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.
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)
Evercontact is a tool that helps you keep your address book up-to-date by automatically analyzing email signatures in your incoming email and adding new contacts and updating your existing address book without creating duplicates.
While their tool certainly comes in handy (I mean – who actually enjoys manually updating their address book? Nope.), the content they create is also killer.
A few years back, the company published an infographic entitled, “The Anatomy of an Email Signature”. Since 2011, Evercontact has analyzed over 700 million emails to extract valuable information about professionals’ email habits, so they know a thing or two about employee email.
As our company, Sigstr, is built on managing creative email signatures, we had to share this infographic and some of the key learnings with our readers. Below is a rundown on Evercontact’s take on the anatomy of an email signature.
What do professionals include in their creative email signatures?
How does social media fit into creative email signatures?
While Twitter leads the way at just over 7% inclusion on email signatures, overall social media is lacking from the signature area of professionals. We assume this is because professionals don’t want to overwhelm their email recipients with tons of links and information (and we agree!), and therefore leave out social media information like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. However, including LinkedIn information (traditionally more of a professional social network), can be beneficial.
What are the top 5 Do’s & Don’ts?
Think twice about adding social media profile links if it doesn’t blend well with professional goals
Separate your email signature from the email body with the accepted form “–”
NEVER use an entire image as your email signature as it often becomes an attachment and your info won’t be clickable
If you’d like to try using an image in your email signature, try an email signature generator to ensure your images are automatically updated and always render properly
Do provide an international prefix (like +1 for the United States) if your audience is global
Want to take your email signature to the next level?
Sigstr offers marketers complete brand control of employee email signatures with fonts, formatting, color, social links and more through its integration with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Insert a Sigstr Campaign (graphical call-to-action) into the email signature template to utilize every employee’s email signature as a targeted marketing opportunity. Sigstr gives marketers the opportunity to promote the company’s most important initiatives or content, such as events, press, case studies, ebooks, job openings and much more.
See Sigstr in action by requesting a demo. Or, if you’d like to learn more, check out our latest resource:
Weve recently enjoyed following along with Zero to Scales podcast, which is all about bootstrapping startups to $100k monthly recurring revenue and beyond. The hosts of the podcast are Greg Hickman and Justin McGill. Greg and Justin, both entrepreneurs, tackle subjects like:
Handling early traction
Growth hacking strategies
New products they use to grow their businesses
And so on
For Sigstr, the podcast is beyond applicable as our company is quickly accelerating our product offerings as well as growing our team. But it just so happened that Greg and Justin highlighted Sigstrs product on episode #117 entitled, Planning the Next Product Offering and Launching Key Integrations. In this blog post, well give you the cliff notes version of what Justin had to say about Sigstr and his personal email signature.
In Justin McGills words, Sigstr is one of his favorite marketing assets. He explains what value he sees:
Basically what [Sigstr] allows you to do is set up your whole team with email signatures. And I can go in and create a new campaign, and it will update each personal email signature for all of our employees and everything. So, it allows you to track open rates and click through rates and everything on a banner image. You can put address, phone number, URL, all kinds of different things, your social media links and everything.”
Listen to the full podcast recording below, and tune into the 34 minute markto hear the guys talk about Sigstr.
We love Justins enthusiasm about the simplicity of Sigstr and also the benefits of measuring the marketing impact of email signatures, which is supremely important for marketers. Whether youre a digital marketer, content marketer, or both, measuring the impact of campaigns and programs is near and dear to your heart as the insights help you determine whats working, not working, and the overall impact of a call-to-action or design.
Justin goes on to comment that Sigstr is a great asset for his team:
Sigstr ensures that your team members all have a standard email signature. But at the same time the solution allows me to see important statistics such as Sigstr Views, campaign impressions, and click through rates. The solution and its capabilities are sweet, and its a great tool.
Justin explained that Sigstrs email signature generator has been on his mind since last August when he initially saw the solution listed on Product Hunt. But it was when Sigstr announced its Google Apps integration that Justin knew he and his team had to begin using the tool. Sigstr also recently announced integrations with Outlook and HubSpots marketing platform, in addition to Google Apps, which you can learn more about in our recent post.
