s within employee email signatures, check out our latest resource below:
Ever wonder how to make the most of every piece of content your marketing team creates for your company? You’re not alone.
That’s exactly the question the Content Journey seeks to address in its webinar entitled, “How to Make the Most of Every Piece of Content You Create”. You’ve probably noticed by now that our team at Sigstr talks a LOT about leveraging your content across marketing channels. Why? Because 81 percent of marketers invest in content marketing, making it the top marketing investment of 2016. Content is an incredibly important topic for marketers in today’s digital world, so our team wants to ensure your content is put to use in the most effective and measurable ways possible.
We really enjoyed listening to the Content Journey’s webinar about making the most of every piece of content, so we wanted to share just a few of the highlights we learned, and add a few thoughts of our own. In the below recap, we’ll highlight the discussion on the complete content journey with two industry experts: Boaz Grinvald, Founder and CEO of BrightInfo and Daniel Kushner, Co-Founder and CEO of Oktopost. Want to learn more about what Boaz and Daniel have to say? Check out the entire webinar to watch and learn for yourself! Let’s dig into our highlights:
Ready to Make the Most of Every Piece of Content?
Content Strategy – What should you be writing about?
The most important key to consider when creating new content is ensuring the proper amount of thought and consideration goes into the planning process. No matter how brilliant you think your idea is, write it down noting the main topic points on a piece of paper and walk away from it. Consider what the content will look like and determine whether or not it matches your strategy. Will it help you move the needle? Will it help you create more conversions? Start by asking these questions:
Who is your target audience?
Why are you writing?
What are you trying to achieve?
Where is it going to be published?
What are the keywords and terms you need to write about?
If you’re going to make the effort to write the content, ensure you maximize the future benefit by using the tools above to make sure the content hits the mark. Here’s some feedback we saw from the attendees:
Content Creation – How do you write killer content?
First of all, create an outline before you start writing. What are the questions that you want to address throughout the post? Make a skeleton outline that incorporates all of the points you want the post to achieve. The goal for your post is to be concise and to the point without going on and on about irrelevant topics. In short, get to the point.
Next, personalize your content to the audience in mind. It’s unlikely that every individual or persona involved in your company’s sales process can be addressed in a single post. Some may be more geared towards decision-makers, financial buyers, end users and etc. Write with the end audience in mind to make sure you hit the mark with your post. Consider creating a variety of different pieces of content to address the various personas involved in the buying process.
Last, when writing, provide context and examples throughout your piece and always back up statistics with data and relevant examples. It’s also tempting to include as many keywords as possible for SEO and organic search purposes, but avoid forcing keywords and terms where it doesn’t make sense – your readers will catch on (and so will Google’s site crawlers, docking points for user-experience in their search algorithm).
Balanced Blogging – Where should you write and to whom?
Your blog is an asset to your marketing and sales funnel. The main purpose of a blog for many companies is to be discovered by your ideal audience for the first time. If your readers get to know and like you, they may visit your website, and if they’re the right audience for your company’s product or service, then maybe you begin doing business with them. The blog is important because it’s where you typically share content for the first time.
Be careful not to create content that’s all about your product and why your audience should work with you – it may actually turn them off from your company. An ideal mix includes more content types – not just the type that is self promotional, but rather what’s important for your customers, such as: industry trends, professional development and so on. Keep in mind that your audience isn’t single-minded and they want to learn about a variety of topics.
Distribution – How do you get readers to actually read your content?
Distributing your content is perhaps the most important part of a content strategy. You need to ensure what you create is activated through the channels your audience will see. Otherwise, why spend the time and resources to produce great content if it won’t be found by your target audience?
Below are a few examples of distribution channels to consider for your external audience:
Thanks again to Boaz and Daniel for a great webinar topic on content marketing! They showed us how to create, in their words, “well-written, well-reasoned and well-distributed blog posts that can prove to be valuable and increase traffic, engagement and conversion.”
If you’re in need of a solution for your personal email signature or company-wide email signatures, Sigstr can help. Learn more by scheduling a demo.
Did the title grab your attention? It’s crazy how much as marketers we often spin in circles. Marketers spend a significant amount of time thinking about marketing budget allocation, but when it comes to executing, measuring and optimizing, marketers sometimes fall short. It’s difficult to get out of the trap of spending budget on what “should work” and not lining up marketing budget allocation on what’s proven.
What’s even more difficult for marketers is every industry, and each organization within every industry, operates differently. The same programs and marketing tactics that work incredibly well for one organization can be downright duds for another. That doesn’t mean your organization is doing it wrong, but it could mean that your audience wants something different altogether.
The Data Around Digital Ads
Take for instance, digital ads. Because we’re all obsessed with the internet, craving constant emersion in technology, marketers assume the expanded reach will create an expanded audience. But in reality, according to a post by Marketing Week, only 9 percent of digital ads are actually absorbed.
A study by research firm Lumen, they said, used laptop-mounted eye tracking cameras on 300 consumers’ laptops to snag information on what they noticed while online. During the study, which was run in partnership with Nectar-owner Aimia, 30,000 minutes of data was collected, with around 15,000 minutes relating to digital ads.
“It found that only 44 percent of digital display ads received any views at all. And, of those, only 9 percent of ads received more than a second’s worth of attention. Only 4 percent of ads, meanwhile, received more than 2 seconds of engagement.”
Wow! If marketers aren’t basing their marketing budget allocation beyond open rates and click rates, statistics like these are going to come as quite the surprise. But what’s even more staggering is by using data from its ‘pressomnibus’ – a lab that tracks how readers view newspaper content – the article compared digital display to print display. “It found that a full-page ad in a paper the same size as the tabloid in the New York Daily News will be viewed by 88 percent of readers, for an average time of 2.8 seconds. In comparison, a billboard format ad on a website will get 38 percent of people looking for just 1.5 seconds.” But what’s most shocking is this: “On the whole, almost half (40 percent) of press ads are viewed for more than one second, compared to just 9 percent of digital ads, according to the Lumen study. A quarter of print are viewed for more than two seconds, nearly six times the rate of digital.”
Why Are Most Digital Ads Less Effective?
Mike Follett, managing director of Lumen, said it’s time to stop being so fancy. The consumers are over complex designs, preferring instead simplicity.
“The best digital ads do get looked at – but they tend to be simple, elegant, beautiful ads that a creative department would be proud of, rather than moving direct mail pieces.”
Marketers who are used to creating big and bold digital ads may need to rethink their strategies Follett said, advising designers to think about display ads “like a poster.”
People spend so much of their day online but have limited time to interact with digital ads – and often times have little desire to do so. Why? Because their time is so limited and so precious, and unless your ad is giving them insight or providing them valuable information they don’t have otherwise, they likely won’t interact with the ad at all. Or if they do, will navigate away almost immediately, as the stats above so clearly articulate.
What’s the bottom line? The better the quality and the more important to the viewer, the greater chance of a higher “dwell” time and a greater chance they will interact.
Need Another Way? Try Employee Email Signatures
Unlike huge full-page or half-page digital ads, the small area at the end of an email can provide an incredible (and much less expensive) form of digital advertising in the form of email signature marketing.
Simple and elegant call-to-action banners in email signatures (as shown in the illustration below) can play an instrumental role in getting higher dwell time and interaction with the content your marketing team works hard to create. These interactive banners can include important company initiatives in the hundreds (or thousands) of the emails your employees are sending every single day. Turn your email signature into a conversation starter to help your company’s most important contacts feel further connected to your brand via every single employee email sent.
Use Employee Email as a New Owned Marketing Channel
Request a demo today to see why email signature marketing should be in the conversation for marketing budget allocation. Or, click below to access our latest resource:
As a marketer, you know just how important your content distribution strategy is to your marketing goals and generating revenue for the bottom line of the business. Without content, what programs can you run and what can you promote? Smart marketers have found that when they give away really useful and meaningful information in the form of content, like ebooks, blog posts, case studies, infographics, one-pagers, even videos, they get much better results than a standalone sales message.
The Marketer’s Dilemma
But what does the ideal content distribution strategy look like? Are you like the many marketers who have so much on their plate that they use the “spray and pray” approach to sharing content? They don’t have a strategic plan for how to get the most from the content their team members create, so when a piece is ready for prime time, they might post it to social media, send a link to the sales team and maybe write a blog post about it. But what good is that if it’s not measured and not consistent? Are you missing activation channels that are available to you?
That’s why we’ve created an ebook to help your marketing team get the most from the incredible content you work so hard to create.
In this ebook you will learn:
Why 65 percent of content goes unused in most B2B organizations, and how that equates to wasted time and money
Overlooked digital marketing channels that can help with your content distribution strategy
Metrics to focus on, based on your marketing team’s goals
Which channels are most effective, including employee email
Underutilized content and overlooked distribution channels can be a major problem for marketers, but Sigstr is here to help. Download your complimentary copy of the ebook, “The Marketer’s Dilemma: Underutilized Content & Overlooked Distribution Channels” as a guide to help you put to use new and innovative digital channels to help your content cut through the noise. Get inspired by new channels you might be missing, and see how they should play a role in your marketing strategy.
Let us know what you think – we’d love to hear your feedback! We always enjoy listening to new ideas and seeing cool designs. And if we can help in any way, feel free to reach out! Request a demo here.
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:
If you’re a marketer at a small business, then you need every tool and solution you can get your hands on that makes you more efficient, more effective, or helps you make smarter decisions. As part of a small business, you likely have a limited marketing team – or may be doing it all yourself, which only increases the challenge. You have limited capacity to execute on programs and marketing ideas, and you probably have a limited budget, too.
But as Neil Patel, a contributor at Forbes, shared in a recent article:
“Marketing a small business is incredibly exhilarating. In a small business context, it’s much easier to see the immediate impact of a marketing initiative.”
Isn’t that so true? As marketers, we need to execute quickly and need to be incredibly effective with the resources we do have. But don’t we also want to see the direct impact of the work we’re doing? That’s part of the glory of being a marketer at a small business – you get to call the shots AND see the results almost immediately.
