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:
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)
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
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.
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:
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.
Sales development representatives, sales reps, and account executives rely on email more than any other role in your organization. If your sales or SDR team uses SalesLoft Cadence for email communications, you may want to consider an integration with Sigstr.
SalesLoft Cadence drives incredible efficiencies and visibility to the SDR process. Sigstr helps you get more out of Cadence and every email your employees send. As with any email, Cadence messages often close with an email signature. Sigstr ensures every email signature in Cadence, Gmail, or Outlook is consistent and includes a demand generation call-to-action. Analytics within Sigstr help you see how prospects and contacts are interacting with your email signature examples.
The best part? The Sigstr + SalesLoft integration requires minimal configuration. Watch the video below to see how the magic happens:
Through the Sigstr API, SalesLoft aligns to your Sigstr account and user profiles. Using the user email address as the common identifier, SalesLoft applies an individual signature to his/her SalesLoft signature settings.
To enable the integration, first navigate to your SalesLoft settings. Then, to your integrations tab. Once in the integrations section, simply use the toggle button to activate the users. Once active, each user’s SalesLoft Cadence signature settings will automatically be updated with a Sigstr signature and campaign.
As you can see, this integration can make your email sending incredibly efficient. Personalized and sincere emails are key when communicating with prospects. Lesson.ly, a learning management platform, uses this integration as an integral part of their process. Sending hundreds of email per day through SalesLoft Cadence, Lesson.ly harnesses the power of Sigstr with no added effort. Once a Sigstr campaign is created, the administrator applies it to one or all members of Lesson.ly’s sales team, and the campaigns and signature instantly appear in Cadence.
So, you’re a startup or company that’s scaling up with a Marketing team that wears 1,000 different hats. Your Marketing budget is small (but mighty!) and you need to fill the funnel with quality leads that can convert. Have no fear, Product Hunt just released the ultimate Marketing stack for startups. This list includes all the tools you need to build your best startup Marketing strategy – we recommend taking a look.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Pexels – Need free stock photos? Here is your new best friend
Lead Pages – Landing page generator built for conversions
If you’re not familiar with Product Hunt, here’s the lowdown:
Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It’s a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, website, hardware projects, and tech creations. Read more here.
We’re big fans and have been on Product Hunt for almost a year now. Our listing can be found here. As you can see, it’s a great platform for checking out recommendations from your peers. It’s also a way to interact and drive great discussions with your current customers.
Email signatures in your Marketing strategy
We’re also grateful to be included in their Marketing tech stack for startups. If you’re a startup, a company growing fast and scaling up, or even a bigger organization, Sigstr is a great way to ensure brand consistency and unlock a powerful marketing channel in your email signature design.
For a Marketing team that doesn’t have a lot of time in the day, Sigstr is simple to use and takes less than 5 minutes to set up. Easily update your email signature design and include a Campaign banner to highlight your latest marketing content or most important company initiatives. Sigstr prevents any headaches your Marketing Director may have over controlling the brand in employees’ email signatures (there’s always that one guy with the comic sans font and corny inspirational quote).
We recommend checking out all of the tools mentioned in Product Hunt’s Marketing tech stack. If email signatures are a part of your Marketing strategy, and how you can use them as a new channel for lead generation, let us know how we can help! Or, try it yourself for free with a 30-day free trial.
For more inspiration on your email signature design, check out this latest resource:
If you are a business services company, you have a unique challenge. You don’t have a physical product, instead you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. Your company’s success was built on the people you recruited and brand you worked so hard to build, and as such, both are incredibly important to you.
We have created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with cool email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #5.
Good relationships are built on trust. So its natural that customers want to learn as much as they can about your company and the people that stand behind it. For instance, your customers tend to look for deeper information when deciding on which company or service to choose, and the vast majority do research on the web before making a purchase. Having a complete company website is a smart and affordable way to convey in-depth information about your service business.
Showcase your service benefits on the main page, just as you would in an effective company brochure. Include your companys story, photos, staff bios and affiliations. And show how well your company delivers on its promises by providing testimonials, case studies or work samples. Most importantly, give your visitors a way to reach out to your company. Include an info@ email address, forms where they can learn more about your services, and content they can download in exchange for a few pieces of information (such as name, company, and email address).
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Did you know 80% of buyers start their search online? It is and will be more vital than ever to have a compelling and appealing presence online. Many search engines display local search results allowing customers to connect to businesses locally; which is much easier than competing with major websites in the same industry. In addition, mobile applications are becoming more popular, with the ability to suggest businesses based upon your location or search results.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. Ready to start creating your own cool email signatures? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today.
Please excuse my typos. Not because I’m sending from my mobile (by the way…please consider removing that from your email signature :)) but because I might have had too good of a time last night. 3 hours of sleep…but a big smile on my face.
Why?
Opportunity. Salesforce Connections day 2 is getting started. I feel like day 1 ended a few minutes ago. Much obliged Stevie Wonder, Meehan’s Irish Pub, Gibney’s Irish Pub (are you sensing a theme here?).
For the 8 of us here from Sigstr, there is literally no place in the world we’d rather be.
Marketers create leverage by building incredible brands and creating useful content.
There are 5,000 of the world’s smartest digital marketers in Atlanta.
So for me, and for Sigstr, you might as well try to get 20 hours out of every day here. On day 1 alone:
3 hours later, the expo hall is waking up to Jimi Hendrix pumping on the sound system. It’s what happened in Indy at the ExactTarget Connections events (anyone remember 3am at Steak and Shake – thanks Scott Dorsey!)
In my first job out of college, I worked for a hard charging bulldog, Ryan Hasbrook, at a two man startup called Brooksource (now hundreds of employees and a Salesforce customer). I learned that many of the best opportunities happen at Irish pubs after midnight. I also learned that the other best opportunities happen at 7am the next morning.
“If you’re a man (or woman) by night, you’re a man (or woman) by day,” was what Ryan told me.
As a 22 year old, that meant an opportunity to jumpstart my career. Today, if I leave my family for 72 hours, you better believe I’m going to find the opportunity. With this many smart marketers in one place, one conversation can change everything.
Come say hi and see some professional email signature examples. Our team rocks, and you’ll be happy to know them.
Author: Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner of High Alpha
High Alpha is a venture studio that conceives, launches, and scales next-generation enterprise cloud and SaaS companies.
Good luck to Scott McCorkle and all of my friends with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud this week as they prepare to launch Connections 2016! I have always loved Connections – the conference brings together the best digital marketers in the world to learn, share, be inspired, innovate and celebrate together.
So many incredible highlights over the years – Subscribers Rule!, Malcolm Gladwell, Sir Richard Branson, Michael J. Fox, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Soledad O’Brien, Jim Collins, Indianapolis Symphony, Train, The Fray, Steak and Shake at 3am, Imagine Dragons and many more.
This week, I am excited to see Sigstr (one of our newest High Alpha companies) exhibit at Connections and plug into this dynamic and vibrant marketing ecosystem. Sigstr is a next generation marketing tech company focused on the often-overlooked and very powerful channel of 1-to-1 employee email communications.
Sigstr enables marketers to standardize professional email signatures (so important for brand consistency) and leverage the precious real estate of 1-to-1 employee emails to promote events, white papers, job openings, new products and much more. Marketers can manage these campaigns with segmentation tools, powerful analytics and enterprise controls.
I am very excited to see what the best marketers in the world can do with the Sigstr technology!
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.
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:
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):
TechPoint
TechPoint
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.”
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.
Author: Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner of 
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”.