Thanks again to Justin and Greg for highlighting Sigstr in Zero to Scales podcast episode #117. Well keep listening, and hope you will too!
If you’re in need of a solution for your personal email signature or company-wide signatures, Sigstr can help. Learn more by scheduling a demo.
Email continues to be a mission-critical tool for businesses across the world. While in the past some have predicted the certain death of email, the opposite is happening. Even with products like Slack and other internal communication tools prevalent in the market, email is still the backbone of communication. In fact, email usage is expected to increase over 6% each year for the foreseeable future.
According to email experts at the Radicati Group, it’s estimated that each employee sends about 28 emails every day, or about 10,000 emails every year. This huge volume of emails (up to 1M emails a year for a company of just 100 employees) proposes a huge untapped marketing channel. Because every single email an employee sends contains an email signature, smart marketers are using that signature area to promote their most important initiatives (like content or upcoming events) to the targeted audience that receives those emails: prospects, customers, partners, vendors, and influencers.
While marketers are now using employee email signatures to distribute their most important content, what about other departments across the company? Can they use great email signatures to promote what they care most about, too? Absolutely. Need some ideas on how to leverage employee email signatures across your entire organization? Here are 3 examples of how other departments can use great email signatures to promote what their departments care about most:
Sales
If Marketing’s primary objective is to drive engagement with the brand, then Sales wants you to engage with the process. Sales, whether it be pre-sales or getting the final contracts signed, cares a lot about the process and making sure prospects see the true value of what they’re providing. Marketers want the prospects to be engaged with every email and every part of the process – no matter how short or long the sales cycle is.
Your company wants customers to be eager to learn as much as possible about what you can provide them by way of the products or services offered. You want them to see the value of what you offer and understand the benefits of deciding to work with your company rather than the competition. And they want all of that to happen with minimal investment and in the most efficient way possible. What if you could let your email signatures do the work for you? What if with every email you guided your prospects on a journey? A journey where with one click of a button they could interact with the process by requesting a demo, seeing a product video or tour, viewing pricing and product features, or calculating the impact your product or service could provide with an ROI calculator. With each click and interaction, they understand your product or service offerings better – all with zero effort from the sales rep.
Now every email can help your prospects feel more and more confident about moving through the sales process.
Allow prospects to interact with resources like:
Demo requests and product videos
Pricing and feature guides
ROI Calculators
Human Resources
The HR department is focused on finding great talent and equipping talent to be successful in the workplace. But finding candidates in today’s competitive market can be incredibly challenging. Human Resource departments need to find clever ways to showcase how their company is different and how their culture is attractive to those who may be job searching.
Because HR department employees send emails to many potential employees or partners that may be interested in working for their company, their email signatures offer a prime opportunity to showcase open positions – either specific jobs or a blanket “we’re hiring” – and showcase the company’s unique culture, all through HR employees’ great email signatures.
Give prospective employees a glimpse into your company with:
Video footage of the office or with the CEO
A culture showcase and “meet the team”
A call-to-action with current open positions
Company X-Factors and stats
Customer Success & Customer Support
If Marketers want you to interact with the brand, and Sales wants you to engage with the process, then Customer Support and Customer Success want their customers to learn more about the product, services and value the company offers. Customer Support and Customer Success exist to help customers feel more confident about the product and services being provided. They want their customers to understand not only how to get their questions answered, but how to best troubleshoot and solve problems for themselves and continue the learning journey well beyond signing on as a new customer.
Customer Support and Customer Success want customers to understand the products and services you offer so intimately that they become dedicated advocates of the company, product, services, and people – resulting in greater satisfaction and more referrals.
Promoting product materials or a referral landing page doesn’t mean replacing an existing portal or community, but rather great email signatures with clickable call-to-action banners that serve as a constant reminder of the tools and resources that are available for those customers and urges them to join the conversation.
Customers can be one of your company’s biggest asset. It all starts with education and empowerment.