Small Business Marketing Tools
Recently, Sigstr was featured in an article by David Cummings entitled, “SaaS Products For the Marketing Department”. In his post, David shares that some small business marketing departments use up to 27 products. While that number may be on the high side, he suggests that, “As a small business marketer, you should look for the number of marketing department apps to grow over time as more useful point solutions come on the market.”
Our team at Sigstr would be lost without many of the small business marketing tools we rely on every single day. We use SaaS products to market, measure, sell, optimize, serve, grow, and so much more – all in a day’s work. In fact, we love our SaaS partners so much that we’re going to share a few with you from David’s list that you should check out immediately for your small business marketing department.
Here’s Our Favorites:
Salesloft: Sales development (inbound response reps on the marketing team use SalesLoft to respond to leads)
Is your team already using some of the small business marketing tools we listed above? Let us know which are your favorites and why!
And while you’re at it, learn more about how Sigstr can help your small business marketing team by scheduling a quick demo or check out our latest email signature marketing 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?)!
So your team has amazing content, huh? Awesome! Creating compelling content that your audience finds valuable can be really challenging, which you probably know from firsthand experience. But after your team spends hours creating and designing that great content, you’re only halfway there. Getting your content out and onto the computer screens or into the hands of your audience is the hardest part. After all, great content doesn’t matter unless it finds its way to your audience – right?
Distributing Your Content
We live in the digital age where there are literally thousands of channel options across paid, owned, earned and shared media that can be utilized to distribute content. But we’re guessing that doesn’t make you feel better. The sheer number of channels and ways to get content out there can be daunting. So what are the best content distributions channels to use?
In a recent post by Contently, author Joe Lazauskas addresses this question head on. We liked his article so much that we’re outlining some of his suggestions (with one of our own, too):
Tip #1: Put Email Newsletters to Use
Joe explains that the email newsletter will serve as the foundation for your entire content marketing program, and if you don’t get it right, you’re screwed. “Unlike social or SEO, it’s a direct line to your audience that you control. And it’s the easiest way to build a devoted readership that comes back every day.”
According to Joe, “The beauty of the email newsletter is that it doesn’t just drive reader engagement and traffic in a vacuum. Instead, it sets off a waterfall of traffic that spreads across social networks.”
Tip #2: Examine Where Your Audience Shares Content
Next, examine where folks share your content, Joe explains. “Those are the social networks where your company should be most active. There are a million different strategies for social, but for now, let’s just focus on sharing links to your stories. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are requisites for most companies.”
In addition, you also probably want to invest in paid content distribution. “If you’re going to spend $400 on an article, spending an extra $50 to ensure that twice as many people see that article just makes sense, assuming that traffic is high quality. And the best way to buy high-quality readers is through Facebook.”
Joe goes on to explain that, “The beautiful thing about paid content distribution is that you buy a lot more than just clicks. If your content is good, a lot of those new readers will become loyal email subscribers and organically share your content with their networks.”
Tip #3: Get Beyond the Blog
Joe concludes his content distribution tips by urging marketers to go beyond the blog. “Once you get these owned content fundamentals in order, it’s time to start thinking about going beyond the blog and getting into distributed content—the modern media term for creating content that’s made specifically for social platforms,” said Joe. “Think Facebook Instant Articles and auto-play videos, Instagram video, Snapchat, YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, and other platforms that let you reach tons of people.”
(Bonus) Tip #4: Use Employee Email to Your Advantage
Your employees send thousands of emails each day. Use email signature marketing to ensure that your content marketing efforts don’t go to waste, but are instead highlighted in the email signature area of every employee email sent. Email signature marketing also ensures that company branding is consistent across each employee – no matter what.
Without an email signature template in place, your employees will create their own email signatures, attach ad hoc PDFs of marketing materials, or include off-brand calls-to-action to download your newest piece of content. Use email signature marketing to empower your employees to share exciting content marketing updates without the hassle?
Make the Most of Your Content
Ready to see how employee email can used as an owned marketing channel? Schedule a quick demo or check out our latest helpful email signature marketing resource below.
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.
TechPoint, an Indianapolis-based group that is dedicated to promoting and accelerating the growth of our local tech community, has released the 2nd Annual Tech 25 Class to recognize the movers and shakers of the Indianapolis tech world.
“The Tech 25 is a prestigious selection of twenty-five individuals who are critical and exceptional performers helping to grow our community’s tech and tech-enabled companies, but who — not being the CEO or other top executives — don’t get celebrated publicly as often as they deserve.”
We are extremely proud to announce that our VP of Customer Success, Dave Duke, has been recognized as a member of this prestigious group. If you have ever had the pleasure of meeting Dave Duke, you understand why this recognition is not only very well earned, but it’s about dang time. We got a laugh out of this tweet from Zylo CEO, Eric Christopher:
If you have not met Dave, here is a brief look into why he is so deserving of this award:
Dave’s title says it all: Customer Success. If you make your customers more successful, your business will thrive. Dave’s unwavering dedication to the success of others has in turn fueled his own extraordinary professional success. Greg Kraios, who previously worked with Dave at ExactTarget and is currently the Founder and CEO of 250ok, gave this glowing review:
“Dave was an Account Manager who focused on our SMB clients during my tenure at ExactTarget. Although this entailed him having to be responsible for a high volume of clients, he was able to give each one his personal attention and care. His passion for their success was unparalleled. In addition to being a tremendous asset to the company, Dave is a great guy to have around. Always smiling, happy and positive.”
Dave spent over a decade at ExactTarget/Salesforce ensuring the success of customers before joining Sigstr as one of our first hires. At ExactTarget, Dave grew from an Account Manager to a Director of Customer Success, and along the way, he learned what it takes to scale Customer Success for one of the world’s premier marketing technology companies.
Dave has brought that knowledge to Sigstr. But more importantly, he is a catalyst behind the energy, empathy, and curiosity that has fueled Sigstr’s growth. Dave’s passion for the success of others overflows into the workplace. If you spend time with Dave, you come away happy you did so. He wants to know what’s most important to you and then works to help you move that forward. He fuels the creative fire for marketing. Every week, Dave makes time to sit down with his team to make sure they are happy. Not to make sure they are on track for their metrics, or they are being productive, just to make sure they are happy.
Sigstr is unbelievably lucky to have Dave Duke and we are so proud that he is receiving this recognition. No one is more deserving.
Congrats, Dave!
(Dave is also a key author on our blog – check out some of his posts below)
Dr. Seuss once wrote, “A person is a person, no matter how small.” At Sigstr, we believe that a win is a win, no matter how small. Every win deserves to be celebrated. Some wins merit leaving the office for celebratory Kilroy’s pitchers or Nada margaritas (2 of our favorite go-to watering holes in downtown Indy). Others simply require a Sigstr celebration staple: the walk-up song.
Background & History:
The walk-up song originated in the very beginning, with the original 3 man team of BDRs (business development reps). We have a demo whiteboard in the office that keeps track of how many demos (a meeting with a prospect where we walk them through our email signature app) have been scheduled by each rep. Walking up to the board to record your newest scheduled demo is a celebration in and of itself, but our VP of Product, Sam Smith, upped the ante with the introduction of the concept of a walk-up song (side note: this isn’t the first Sigstr tradition Sam has started, read more about that here).
As each BDR would triumphantly sashay up to the board to add to their demo tally, Sam would play that team members walk-up song. It. Is. Awesome. And this tradition has carried on from when we were a 7 person company all the way to now.
Every member of the sales team has a designated song to be played when they get a win. Sales Development reps get their walk-up songs played when they schedule demos, our AE’s get their songs played when they close deals and our VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes, and CEO, Dan Hanrahan, get their songs played when a partnership opportunity has been agreed upon or they have helped close business. You can see (and make fun of) our sales team’s walk-up songs below.
Celebratory traditions are not limited to the sales team, they exist in every division of Sigstr. The marketing team plays the rap air horn any time we make advancements on the influencer front or a MQL (marketing qualified lead) comes through. If you’re not familiar with the rap air horn, check out this app. Due to an extraordinarily overenthusiastic keeper of the rap air horn (me), we have reached a point that any time we play the horn everyone stops what they are doing and shouts “hot lead, hot lead!”
The product team celebrates new releases and product launches by bringing our DOMO robot to life. Product launches are especially exciting and important to celebrate. Every new launch makes our email signature app better, faster, stronger. The DOMO robot’s dancing can be seen in the GIF to the right.
Like we said, a win is a win, no matter how small. We truly celebrate everything in our own little ways and make sure each team member feels appreciated for their hard work. It is vital to the success of our email signature app and the team. A start-up mentality and sales-driven culture with an office environment that’s exciting and fun to be a part of everyday – we are a 24 man wolf pack and every single one of us is critically important to Sigstr’s success. We celebrate the little wins because everyone’s little wins amount to big wins for Sigstr.
What’s Your Celebratory Tradition?
Do you have unique celebration traditions like we do? We want to hear about them! Tweet us at @SigstrApp and let us know how you celebrate your wolf pack and their accomplishments!
Or better yet, let us know what your walk up song would be!
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:
It’s a question asked frequently by prospects. With so many marketing mediums already at play, it can be difficult to imagine adding another channel to the mix. After all, isn’t leveraging a company website, blog, and countless social profiles enough?
The truth of the matter is that we live in the digital era and new ways of engagement emerge every day. In order to stay relevant, businesses have to embrace a multi-channel marketing strategy to create a cohesive and impactful brand identity. Instead of shying away from new medias, marketers must embrace the opportunity to capture an audience’s attention in innovative ways.
Finding the perfect balance of mediums can be complicated. When evaluating a new channel, like Sigstr and your work email signature, it’s important to understand channel strengths and weaknesses in relation to your overall marketing strategy. There are a variety of factors to consider. Many owned medias like websites and social accounts give you the benefit of control and cost efficiency, but have no guarantees. Paid media such as display ads are easy to scale, but suffer from declining response rates. Earned media is the most credible, but can be hard to control. Marketers are tasked with finding the perfect channel combination to create an effective and memorable audience experience.
Sigstr is unique in the fact that it is an owned channel that is utilized by individual employees during one-to-one interactions. Most owned medias like websites, blogs, and social profiles are promoted from a single source and the audience consumes the content at a single location. Sigstr provides the opportunity to promote content during thousands of individual email interactions with prospects, customers, partners, and important stakeholders. Therefore, every single employee using Sigstr in their work email signature is a brand advocate and promoter of the company’s most important marketing initiatives. The added bonus is that leveraging direct relationships to distribute content establishes a level of trust uncommon in owned media.
So, IS Sigstr a needed marketing component? The answer depends on your goals and objectives. At the end of the day, marketing channels must work together to create a compelling story. Individuals consume content in a variety of ways and it takes repetition for a message to resonate. If you’re not seeing the response you’d like from current marketing efforts, you may need to revamp your channel strategy to include the addition of new medias like Sigstr.
Check out these helpful resources to learn more about Sigstr and how your work email signature can be used to distribute your content:
It’s hard work building up a company’s brand. Left to marketing alone, it can take years to grow a brand into something valuable – not to mention a significant amount of resources.
How many individuals work at your company? Whether your company has 10 employees or 10,000 employees, each of those unique individuals have their own voice, their own audiences, and their own preferences and interests. Especially in today’s technology-filled world where work and personal lives intersect, your employees want to feel empowered to use the resources available to them to be an advocate for their company or brand and help it grow. In today’s world, this is a new concept called “Employee Advocacy”.
Are not filtered by social networks the same way that corporate messages are
Thus, according to the article, employee advocacy gives you Authenticity, Trustworthiness, and Reach.
Employee Advocacy and Social Media
Companies often think of social media as a way to achieve employee advocacy. Social media is all around us and employees engage in social media activities (whether it’s work related or not) all throughout their days. In fact, according to a survey shared by Forbes, 64% of employees visit non-work related websites every day at work.
Companies like Oktopost have built a B2B social media management solution because of these statistics. According to a recent blog post on the Oktopost site,
“It can take months, or even years, for a marketing team to build up a company’s presence, reputation, and credibility online. This is exactly why employee advocacy is so powerful. Every post published by an employee on social media reaches hundreds of new connections, which the marketing team would not be able to gain exposure to on its own. While helping your employees become thought-leaders within their communities, by sharing insightful and educational content.”
The Oktopost article goes on to say, “The opportunity to engage so many fresh audiences is unparalleled, and of course, can either be immensely helpful – or hurtful, to a brand. It’s the responsibility of a company’s leadership to create a culture, environment and projects that employees will want to favorably post about.”
Going Beyond Social Media
At Sigstr, we use a saying around the office that goes like this: “Every one of us is a marketer”. Not just the marketing team or the sales team or even the customer success team. No, everyone in departments from product to administration to sales is a marketer, each with a different voice and different audience, as we discussed in the beginning of this post. Companies that haven’t realized that their employees can be their company’s biggest brand building asset (beyond actually just doing their jobs well) are missing out on a giant opportunity for their employees to be huge advocates in their respective circles.
But does it stop at social media? Absolutely not! Sigstr’s email signature generator was built upon the idea that each employee sends approximately 10,000 emails annually, each including a simple email signature. So for a company of just 100 employees, that’s 1M unique emails sent to an engaged audience of prospects, customers, partners, thought leaders, potential employees, and so on.
What if every single one of those employee email communications from across all company departments contained a unique call-to-action pointing the recipient to an important marketing or company message? Just like employees can be an advocate to your brand via social media sharing, a simple email signature can present a similar opportunity (if not greater because of the huge volume of emails sent each and every day).
Employee Email Signatures
Your employees send thousands of emails each day. Similar to social media advocacy solutions, an email signature creatorlike Sigstr ensures that company branding is consistent, and the most relevant campaign across all employees is highlighted in every email sent.
High-Impact Campaigns
Easily add clickable call-to-action banners to your simple email signature. After initial setup, these banners update automatically across your entire organization anytime a new campaign is activated.
Centrally Managed Signatures
Updating employee email signatures is notoriously time-consuming and unpredictable. Sigstr helps companies maintain consistent branding, manage contact information and ensure compliance within the simple email signature.
Without an email signature generator in place, your employees will create their own email signatures, attach ad hoc PDFs of marketing materials, or include off-brand invitations to events, webinars, or product demos. Why not use a solution that empowers your employees to share exciting company or marketing updates without the hassle, and relevant to their own department or group?
Start Empowering Employees to be Email Advocates
Ready to start distributing content through your employees’ email signatures? Start a free trial today and give Sigstr a whirl.
Want more information first? Check out our latest helpful resource:
If you’re anything like the Sigstr team, for the last 40 hours you’ve been mourning the end of the best television show in history, Game of Thrones. This season has received mixed reviews, but whatever your feelings are towards the storyline, you have to admit that these past eight seasons have been a wild and exciting ride. We at Sigstr have been fans since the beginning. In fact, we kicked off our most popular blog series dedicated to fictional email signatures three years ago with a post about our favorite GOT characters! In seems only fitting that we close out this story by theorizing what those email signatures would look all these years later.
It goes without saying, but SPOILERS AHEAD.
Tormund
Thank goodness for Tormund and his comedic relief. In a season that can best be described as bleak, it was a breath of fresh air to watch Tormund tell stories of giants, guzzle milk, and make countless passes at Brienne. It makes the heart happy to imagine him living his best life in the north with Jon and Ghost. Maybe he’ll find another Big Woman to make his heart whole.
Theon
Talk about a character arc. Fans went from being annoyed by Theon, to hating Theon, to feeling sorry for Theon, and finally, to rooting for Theon. His heartfelt moments with Sansa and Bran this season brought many to tears. He may not have been the most popular character on GOT, but in the end, he was “a good man”.
Jorah
Jorah defied death on many occasions over the years, but his time finally ran up. For that reason, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he didn’t make it through the Battle of Winterfell. Out of all the deaths this season, his was one of the best. His singular purpose was to love and protect Daenerys and that’s exactly what he did until his last breath.
The Hound
The Hound showed us a little more of his softer side this season. His crude remarks were perfectly offset by the tender moments he shared with Sansa and Arya. The fact that he died taking out his brother was bittersweet. His journey started and ended with fire.
Lord Varys
Hot Take: Varys was the most underrated character on Game of Thrones. He was the only person whose intentions were pure when it came to who ended up on the Iron Throne. He may have been manipulative and ruthless, but everything he did, he did for the common good. Rest in Peace, Varys. You deserved better.
Arya
This season, Arya brought a new level of badassery. Cheers were heard around the world when she defeated the Night King. Did any other character do anything of importance? We didn’t notice. Thank you to Arya Stark, and Arya Stark only.
Jon Snow
As soon as you saw Jon Snow’s reaction to the destruction in King’s Landing, you knew it was about to go down. It’s hard to believe that the honorable Jon Snow had it in him to kill Daenerys, but he was always the person to do the right thing, no matter what. His journey ending in the north wasn’t what we were expecting, but we can all rest a little easier knowing that Ghost finally got the pets he deserved.
Daenerys Targaryen
Every time a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin. Unfortunately for us (and for King’s Landing), Dany’s coin fell on the wrong side. Even though she always said she would take back what was hers with fire and blood, nobody thought she meant that literally. She turned mad in the end, but can you really blame her? She lost her greatest advisors, nobody is Westeros believed in her, and the man she loved turned out to be her nephew. Those are a few tough breaks.
Looking for a scathing review of her final storyline? We’re too positive for that at Sigstr. Please refer to Reddit.
Sansa Stark
If looks could kill, Sansa’s death toll would outnumber any other character’s. It was a great joy watching Sansa grow into a political powerhouse over the course of the last few seasons. If people (aka Jon Snow) had listened to her a bit more, some major bloodshed could have been avoided. All hail the Queen of the North!
Cersei Lannister
Cersei Lannister was the villain to end all villains. She was evil in every definition of the word, while at the same time insanely clever and complicated. We may have been expecting a more gruesome death for the beloved Cersei, but her end was poetic.
Jaimie Lannister
Oh, Jaimie. In the words of Tyra Banks, we were all rooting for you! His brief stint with Brienne gave us false hope that he had chosen to leave Cersei behind for good. We should have known that a happy ending wasn’t in the cards. Jaimie said way back in Season 5 that he wanted to die in the arms of the woman he loved. Wish granted.
Ser Brienne of Tarth
Brienne getting knighted might just be the best thing that happened this season. The moment was made that much more poignant by everything that happened after. She helped defeat the army of the dead, fell into the arms of Jaimie, lost Jaimie to Cersei, and took her place on the Great Council.
Tyrion
Tyrion’s intelligence seemed to slip these past two seasons. Trusting Cersei? Betraying Lord Varys? Blindly following Daenerys? He started to let his emotions get the best of him. Up until Daenerys torched Kings Landing to the ground, he believed she was Westeros’s savior. Thankfully he came to his senses in the end. He will go down as one of the most beloved characters in television history. Period.
Gendry
Gendry’s biggest mistake this season was asking Arya be his lady. Did he learn nothing from her repeated claims that she would never be any such thing? Other than that slip up, Gendry was always kind, honorable, and fair. Perhaps now that the post-war dust has settled, he can put his rowing skills to use once more and follow Arya to the edge of Westeros.
Bran
It seems a major miss that nobody asked for Bran’s advice this season until the very end. Doesn’t it seem like a good idea to gain a few tips from the guy who sees oh, I don’t know, EVERYTHING? I guess in a show about dragons, incestual relationships, and red witches, that’s not the most unbelievable thing that’s ever happened, but it’s close. His rise to the iron throne may not have been what everyone was hoping for, but alas, Game of Thrones loves to surprise.
The end of Game of Thrones is the end of an era. Let’s just hope that the rumors about a few different spinoff series are true. In the meantime, request a demo of Sigstr to see what your team can accomplish with your own email signature campaigns!
Note: this post has been recently updated after the conclusion of season eight. Scroll below to find the original email signatures we created before season seven .
Hodor
We had to honor Hodor, the most genuine and sincerely sweet character we have yet to meet in all the seasons of GoT. This season brought a devastating end to this gentle giant. The revelation that Hodor’s nomicker, and token phrase, originated from Bran’s travel through time and the desperate plea to “Hold the Door” made for the most devastating and painful death. Hodor’s Sigstr signature, we believe, is exactly as he would have made it.