Give customers information such as:
Service and support phone numbers and contact info
Latest product release notes
Community sign-in or sign-up page
Overview of new product/services
Landing page to suggest referrals
What about your Channel team promoting new partnerships? If you work for a professional sports team or athletic department, why not use great email signatures to promote ticket sales? The options are endless, and best of all, a single admin on the Marketing team can create the Campaigns and assign to various groups or departments, so your departmental employees can simply keep sending emails… all of which automatically update with the latest Sigstr Campaign.
Each department within your organization is important. They each impact the entire business in different ways, and each have a different story to tell. Employee email signatures and the Sigstr Groups feature can help amplify that message, whatever it may be, from that particular employee, department, or entire company.
Our team at Sigstr is always on the lookout for great articles, posts, podcasts and helpful information for digital marketers. So when we ran across this post from Technorian entitled, “Conversion Rate Optimization: Secrets as Revealed by 54 Industry Experts”, we had to write about it and share it with our readers. Digital marketers have a tough job. Not only do they have to keep up with their competitors, but perhaps more than any other role across a company, their digital marketing tools and marketing campaign software of choice evolve and change on a weekly basis.
In this article the author, Adnan Afzal, interviewed 54 industry experts about how to increase conversion rates. We’ll share a few of our favorites below, plus one more that we believe is an important addition to digital marketers’ toolboxes: employee email signatures.
“One of the best ways to improve in your conversion rate optimization is to have an explainer video on your site that tells your audience why your site or service is for them. If you ever take a look at the top selling products on ClickBank, you will notice that nearly all of them are using explainer videos on their landing page. Extremely long sales pages worked well in the past, now it’s all about the sales video. Make it engaging, interactive and of course ending with a call to action for your target audience. Be sure to check out my how to create killer explainer videos article for how to create one for your site.”
“Storytell. It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve conversion rate. Tell me why you started your business. Tell me how you are using your products. Tell me what your customers are gaining from working with you. Let me feel your pride and emotion. If I don’t feel something on an emotional level when I visit your website, then I’m just going to compare on price and then you lose. Storytell more for improving conversion rate optimization.”
“Constantly test different colors for your call to actions in an a/b test environment. I remember Google tested over 50 shades of blue before they found the best converting blue for their organic search results. Keep testing until you find the best that works for you.”
“I recommend investing in great visuals for improving your conversion optimization rate. The prospective customer has to be able to visualize using the product, and if you have gorgeous visuals and video, you help the customer break the buying barrier. Research indicates products on a white background work better than a busy background. Investing in great visuals is beneficial for both sales and website conversion.”
“Whether your marketing department produces great content, case studies, videos, or product descriptions, getting your marketing message through to your target audience is critical. Each company employee is estimated to send about 28 emails per day or 10,000 emails per year, and each of those emails contains an email signature. Smart digital marketers are using the email signature’s untapped potential to promote their most important products or initiatives within the signature area of each email. Put the email signature to use with marketing campaign software that helps your company brand employee signatures with approved fonts, formats, colors, and even social media channels, while also promoting the company’s most important content or initiatives via clickable images called campaigns.”
Main Takeaway
Whether you’re a digital marketer, content marketer, or both, conversion rate metrics are near and dear to your heart. It helps you determine what’s working, not working, and the overall impact a call-to-action or design can have on that particular marketing campaign.
Explainer videos, storytelling, a/b testing, overall design, and marketing campaign software. These can all help boost your conversion rates so you and your team generate more qualified leads that translate to closed/won business for your sales team.
Use these recommendations to get started and find out what works best for your team. And if you’d like to test marketing campaign software for your employees’ email signatures, we’d love to help! Check out the latest Sigstr resource to learn more:
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:
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.