Ramsay Bolton
In a very stark contrasting character review from the former, we hated Ramsay Bolton. Who didn’t? The horribly deranged and sadistic Bolton is a death that we have long been not only imagining but wishing for. Never before have we been so enraged by a character, all kudos to the extraordinary acting of Iwan Rheon (can we put in a bid for his Emmy Award now?) Ramsay made the list because we cannot possibly be happier that he’s dead and gone. Ramsay’s overwhelming obsession with his hounds, and the cataclysmic hunting trips they embark on, makes his death all the more epic. As Leslie Jones says in this hysterical video, “we are rewarded here in Game of Thrones.” Sansa deservingly deals the final blow. It’s the season of girl power, and the Sansa-smirk-walk-away at the end of “The Battle of The Bastards” had me leaping off my couch to give her a hard-earned round of applause. Ramsay has boring fonts in his email signature design because that’s all he deserves.
Daenerys Targaryen
This has been a tumultuous season for our favorite, and longest title-bearing, power queen. Khaleesi has formed a special bond with Drogon, the eldest and largest of her three, winged offspring. She had a very frightening bout with the Masters of Meereen and their vigilantes, the Dothraki and her own freed people. In spite of this all, Khaleesi has formed a crucial bond in this season. While she has had extraordinary success as a conqueror, her ruling skills are lackluster. In comes Tyrion Lannister, the wickedly smart and calculative man that has brought control to chaos. At the end of the season, Tyrion is appointed as Daenerys’ right hand. With his wisdom of all things Westeros, we expect some pretty big things for the Queen of Meereen in season 7. Khaleesi reigns supreme and ends this season looking like a total bada– leading a fleet of a thousand ships, with three nearly fully grown dragons, in towe.
Arya Stark
Arya earned this spot only after her rousing performance in which she confronts Jaqen H’ghar, the horribly annoying long locked man from the House of Black and White. When Jaqen tries to imply she has finally become No One, she claps back with “a girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell, and I’m going home.” YES. FINALLY. Arya has had certainly the worst and most roundabout journey back to Winterfell. She has proven herself time and time again that she has become a masterful swordsman and a fearless fighter. Her long overduerevenge of the Red Wedding solidified her spot in our top 5. Arya makes fighting like a girl cool, which is why it was almost too easy to craft her email signature.
Jon Snow
We could not make this list and not include arguably the biggest comeback kid in GoT history (rivaled only by the Hound and possibly his blue-headed half-dead brother, the Mountain). Jon had a heck of a season. He started off dead, murdered by his own men. By this point, nearly all of his family has been murdered. His first love is killed in front of his eyes. He nearly dies at least a dozen times at The Battle of The Bastards. He has believed himself to be an unloved bastard son to a murdered king. Through all this, Jon has come back swinging. He literally came back to life. He served as Lord Commander. He gained the unwavering affection and loyalty of the wildlings (most notably the giant and the guy with the red beard). Most importantly:Little Lady Lyanna Mormont gives a rousing speech in front of a full room of lords and leaders in which she declares Jon as the rightful and deserving King of the North. Jon Snow got the email signature design fit for a king – he earned it.
Cersei Lannister
We all join together in this wishy-washy state of loving or loathing the newly appointed HBIC (if you don’t understand the acronym, here’s some help from Urban Dictionary). She is both simultaneously the worst and best character in the series. Aside from being a total weirdo and being in love with her brother, Cersei has been consistently in a state of complete and utter lack of giving any cares in the world which makes her a freaking awesome leader of the new girl power movement happening in the series.
The only three things that kept her human and frankly, humane, were her children. The woman once said “the more people you love, the weaker you are.” Foreshadowing? Now that they’re all gone, we expect some pretty seriously powerful, badass acts of revenge by part of Queen Cersei.
She’s already off to a killer (pun intended) started with the nun that led the march in her Shame walk and the Sparrow and Margaery Tyrell, who burned along with about 100 other visitors of the Great Sept of Baelor deemed “collateral damage” by the Queen.
As you may have heard, we recently launched our Dynamic Campaigns feature that sends content based on your end-recipient (think internal communications versus externally facing sales emails). Cersei’s external signature is no-nonsense, just like her. No frills, no cool fonts, no quotes. All business. Cersei keeps her cards close to her chest, and doesn’t want anyone to think she has even an ounce of weakness.
Cersei’s internal signature reflects what only those closest to her know – underneath all of that toughness and hatred is a girly human that just loves wearing the color blue and braiding her beautiful blonde hair. It also shares a message she only wants those who work with her to know and needs the utmost surety the message remains internal (which is why she used Sigstr’s Dynamic Campaigns – shameless plug)
EXTERNAL
INTERNAL
Sansa Stark
Sansa has been dealt the worst deck of cards. The worst. Unfortunately, Sansa hasn’t been known for fighting that deck of cards or showing any toughness or grit. Lest we not forget when this girl thought she was in love with Joffrey and even said “he was the only thing she ever wanted in her life.”
We didn’t see a glimpse into any hint of fire in Sansa until she finally bucked-up and fed Ramsay to his hounds. That hauntingly perfect speech followed by the Sansa-smirk-walk-away at the end of “The Battle of The Bastards” was the stuff of legends. Girl, finally. We have been waiting for this moment since Season 1 Episode 9 when your almost husband had your dad executed. Sansa is finally in a safer, much happier Winterfell.
Sansa’s up for a comeback, hence why we dubbed her “the Comeback Queen”. While Lady Lyanna Mormont (who we idolize, by the way) packed all of her support behind Jon Snow as the King in the North, we can’t help but think Sansa’s up to something. She already pulled the sneakiest move ever when she enlisted the help of Littlefinger (yuck) to ride in and save Jon Snow and his wildling army. Flashback to season one when Sansa quips that a “trueborn will always have the stronger claim.” Hmm. Sansa’s email signature is a nod to this thought and what we can only assume to be her character development in the upcoming season.
Tyrion Lannister
Tyrion is another Lannister who is both loved and loathed. Why? His quick wit, sarcasm, undying honesty and affinity for women and wine. Tyrion knows and accepts it. “That is what I do. I drink and I know things.”
He befriends some of the most putrid characters, i.e. Varys the Eunuch. Varys has betrayed nearly every character throughout the show. Let’s review where he left off: He was with Cersei and the little late King Tommen in King’s Landing. Then, Daenerys and Tyrion at the Great Pyramid, before deciding he needed to take off to Dorne. Cersei just brutally murdered Queen Margaery Tyrell and her brother Loras. So, we can only assume her grandmother is out for blood. And guess who Varys meets in Dorne? Grandma Tyrell. We can’t begin to imagine the horror they are cooking up. I digress.
Back to Tyrion. He has been a key player since we first met him. Season 7 is going to be a great season for Tyrion (I think). We ended last season with Tyrion tearfully accepting Daenerys’ request that he become right hand to the Queen, her most trusted advisor. Tyrion has gained the trust of the lady with hundreds of ships, thousands of notoriously dangerous warriors and three gigantic, blood-thirsty dragons. Safe to say he’s on the right side of this, less can be said for his brilliantly evil sister. His new title, paired with his unabashed passion for wine, made his email signature all too easy to create.
Brienne of Tarth
We are just going to come right out and say it: Brienne is a badass. This cannot be denied. She faced the Hound, arguably the greatest and most intimidating warrior in the Seven Kingdoms, and walked away smiling. How?! Brienne is unwavering in her loyalty to whomever she serves.
She may be best known for her size and strength, but I can’t ignore her dedication to honor. She has sworn service to countless fallen leaders throughout the series until she eventually falls into oath to protect Sansa. I’m hoping this is going to be a much longer term of service than those prior for Miss Brienne.
Winterfell is already treating her well. This is where she meets Tormund Giantsbane, the red bearded wildling. Brienne has, for her entire life, dealt with men sneering at her, mocking her size and disposition. When Brienne first rides through the gates at Winterfell though, Tormund can’t stop staring.
Brienne’s absolutely not used to the attention, so I’m anxious to see how this silent and slightly-awkward love story unfolds. You can’t deny there’s some sort of romantic tension between Brienne and Jaime Lannister. Brienne has an obvious crush on the Kingslayer. Now we’re left to figure out if Jaime feels the same. He certainly cares about here. Maybe we’ll see an all-out brawl between Tormund and Jaime for her heart? We can only hope. Brienne’s email signature is a not to her devotion to all-things honorable – and her crush on the best looking dude in the show.
Tormund Giantsbane
Tormund is my absolute favorite addition to the show. We first met Tormund in the third season and he’s been an unpredictable spitfire ever since. We have gone from being extremely wary of him, to being downright scared of him, to adoring him. He’s a wildly effective and dangerous warrior, while also being a total goof and adorably uncomfortable flirter.
At this point, Tormund is a trusted ally and friend to Jon Snow. But let’s rewind a bit to the days we were still wary of him. When Tormund and his wildling warband catch wind the men of the Night’s Watch betrayed Snow and brutally murdered him, they attacked Castle Black. More proof Tormund is now a loyal friend to Jon.
Tormund’s loyalty doesn’t end there. His performance at the Battle of the Bastards was mind-blowingly awesome. He BITES Lord Smalljon’s THROAT OUT. Tormund has somehow found himself as the Right Hand to the King in the North. I don’t think he’s totally realized what he has gotten himself into.
His email signature reflects the unsurety that exists in how he is going to deal with this new development. Remember, in the Great Hall when Jon is proclaimed the King in the North, Tormund is one of the only not to bend his knee and hail the King.
Events rock. Conferences are the best place to learn from and rub elbows with the best and brightest marketing thought leaders in the business. Finding the right events for your company to attend can be a tall task, as there are hundreds of thousands of conferences put on in the U.S. each year. We love events. Good things happen when we have face-to-face time in front of our most important prospects, showing them tips and tricks with their html email signature template. It’s a big part of our marketing strategy, so we put a lot of time and effort into identifying where we need to be.
Below is a list of the top 16 Digital Marketing events we’ve compiled and put on our radar for the 2016 and 2017 year:
Is there an event we missed that you think should have made our list? Let us know! Tweet us at @SigstrApp and we will update the post accordingly!
And if you need a new creative way to promote an event your team will be exhibiting at, or hosting yourself, here is some inspiration for your html email signature template.
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.
B2B Growth is a podcast dedicated to helping B2B executives achieve explosive growth. Run by Sweet Fish Media, which executes B2B sales processes on companies’ behalf, the B2B Growth Podcast hits on relevant topics including “Email List Building or Segmentation?”, “Sales Call Horror Stories”, “Account-based Intelligence”, and many more topics important to B2B executives.
Did you know the average employee sends 10,000 emails per year? That’s 28 emails per day, or 28 daily impressions that prospects, customers, and users are having with your brand. Email signature etiquetteis massively important and an easy win to tackle. In this post, we’ll highlight some of Dan’s key points, but be sure to check out the entire podcast to learn more. Let’s hear what Dan has to say:
How is Email Signature Marketing Defined?
According to Dan, “Anything in terms of marketing starts with the audience and reach. The most frequent touchpoint prospects and customers have with a brand is through the email channel. The average employee sends at least 28 emails a day, so an organization of just 100 employees will send about 1M emails to their most important audience. And what does every email include? An email signature.”
Dan explains that there are 2 critical components to email signature etiquette:
An on-brand experience across every employee, which includes traditional information like name, company, and contact information.
A meaningful call-to-action that takes advantage of the white space that’s underutilized to promote your company’s most important initiatives. Marketers can inject content into that area that gives them the ability to update employee email signatures without bugging employees and taking them away from their day-to-day work.
Awesome Customer Stories
SalesLoft: “One of the best use cases for Sigstr has traditionally been event marketing,” explained Dan. “As SalesLoft was preparing for its upcoming annual conference, all employees included a Sigstr Campaign which promoted Rainmaker. The team was already pouring their hearts into the event, so it was easy to integrate Sigstr in the marketing mix.”
Lesson.ly: “The hard part about sales is getting the attention of prospects,” Dan explained. “Often times Lesson.ly doesn’t even meet the customer’s team in-person before they come on board. Lesson.ly has an incredible culture that’s fun, energetic, and pretty unique, but often times their customers don’t get to experience that. The Sigstr Campaign for Lesson.ly includes a fun ‘Meet the Team’ image, which points to a blog post that talks about the Lesson.ly culture and how important that is to their mission. Just a few weeks after launching the Campaign, the sales team already had 3 companies raise their hand for that initial conversation, as tracked via the Sigstr Campaign. From those 3 opportunities alone, the team was able to track $30,000 in new business dollars generated by the campaign.”
How Can the Entire Company Become Marketers?
“At Sigstr, we believe each role across the company has a marketing responsibility,” explained Dan. “Whether you’re on the HR team recruiting for a career fair or on the sales team promoting a new video or case study, everyone is involved. With Sigstr, the marketer can determine which Campaigns should be associated to which groups or departments so employees always have a Sigstr Campaign promoting something they care about.”
What Advice Do You Have For Companies Experimenting?
“Start experimenting now, whether you invest in a tool or not,” recommended Dan. “Why not try standardizing your email signature etiquette and including an image and call-to-action? First and foremost, find out if it works for your company. The best thing you can do is experiment and try out various Campaigns.”
Click herefor the full rundown of the podcast (including the recording).
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.
The average worker will send more than 10,000 emails this year. And next year. And probably more the one after that. That means your company of 200 employees is sending over two million emails each year. Usually, when you’re doing something that often, you want to make sure you’re actually doing it right. But as we work to hone our messaging – adding the right amount of humor paired with an amped up value prop – we’re forgetting to optimize one crucial piece: the employee email signature.
This is one of the most visible representations of your brand – likely even more so than your company’s website. So why are we allowing our this digital real estate to include cheesy quotes and bad avatar photos?
Our Role in Marketing is Changing
We’re creating ideas (on and offline), executing them through fruition, measuring our analytics, optimizing our programs and improving conversion rates. And if that’s not enough on our plate, now we’re tasked with managing how every employee across our company represents the brand image we’ve worked so hard to create. And because social media – especially Facebook – is so pervasive, that responsibility seems to increase daily.
To this fusion of responsibility, add a touch of technology which have made it easy for employees to share your branded messages. One-to-one human email, for instance, has been on the up and up for years. Last year, more than 215.3 billion emails were exchanged every single day. And research predicts we’ll be exchanging 257.7 billion emails a day by 2020. The email signature is more important and more valuable than ever.
Proper Etiquette for Your Email Signature
In your workplace tech toolbox, your email signature is often taken for granted. So many first impressions are made through email, and your email signature is your chance to shape that impression. OfficeTeam’s overview, Email Signature Etiquette: The Good, The Bad & The Unnecessary, sits on par with our own best practices.
The Good
According to business etiquette expert Jacqueline Whitmore, a sender’s contact information is the most important part of the email signature. Your recipient needs the ability to quickly access ways to reach you. And they need direction on what it is you want them to do. To ensure your information is always available include these:
Your full name
Your phone number (office or mobile)
A single, clear call-to-action
The following information is also helpful, but not always necessary:
Your company name & website
Your firm’s mailing address
Social media links to either your company or personal accounts
When it comes to your email signature, less is often more. Nix an abundance of flare from your signature to cut clutter and make your information standout and readily available. Here are a few elements to cut from your signature:
Inconsistent fonts and colors: Avoid too many colors and font styles. An abundance of varying typography in your email signature can undermine your credibility as a serious professional.
Inspirational quotes: Inspirational quotes are a fantastic way to show your personality – on your Pinterest board. Some may give off a conflicting message from your brand’s stance, while others just simply make you cringe after reading it.
Additional messages: “Please consider the environment before printing this email,” is a nice sentiment, but it just clogs up a space you could be using to inspire your recipient to act. And it doesn’t do a ton of good when someone’s reading a print of your email. Not to mention, the default, “Sent from my iPhone,” signature is showing your recipient you’re just too lazy to proofread.
Sigstr turns your company’s email into a targeted marketing channel that help drive event registrations, distribute content, execute account-based marketing, and more. Side note: If you book a quick demo with one of our team members, we’ll send you some sweet Sigstr sticker goodness.
Business services companies all face the unique challenge of not having a physical product. Instead, they offer superior services or solutions and rely heavily on the relationships that their sales and customer success teams build. They have created a successful company on their people and brand, and as such, their brand is incredibly important to them.
Sigstr created an ebook that walks through 7 clever ways to boost the business services brand with a polished html email signature template, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #6.
Clever Tip #6: Keep the Relationships Alive With Communication
It costs considerably less to keep a customer than to win a new one, so it’s smart to maintain a campaign to upsell or resell to existing customers. In fact if you’re not communicating with your customer database at least every four to six weeks, you’re missing opportunities to grow your business. Use a combination of sales and marketing tactics to stay in touch, such as alternating sales calls with email and direct mail. Even with the best of offers, you can burn out your list if you pitch customers too often. So rather than sending only communications with hard-sell offers, intersperse them with e-newsletters that contain case studies or other soft-sell but relevant and valuable information.
Make a habit of periodically using your marketing communications to ask for referrals. You can email a success story, for example, and ask the recipients to forward it to friends or peers who would like to achieve similar results. Or, promote your referral program in your html email signature template (a little more on that later). By providing deep information about your company for new customers and ongoing offers and communications with existing customers, you’ll create a synergistic campaign that builds strong and lasting relationships.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Consider adopting a simple marketing automation software platform designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, website, and etc) and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing departments benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which increases efficiency and reduces human error. The use of a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.
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.
Does your company rely on your employees to promote your most important initiatives, or to ensure their email signatures are always up-to-date with your brand standards? While some employees may be careful to curate the perfect message and will use the correct brand standards, that’s usually not the case. Asking employees to manually update their email signature template pulls them away from their primary job. It’s a distraction, and every update request costs your employees time and your company money. At the same time, your employees may not even know how or where to begin.
That’s why we’re taking you back to school with an ebook that’s focused on the math, history, and science of email signatures, ensuring your company is putting this valuable resource to use.
Math
A single employee will send (on average) 28 emails per day or 10,000 emails annually. Each of those emails represent an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Let’s say your company has just 100 employees – that’s 1 million impressions a year! What if your company has 500 employee or 5,000? The number of impressions pile up quickly.
Why not use your gmail signature template to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events, or new diverse service or product offerings?
History
Most of us are familiar with the dreaded company-wide email that we’ve received far too many times. That email includes a list of items each employee in your company needs to do. On average, it likely takes your employees about 5 minutes each to update their email signatures. Add up your number of employees and that’s a lot of precious company time spent on just updating their email signatures. Maybe this process seems ridiculous to you, but for many companies, this is still how they have to operate.
According to this ChiefMarTech.com graphic, the marketing technology landscape is continuing to evolve and change. In just 5 years, it has become entirely different for the world of marketers. But some categories have remained the same – “Email Marketing” has grown significantly. This is a result of employee email continuing to be such a staple in today’s business world and this important business channel won’t be slowing down anytime soon (just ask Gary Vaynerchuk about it).
Science
We’ve all seen a few doozy email signatures, and maybe we’ve even been guilty of some of the no-no’s: Comic Sans font, multi-color rainbow colors, inspirational quotes, 10 links to social media accounts, etc. The science behind a great email signature is surprisingly simple. Here are some tips:
The Do’s
Keep it simple and to the point
Include basic contact information that’s not overwhelming
Use a clean, eye-catching design
The Don’ts
Inspirational quotes
A reiteration of the sender’s email address (often hyperlinked)
Too many fonts
Too much text, period
As you can see, a lot of thought and strategy can go into an email signature format. It can be overwhelming, but we’re to help! Download your complimentary copy of the ebook, “Back to School on Email Signatures” as a navigation guide through the world of professional email signatures. We think you’ll enjoy it. Maybe laugh at a few bad examples, and find some inspiration for your own email signature in our “trophy case”.
Let us know what you think – we’d love to hear your feedback! We always enjoy listening to new ideas and seeing cool designs. And if we can help in any way, feel free to reach out! Request a demo or sign up for a free trial here.