Emails are one of the most common forms of communication today. In fact, there are 2.6B email users worldwide, with each user holding more than 1 account. Just in the business setting alone, it’s estimated that each employee will send 10,000 emails annually! So for a 100 person company, that’s over 1M emails per year. And while the email signature may not seem all that important, think about how your company’s most important contacts are perceiving your employee’s signature: your prospects, customers, partners, vendors, influencers, thought leaders, and so many others. Often times, an email is the very first interaction an individual will have with your company directly (outside of perhaps your website, blog, or social channels managed by your marketing team).
So how can your employees represent your brand well, while also providing an opportunity for your company’s most valuable contacts to engage with your most important initiatives?
We ran across a recent infographic in a Business2Community post, authored by Danny Ashton and we love it so much we just have to share it.
First of all, we love Danny’s definition that so accurately describes what an email signature is:
“At its simplest, your email signature is an electronic business card: ‘here’s my message, and here’s how to reach me’. Identifying who you are and what you do is a no-brainer. Adding a professional-looking headshot (hi-res and appropriate to your brand) can be a nice personal touch – and potential memory-prompt to sometime acquaintances with handshake fatigue! Phone numbers and email addresses should be kept to a minimum (no more than one of each), and all this information should be neatly divided and spaced out so it’s easily accessible to your busy client.”
But more than that, according to Danny, your email signature can be a very powerful marketing tool:
“Brand consistency is a key element, whether you’re emailing on behalf of your own business or you’re part of a bigger organization. Ensuring the fonts, colours, and tone are aligned with that of your colleagues and your broader web and print marketing makes you easily identifiable and contributes to your company’s strong image.”
Danny lists out 7 ways to improve your email signature:
Make it simple – avoid the use of too many graphics, colors and fonts
Keep it short – include vital information and cut out needless information
Inform your recipients – include information on any upcoming promotions, product launches, events or latest blog posts that might be of interest to the recipient
Be consistent – your signature should reflect your company’s visual identity
Break it up – make use of pipes (|), colons (:) or dividers to condense the number of lines
Get social – include social media links to your company’s main accounts, unless you’re happy for people to reach out to you via your personal accounts
Include additional details – include additional details such as your title and department so your recipients know whom they’re talking with right away
Did you know that there is actually an entire company devoted to employee email signature marketing? Sigstr allows marketers to showcase the company’s most important initiatives via call-to-action campaigns to the most engaged audience – those your employees are emailing with directly. In addition, Sigstr allows your company to gain control of employee’s email signatures to ensure proper formatting and branding on every single employee email signature. No longer will you have to worry about outdated signatures, formatting issues, or wrong uses of colors or fonts. And best of all, get the data to see what’s working!
Ready to get started with the power of employee email signature marketing? Check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
Return Path is a global Data Solutions Provider that helps the world’s leading companies promote and protect their brands. Every minute of every day, their clients and partners trust their data and insights to help them build closer, safer, and smarter relationships with their customers.
Opportunity
As Return Path is a large, global organization, the company had a difficult time controlling employees’ email signatures. Return Path needed a solution that would allow one person to easily manage all employee signatures, while also tracking and optimizing the success of email signature marketing campaigns across all of their employees.
Solution
Return Path began using Sigstr, an employee email signature marketing platform, in February, 2015 as a way to control branding on all sales and marketing emails, as well as promote the company’s most important initiatives and content and measure the campaigns that are most effective. Allison Winkle, Digital Marketing Coordinator, took over as the Sigstr admin in July, 2015 and manages the platform across its 100 global employees in sales and marketing.
One of the first campaigns Allison ran was to promote the Return Path World Tour – Return Path hosted events taking place around the world. The Sigstr campaign directed those who clicked on the image to a specific landing page with further details about the events.
We’re big fans of the Lesson.ly team and their unique company culture. They’re a young, fun company that lives and breathes authenticity and sincerity to rocking learning software and taking good care of employees and customers alike.
They often compete with companies that are much older and bigger, which is why they have honed in on their biggest differentiator: its people. They use many channels (such as their website or blog) to share their culture and love for customers. With Sigstr, they found a way to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of one-to-one business emails the 18 Lesson.ly employees send each year.