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.
If you lead or are a part of 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.
Sigstr created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with the best email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #4.
Clever Tip #4: Don’t Mass Market to Your Target Market
Product companies sell to the masses through large scale advertising efforts. Trying to follow in the footsteps of these companies, many service firms attempt to first build their brand by advertising through traditional channels like tv, radio, and billboards. But for a service brand, this can be a waste of time and money. It’s not targeted to your specific audience and it costs too much (given the likely return).
The dynamics of brand implementation are just different for service companies. Business service companies need consistent articulation of their value proposition across all touch points of the marketing and sales process.
While catchy jingles during primetime tv might work for a product company, they are simply inappropriate for a business services firm. But the right marketing program, that “touches” your prospects regularly with highly targeted messages will increase awareness and recognition. So the next time you call to schedule a meeting, they’re more likely to take it.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Consider using a remarketing strategy (such as Google AdWords) for those that visit your website or landing pages. Because you are remarketing to people who have already shown an interest in your services, you get more bang for your advertising dollar. Each additional impression increases the chances that you will gain a new purchase, and even existing customers benefit from being regularly reminded about your business services brand.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. We help you build the best email signatures that you can standardize across your entire oranization. Sign up now and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures.
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:
Earlier this week, Sigstr was featured on a new episode of The Sales Evangelist’s podcast. See the full recording on “How to Use Your Email Signatures to Generate More Business” below:
First off, who is The Sales Evangelist?
Donald Kelly believes in keeping sales simple and mastering the fundamentals. He’s passionate about helping salespeople overcome the most challenging obstacles they are currently facing. So much so that he created a blog, podcast, and other publications around this central theme. His podcast, The Sales Evangelist, has been recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine, Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, South Florida Business Journal and UpStart. Learn more about Donald here.
We are incredibly appreciative and grateful to have Donald as a supporter and fan. He even reps Sigstr in his own email signature template, which we were very excited to see.
New Episode: “How to Use Your Email Signatures to Generate More Business”
Donald and Sigstr Founder/CEO, Dan Hanrahan, talk about a new way to capitalize on employee emails as a marketing channel. Dan highlights 3 important features of a great email signature template:
1. Keep it simple
No need to include your address in your email signature
Have a link to your website
Think of the 3 or 4 things that have the most value and hone in on those
Skip things like address and fax numbers but make them easy to find on your website
2. Use images wisely
Be efficient
Reserve the images to what’s most important (logo, call-to-action)
3. Drive consistency to fuel brand
Provide a consistent experience across all formats of your brand
The major takeaway:
“Think about the massive reach and impact of employee email signatures. Whatever you do, make sure it’s a compelling brand experience because every single message can impact your brand positively or negatively.”
Thanks again to Donald for having us on the show and to the supporters of The Sales Evangelist for tuning in. A full recap of the episode can be found here.
For more on email signature examples and email signature templates, check out our latest resource:
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.
If you send a girl that loves fashion to a SaaS conference on sales development (this one being #Rainmaker16, hosted by our friends at SalesLoft), she’s going to walk away enamored by the fashion of the tech world. It all started with Kyle Porter’s light up shoes.
While Kyle’s flashy shoes lit up the main stage (please excuse the poor dad joke here), arguably one of the greatest things about a SaaS/tech conference is the garb. Following along with the Rainmaker theme of this conference, we chose to bring Sigstr branded umbrellas.
In the growing industry known by it’s shorthand moniker “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service), the opportunities for goofy, borderline sophomoric, puns are hard to avoid. Most notably (and thanks mostly to pop culture’s recent love and affinity for booty) “Nice SaaS”, “Dat SaaS Tho”, and “So SaaSy” are some memorable ones. #Rainmaker16 (heldin Atlanta last week) was no stranger to the plethora of software-related humor.
Social123 brought awesome shirts with a hilariously placed hashtag (shown to the left below, thanks so much Carolyn Fieberman from the Everstring for the photo).
RingLead’s were also very clever (thanks to Ashley Darnell from Social123 for the pic)!
Lastly, I want to thank (but mostly apologize) to the Everstring team for putting up with me as I obsessed over their embroidered henleys!
I was so happy to have met all of these wonderful people and learn from the brilliant minds of the Sales Development Cloud. I already cannot wait for #Rainmaker17, and I can assure you that Sigstr will be back with some even cooler tees!
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.
While many business services brands embrace the power of employee email to communicate with customers, many do not use those emails to their full potential. In fact, a single employee will send, on average, 10,000 one-to-one emails annually, and each email represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse offerings? Or, win new logos by promoting a referral program to your happy existing customers. Email is a powerful engine for business services company – use it for your brand’s advantage.
To help business service companies fully take advantage of the thousands of emails its employees send each day, we’ve written the below post that’s full of information and tips to maximize every email your employees send.
So let’s get down to email business. Here’s a look at 4 ways that employee email can help your business services company accomplish its marketing goals. And surprise! All of these tips can be implemented in just a few minutes via your employee email signatures:
1. Attract Prospective Customers
Email can intrigue potential customers in a non-obtrusive way. Email isn’t pushy and doesn’t have that same feel as a cold call. Using the email signature area to introduce potential clients to your business is an attractive way for them to learn about what you do on their own terms. For example, include a visual call-to-action to learn more about your organization via a short video about your company or a 2-page overview about your service offerings.
2. Encourage Customer Action
Email is a great way to activate potential customers. You can encourage customers to get quotes, schedule a meeting and set up consultations all through the employee email. These messages should be designed to motivate potential customers into actual customers. In other words, you’re converting leads in paying clients. Try doing this by including a clickable call-to-action that promotes getting in touch with your company by prompting the prospect to “sign up for a webinar”, “set up a consultation”, or “hear a customer success story”. Giving the prospect a way to reach your team without having responding to a sales pitch can pay dividends to your bottom line.
3. Drive Web Traffic
Like many service-based businesses, your website is probably one of your main marketing tools. Rather than hoping your website shows up in search results, you can encourage potential customers to visit your website by promoting specific pages (such as customer success stories, pricing, or upcoming events) via the email signature.
Email is a great routing tool that can lead your customers to your website to learn more about your business and engage with your company. Just make sure you have the right things in place when they arrive so you don’t miss an opportunity.
4. Keep Customers Up-to-Date
Everyone gets busy, but well-timed employee emails can keep your audience informed even when life gets crazy. Emails that keep your clients informed or “in the know” keep your target audience engaged with your business and company. Informative emails can also update customers about upcoming deals, events, open job positions or changes to your service offerings.
Use the email signature as a way to keep your audience informed. Promote your newsletter, upcoming events where you’ll have a booth or a speaker, changes to your current product offerings, or even any recent awards or recognitions. Make sure the signature is always up-to-date so it’s a reliable source to your prospects and customers!
Along with promoting calls-to-action via the employee email signature, ensure that the signature area itself appropriately reflects your brand. For business services companies, your brand is the most important asset in the absence of a physical product. Make sure that all employee signatures have correct formatting, font, social media links, and colors to ensure your brand has its best foot forward when communicating with your company’s most important contacts.
For more information on how your business services company can use employee email (and more specifically, the email signature), check out these recent Sigstr resources:
Raidious is a content centric digital agency. They create all types of digital content for brands – everything from social graphics to video and blogging. Pretty much all of the “stuff” that makes digital marketing work – Raidious specializes in creating.
Through years of creating great content, the team has learned that the traditional methods of distributing content no longer deliver the same results that they used to. According to Craig Lile, Senior Director of Advancement at Raidious, “It’s a lot harder to get your content noticed – brands have fully bought in that content marketing is the way of the future, but getting content marketing to break through is a really tough task for brands to do.”
Raidious’ employees send email all day long to clients and prospects and vendors, and they saw these personal, one-to-one email communications as another way to create advocacy – another opportunity for up-sell and cross-sell within their clients.
“When I saw Sigstr, I thought ‘wow, what a great way to distribute content!’ – and it’s from people that are trusted. It gives our team an awesome way to serve content that has a high probability of getting digested because it’s from a trusted source – and best of all, we can measure everything and continually improve our campaigns”, said Craig.
Solution
Raidious began using Sigstr, an employee email signature management platform, in January of 2015 for their 25 employees. To date, Raidious has run 5 unique employee email signature marketing campaigns, including: hiring and open positions, video and expanded services, a general brand campaign promoting Raidious, and a very specific website campaign. Raidious has 2 default groups: Sales and Marketing, and split their campaigns accordingly.
Results
Raidious’ top 2 campaigns to date include a campaign centered around hiring new talent, and a “Welcome to Raidious” brand campaign:
The hiring campaign generated 26,000 displays and 41 clicks over a month long period, and helped Raidious fill its’ talent pool with well qualified applicants in the local Indianapolis area. The email signature marketing campaign was very targeted and helped bring visibility to the growing team at Raidious.
Meanwhile, the Raidious brand campaign, which was active for 3 months, generated 174,000 displays with 181 clicks and generated many new visitors to the website, along with increased brand visibility.
“The value of ~200,000 impressions is unparalleled,” commented Craig. “It’s a channel we already own promoting content we already have. You simply can’t find a better value for reaching this type of audience.”
Vision
In the future, Raidious plans to test out new Sigstr campaigns. First, the team plans to launch a campaign entitled “This Week in Raidious” highlighting all of the new content and announcements across the company for that particular week. They also plan to launch a culture-centered campaign highlighting the great work environment and promoting Raidious as a great place to work. In the future, they would also like to begin pushing relevant blog posts, as well as create specific guides, such as a social media guide, for their end recipients.
During my time at #Rainmaker16 this week, I had the opportunity to sit in on a breakout session that provided a unique perspective from the founders of 3 companies: Crystal, Datanyze, and Sigstr.
Drew D’Agostino: Founder & CEO of Crystal (helps professionals communicate more effectively with personality data). He previously co-founded and served as CTO of Attend.com (an event management software company in Boston).
Ben Sardella: Co-founder and CRO at Datanyze (an all-in-one sales intelligence platform that helps companies find and reach prospects). Ben previously served as VP of Sales at Kissmetrics.
Dan Hanrahan: Sigstr founder & CEO (previously lead go-to-market teams at iGoDigital and ExactTarget).
Alongside these 3 fine gentlemen, Sean Kester (VP of Product Strategy at SalesLoft) served as moderator and led the conversation.
The session started with how each founder uses their own solution to help their sales development teams, or more simply put, “eating your own dog food.” Each founder was then asked what they do to set up their SDR teams for success.
Ben: “We all want a lot. But we also want to be effective. I’ll take personalization over mass volume. Segment your audience into specific buckets, then build your templates around that and measure effectiveness.”
Dan: “Personalize content based on a specific vertical and equip your sales development team with that material.”
Drew: “Include screenshots of your solution and how it relates to the prospect by including their data. A strategy that is around personalization but that is also scalable goes a long way.”
Dan: “Look to your sales development team for feedback on what specific content will resonate best with that particular audience.”
Question from the moderator: “How has the landscape of a sales development team changed during your career?”
Drew: “The more you leave out the better (with email). It can come down to one line of information that triggers a response.”
Ben: “I’ve seen promotions and progressions into the most important titles of the company originate from the sales development team. Sean is a prime example of that.”
Question from the moderator: “What are some traits you look for when hiring for a SDR position?”
Dan: “Curious. Self-starter. A willingness to help. I’m looking for them to hit their activity benchmarks then do what interests them most.”
Question from the moderator: “What are you most excited about with SalesLoft’s announcement of the Sales Development Cloud?”
Ben: “The ability to use data to strategize your engagement.”
Drew: “It helps professional communicators accelerate their relationships.”
Question from the crowd: “What motivates you most as founders?”
Ben: “First off, I’m naturally just a competitive person. But I also want to make sure we’re doing all we can to ensure our sales development team (and any other team at Datanyze) is set up for success.”
Drew: “Relationships and people. To help people know others and to be known.”
Dan: “Seeing that growth of your team and seeing the culture form. It’s all about the people.”
A big thanks to all of the rockstars on the SalesLoft team for putting on such a great event. And thanks to all of those who stopped by our booth to say hello. The Sigstr team had a blast meeting many new friends and catching up with old ones. See you all next year!
About Datanyze: Find your perfect prospect information - Uncover, research, and connect with the right prospects and companies at the right time. Import target people and company profiles with one click into SalesLoft and create better alignment.
About Crystal: Communicate based on personality – Get access to millions of personality profiles and learn the best way to communicate with your customers. Use empathy and intentionality by tailoring your outbound messages to fit the context of the buyer.
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product – instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you – as is brand consistency.
Employee Email Is a Critical Branding Channel
Often times for business services companies, email is the main channel for communication and where your company branding is viewed most often. But are you leveraging the thousands of employee emails (sent from Gmail or Outlook) each of your employees sends directly to prospects, customers, industry influencers, and partners? A single employee will send, on average, 10,000 one-to-one emails annually, and each email represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse offerings? Or win new logos by promoting a referral program to your happy existing customers. Email is a powerful engine for business services company – use it for your brand’s advantage.
How Sigstr Works
Leverage Employee Email Signature Marketing at Your Business Services Company
Referrals:
Referrals, both to recruit employees as well as attract new customers, are important to your business services company. With no physical product, you rely heavily on the relationships your team builds, why not put those thousands of employee emails to work and use the email signature as a referral engine?
Newsletters & Social Media:
For many business services companies, monthly newsletters and social media followings are important so customers and prospects alike can keep up with new content, service offerings, events, and news. Grow your subscriber list and your social media following by enticing email recipients to sign up by using the employee signature.
Events:
Does your business services company frequently attend or host events? How about webinars? Ensure your most important contacts are aware of where you’ll be and when so they can make plans to attend. And best of all, track their registration or clicks via the email signature campaign to determine which events are most attractive to your recipients.
Upsell/Cross-Sell:
It’s likely your business services company offers multiple service options – many of which your customers may not realize (or may have forgotten). Use the employee email signature as a way to introduce new solutions with a call-to-action to visit a landing page, video, or data sheet with more information. Why not encourage your most important contacts to understand more about your business?
Studio Science Use Case
Studio Science is a world-class team of designers, technologists and strategists. Studio Science recognized that their customers spend the majority of their days in email as well. When launching new initiatives, Studio Science needed another outlet to spread the word as quickly as possible.The team began to use Sigstr to promote the company’s most important initiatives and to reinforce its brand through a visual, clickable campaign allowing them to bring design and visuals to the forefront – and control the content and signature itself – with just a few clicks. The Periodic newsletter is an important focus for Studio Science and is promoted through a number of different outlets. In just 1 month of promoting the newsletter via the Sigstr campaign, Studio Science saw 71,052 impressions resulting in 26 clicks to the sign-ups page of the weekly newsletter from the email signature call-to-action alone.
The world of employee email is evolving and growing on a daily basis, and Sigstr is working hard to ensure our customers have a seamless experience using our email signature marketing platform. Email is a critical component in our daily lives and it’s our mission to make employee email signatures more powerful, more effective and now, more efficient. As many of our customers use Google to run their businesses, it has been a top priority for our product team to develop an incredible user experience for those using the Gmail email platform. And now, we’re excited to announce it’s here: Gmail Signature Sync!
Backed by a powerful integration with Google Apps, the Sigstr install process is simple and efficient. The integration removes the need for employees to install the application individually. Instead, the Sigstr administrator has the ability to push campaign and signature updates to each employee through the application portal.
Does your company use Gmail to run your employee email? If so, the Gmail Signature Sync is as easy as the 4 steps below. Once you’re logged into your Sigstr account, simply:
1. Select the tools menu.
2. Navigate the Connectors page.
3. Select Connect to Google Apps and enter your Google Apps Admin credentials.
4. After authenticating, click Sync Signatures Now to push your Sigstr content to all users. Alternatively, enable Auto-Sync to instantly push out changes to Google Apps users whenever content is updated in Sigstr. The sync will push any signature or user signature field changes straight to users on your Google Apps domain. It will only affect users who are already provisioned in Sigstr.
WARNING: Make sure you have uploaded all employee data and are ready for a live launch before syncing.
Yep, it really is just that easy! We even put together this video tutorial below to prove it!
Still on the fence about employee email signature marketing? No problem! Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to experience firsthand the power of email signature marketing.
Still undecided? Check out the lastest Sigstr resources to learn more:
Emails are one of the most common forms of communication today. In fact, there are 2.6B email users worldwide, with each user holding more than 1 account. Just in the business setting alone, it’s estimated that each employee will send 10,000 emails annually! So for a 100 person company, that’s over 1M emails per year. And while the email signature may not seem all that important, think about how your company’s most important contacts are perceiving your employee’s signature: your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, influencers, thought leaders, and so many others. Often times, an email is the very first interaction an individual will have with your company directly (outside of perhaps your website, blog, or social channels managed by your marketing team).
So how can your employees represent your brand well, while also providing an opportunity for your company’s most valuable contacts to engage with your most important initiatives?
We ran across a recent infographic in a Business2Community post, authored by Danny Ashton and we love it so much we just have to share it.
First of all, we love Danny’s definition that so accurately describes what an email signature is:
“At its simplest, your email signature is an electronic business card: ‘here’s my message, and here’s how to reach me’. Identifying who you are and what you do is a no-brainer. Adding a professional-looking headshot (hi-res and appropriate to your brand) can be a nice personal touch – and potential memory-prompt to sometime acquaintances with handshake fatigue! Phone numbers and email addresses should be kept to a minimum (no more than one of each), and all this information should be neatly divided and spaced out so it’s easily accessible to your busy client.”
But more than that, according to Danny, your email signature can be a very powerful marketing tool:
“Brand consistency is a key element, whether you’re emailing on behalf of your own business or you’re part of a bigger organization. Ensuring the fonts, colours, and tone are aligned with that of your colleagues and your broader web and print marketing makes you easily identifiable and contributes to your company’s strong image.”
Danny lists out 7 ways to improve your email signature:
Make it simple – avoid the use of too many graphics, colors and fonts
Keep it short – include vital information and cut out needless information
Inform your recipients – include information on any upcoming promotions, product launches, events or latest blog posts that might be of interest to the recipient
Be consistent – your signature should reflect your company’s visual identity
Break it up – make use of pipes (|), colons (:) or dividers to condense the number of lines
Get social – include social media links to your company’s main accounts, unless you’re happy for people to reach out to you via your personal accounts
Include additional details – include additional details such as your title and department so your recipients know whom they’re talking with right away
Did you know that there is actually an entire company devoted to employee email signature marketing? Sigstr allows marketers to showcase the company’s most important initiatives via call-to-action campaigns to the most engaged audience – those your employees are emailing with directly. In addition, Sigstr allows your company to gain control of employee’s email signatures to ensure proper formatting and branding on every single employee email signature. No longer will you have to worry about outdated signatures, formatting issues, or wrong uses of colors or fonts. And best of all, get the data to see what’s working!
Ready to get started with the power of employee email signature marketing? Check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Founded in 2012 and based in Detroit, LevelEleven is a sales performance platform used by VP’s of Sales & Marketing at tech companies and across many fast-growing industries where the sales role is fundamental.
Named by Salesforce as one of the “Top 8 Apps to Help Your Sales Soar,” the software helps sales teams sell more by keeping salespeople focused on the behaviors that matter. Sales managers simply identify key sales behaviors and set daily, weekly and monthly goals to motivate reps. When performance falls out of line, LevelEleven creates real-time, high-impact leaderboards to rapidly spike behavior and rally any team.
The LevelEleven team began using Sigstr as a way to promote the company’s most important initiatives through its own team by automatically including a call-to-action at the bottom of every single employee email sent (think Gmail). The platform gives Kristy Sharrow, LevelEleven’s Marketing Director, insight into how each Sigstr Campaign is performing so she can monitor the results in real-time and adjust accordingly for the next campaign. In addition, Kristy can divide Sigstr users into groups or departments and use different campaigns across sales, marketing, administration, customer success, and other departments.
Check out LevelEleven’s most recent Sigstr Campaign promoting their newest ebook, “Why Modern Sales Leaders Drive With KPIs”.
A true champion of the Sigstr platform, Kristy had this to say about the partnership:
We look forward to seeing what results LevelEleven will continue to experience with the power of email signature marketing! Want to try email signature marketing for your organization? Start your free 30-day trial here: https://app.sigstr.com/users/sign_up
For more testimonials and case studies from other SaaS companies, read more:
Every SaaS marketer understands the power of marketing as it relates to filling the funnel, progressing opportunities through the pipeline, and improving brand impressions. For several years, digital marketers have relied upon the trusty “paid, owned, earned, and shared” channels that have proven to be successful: boost website traffic with SEO, attend tradeshows and host field marketing events, use digital advertising and remarketing, implement a PR strategy, use social media, and on and on.
Digital marketers are open about sharing these tried and true channels with each other, and it’s true – they’ve proven successful and have gotten many SaaS companies to where they are today – along with a lot of hard work, trial and error, and sales velocity.
As a high growth SaaS company, your marketing team cares a LOT about retention and account growth for your current customers, as well as scaling your MRR and ARR growth rates of attracting new customers and logos. In order to accomplish your lofty goals each month, quarter and year, you’re likely investing heavily in the traditional channels above as a way to capture interest and educate your audience about your technology.
Check out our newest ebook and explore in depth 4 emerging channels every SaaS Digital Marketer should add to their marketing mix:
Email Signature Marketing (Owned Media)
LinkedIn Sponsored Updates (Paid Media)
Video Marketing & YouTube Video Cards (Earned/Shared Media)
Content Recommendations (Paid Media)
For more information on how your SaaS company can accelerate in the digital marketing age, check out these recent Sigstr resources:
For software as a service (SaaS) marketers, generating leads for the top of the funnel can often feel like the bane of their existence. Though SaaS marketers are also typically accountable for conversion rates, cost per lead, opportunities, and countless other metrics, the initial lead is critical as it’s usually the first real interaction with your company.
Often times, these SaaS marketers work alongside their sales counterparts to help craft messages and campaigns for the sales team to use in prospecting key accounts to open the door to conversations. As all of us in the SaaS business know, communicating via email (such as Gmail or Outlook) is perhaps one of the most commonly used methods of prospecting. In fact, the average employee of a company will send 10,000 emails annually! For a SaaS company with just 100 employees, that can quickly escalate to over 1M emails sent annually.
So for SaaS marketers, these email communications can be a prime opportunity for helping sales open the door by using the email signature to generate great, warm leads from those that have already had exposure and communication with your company. How? Here are 3 ways to get started:
1. Prompt Prospects to View a Product Demo Video
When prospecting an individual or a company that is likely unaware of what your company does, give them some easy to digest information in the form of a quick video. Include the call-to-action in the email signature for them to watch this 1-2 minute demo video to gain more of an understanding of what your product or service offers, what the benefits are, as well as quick customer success quotes or logos.
By giving your prospects this information right away, they can determine almost immediately if the product or service could be of use, opening the door to further conversations, rather than seeking to schedule a 30-minute demo out of the gate.
2. Share a Great Customer Success Story
Your customers love your product or service, so why not share some of the successes loud and proud? The email signature is a great place to showcase brands across industry, use case, problem they were solving and more. Use the email signature call-to-action to highlight the customer name and results, then direct the prospect to download the full case study to read more information about how the company achieved the results with your product or service.
Customer success stories are one of the greatest ways to accelerate a conversation – especially if your prospect is aware of the company that’s being discussed. Be proud of your customers and share their stories!
3. Promote a Conference or Event
Inviting your prospect to sign-up for an upcoming conference, tradeshow or field marketing event is a painless way of engaging. By offering something of value to the prospect by means of your email signature, you are showing how your company values education and resources. If your prospect signs up, you’ll have the opportunity to meet him or her face to face at the event or conference, and dive deeper into discovering their needs, goals, as well as have the opportunity to showcase your product or service by providing a personalized demo.
For more information on how your SaaS company can use email to generate leads, check out Sigstr’s latest free resource:
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:
Return Path is a global Data Solutions Provider that helps the world’s leading companies promote and protect their brands. Every minute of every day, their clients and partners trust their data and insights to help them build closer, safer, and smarter relationships with their customers.
Opportunity
As Return Path is a large, global organization, the company had a difficult time controlling employees’ email signatures. Return Path needed a solution that would allow one person to easily manage all employee signatures, while also tracking and optimizing the success of email signature marketing campaigns across all of their employees.
Solution
Return Path began using Sigstr, an employee email signature marketing platform, in February, 2015 as a way to control branding on all sales and marketing emails, as well as promote the company’s most important initiatives and content and measure the campaigns that are most effective. Allison Winkle, Digital Marketing Coordinator, took over as the Sigstr admin in July, 2015 and manages the platform across its 100 global employees in sales and marketing.
One of the first campaigns Allison ran was to promote the Return Path World Tour – Return Path hosted events taking place around the world. The Sigstr campaign directed those who clicked on the image to a specific landing page with further details about the events.
As a high growth SaaS company, you care a LOT about retention and account growth for your current customers, as well as scaling your MRR and ARR growth rates of attracting new customers and logos. In order to accomplish your lofty goals each month, quarter and year, you’re likely investing heavily in mass email marketing, digital marketing channels and event marketing as a way to capture interest and educate your audience about your technology. But how are you leveraging the thousands of one-to-one business emails (such as Gmail or Outlook) your employees are sending directly to prospects, customers, industry influencers, and technology partners?
Did you know each of your employees likely send about 10,000 one-to-one emails annually? Multiple that by how many employees you have, and that’s a LOT of personal email. And best yet, each email sent represents an opportunity to drive awareness and engagement for your events, content marketing assets, and marketing campaigns to your most engaged audience: those that are interacting with your employees on a 1:1 basis – not through a mass marketing play.
Top SaaS Brands Trust Sigstr to Power Email Signature Marketing:
Leverage Email Signature Marketing Campaigns at Your SaaS Company:
Account Growth & Retention:Keeping your current customers happy is key to success for SaaS companies.Use email signature marketing campaigns across your customer success, services and account management teams to shareproduct release notes, new product or service announcements, and inspiration and best practices on how to be successful using your SaaS product
New Customer & Logos:New customer acquisition is critical to your company – and every month and every quarter your targets keep increasing, but your number of sales reps may not be.Include email signature marketing campaigns for your new business sales and sales development teams to showcasenew customer case studies, ebooks and reports, upcoming educational webinars, infographics, and explainer Videos
Talent Recruitment:Your HR and talent recruitment teams are competing against many other SaaS companies – some maybe a lot larger than your company with a greater history of success. Your HR team is on the front-lines and need as many tools as possible to showcase your awesome company culture, growth, and vision for the future. Make sure your recruiting team is using their email signatures to showcase your brand, culture via a video by your CEO or other employees, and press releases and company growth stories.
As a SaaS company, you know how important events and relationship building is to your industry. You invest a lot of dollars and time into booths, hosting customer events, and putting on webinars. But none of that matters unless you’re able to connect with the right attendees. Did you know that the promotion of events is actually the highest converting kind of Sigstr campaign? We’ll show you how Return Path uses Sigstr to promote their important company events below, or check out the full case study.
Return Path Use Case:
Return Path needed a solution that would allow one person to easily manage all employee signatures, while also tracking and optimizing the success of email signature marketing campaigns. Return Path began using Sigstr as a way to control branding on all sales and marketing emails, as well as promote the company’s most important initiatives and content. One of the first campaigns promoted the Return Path World Tour – Return Path hosted events taking place around the world. The Sigstr campaign directed those who clicked on the image to a specific landing page with further details about the events. During the 3 months that Return Path promoted the events, the campaign was displayed over 150,000 times and resulted in over 1,900 clicks with several registrations a direct result of the Sigstr campaign!
Want to check out the power of employee signature marketing for your own SaaS company? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sigstr.
When thinking about a standard sales and marketing funnel, and which metrics are used to measure the success of a sales and marketing strategy, let’s keep it pretty straight-forward for the sake of this post’s word count. In its simplest form, our own sales/marketing team focuses on three main metrics: qualified leads generated, demos scheduled (and executed) and closed/won business. That’s it. That’s our formula for success.
The human body is hardwired to pulse – moving naturally through periods of higher and lower alertness. 
The modern model for success is broken. The idea of hunkering down for hours in front of a computer screen, plugging away all day, answering emails immediately, even late into the night, and working until you drop isn’t helping you get more done. What are you giving up by working so continuously? Are you able to think as clearly and creatively? Do you produce the same quality of work in the tenth or twelfth hour of a work day as you do in the second or fourth?
In the sales world, we’re constantly challenged with breaking through the noise and getting time with our most important prospects. In Tyler Lessard’s breakout, “How to Make Your Target Accounts Love the Fact You’re Targeting Them,” I learned new, creative ways to prospect. Lessard, who is the CMO at Vidyard said it’s time to get personal. Not just “personal,” but 
The sales and marketing SaaS platform world is exclusive. Through our partnerships with Salesloft and Terminus, Sigstr has quickly been initiated into this illustrious group. #FlipMyFunnel marketed the official launch of the Terminus + Sigstr partnership after the announcement of Terminus’ ABM Cloud.
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
TechPoint
The product team celebrates new releases and product launches by bringing our DOMO robot to life. Product launches are especially exciting and important to celebrate. Every new launch makes our email signature app better, faster, stronger. The DOMO robot’s dancing can be seen in the GIF to the right.
Your employees send thousands of emails each day. Similar to social media advocacy solutions, an 
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.
SalesLoft: “One of the best use cases for Sigstr has traditionally been event marketing,” explained Dan. “As 
The Sigstr Campaign for Lesson.ly includes a fun ‘Meet the Team’ image, which points to a blog post that talks about the Lesson.ly culture and how important that is to their mission. Just a few weeks after launching the Campaign, the sales team already had 3 companies raise their hand for that initial conversation, as tracked via the Sigstr Campaign.
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”.
If you send a girl that loves fashion to a SaaS conference on sales development (this one being 
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!