Mitch Causey, Lesson.ly’s Director of Marketing, uses Sigstr to drive engagement around PR, events, product releases, and of course the company culture. “The Sigstr platform is so easy to use – it’s so simple for me, as the administrator, to hop in and edit campaigns in a matter of seconds — and apply the campaigns to individuals, groups, or the entire company. It just does what it’s supposed to do. Sigstr allows me from a single point to manage everyone’s email, which we definitely didn’t have before.”
The “Meet the Team” campaign (pictured below on the left), which ran for 2 months, scored 70k impressions and 250 clicks for the Lesson.ly team. They also use Sigstr to promote their most recent accomplishments (pictured below to the right).
A&A is a leading provider of freight, warehousing and customs brokerage services with over 35 years of experience. A&A helps companies or individuals transport items such as goods, machinery, lumber, textiles, autos, retail and more.
Opportunity
In the past, A&A used hyperlinked text in the email signature to link to resources, FAQs, or new service announcements. The employees had to manually update the email signature in order to update the link. Marketing had no way to ensure the update happened, or that it was done correctly, and measuring results was near impossible. Did employees include the link in the signature? Did recipients click or engage?
Solution
In August 2015, A&A launched Sigstr as a simple way to utilize employee email for signature marketing campaigns. Every email an employee sends from Outlook now promotes new services and offers helpful resources, and ultimately drives traffic to their website. The company of 120 employees currently has 90 employees using the solution, which is easily managed by one individual, Trevor Carss, Marketing Manager, who uploads a visual campaign into Sigstr, and assigns the campaigns to specific groups across the organization. Trevor can log into Sigstr at any time to see how campaigns are performing.
In just 3 months of using Sigstr, A&A has experimented with several campaigns in order to test which messages resonate best with end recipients. Their campaigns have showcased their warehousing services, offered import/export knowledge for those shipping across borders, and promoted the new A&A website. Currently, the team is promoting their 4th campaign which is focused on customs brokerage services for the U.S. and Canada, as shown below:
Results
A&A began seeing immediate results after starting to use Sigstr – best of all, the team can now track the success of each campaign with definitive metrics, rather than guessing how each is perceived.The warehousing campaign, which was live for just under two months, yielded the team 193,000 displays with 318 clicks. Best of all, A&A now has the ability to track sourced deals that are generated from the employee email signature. Since launch, Sigstr is responsible for influencing approximately $10,000 in new business opportunities!
Want to read the entire A&A case study? Download your copy today and sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sigstr and experience the power of email signature marketing for yourself.
It’s not easy when your job is to schedule a meeting with a decision maker of a large corporate organization. Cutting through the clutter and making a lasting impression (and a good one) is not an easy task. Below are a few tips and tricks that can get you a step ahead when it comes to emailing your prospects that dreaded cold email:
Attitude:
You have a seat at the table. The solution your company provides can solve a pain that your prospect has. You are not selling something frivolous, you have something that can help your prospect increase revenue – be proud of it when reaching out.
Sure, it may be tempting to remind your prospect that you have reached out 15 times before this email, but refrain from mentioning that you’ve tried reaching out before. The average business employee gets 88 emails a day, so if you mention that they didn’t reply last time, they may not take the time to look again.
Make a good impression with a clean cut email signature. The email signature is a representation of your personal brand and the brand of your organization. Sigstr gives your audience an opportunity to click and engage with up to date marketing content and events that you are promoting. Take advantage of the 10,000 emails you will send each and every year for not only personal use, but to drive awareness of your company and the important initiatives or recent content that may be helpful to the prospect.
Relevancy:
Stay up to date with your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. You never know if you can find some information that is relevant to your geographic location, university, or past jobs that can make the world a little smaller.
Tools like Google alerts can also keep you updated with the industry or a specific company. Google will send you emails on the current news, blogs or events surrounding a company or topic.
Mention and compliment their content marketing (ebook, case study, white paper). This can show that you really care about the thought leadership your prospect brings to the table. It can also gives you more research in to the problems that you can solve for them.
Be Short and Sweet:
You should always have a reason you are emailing. If your goal is to schedule a meeting, then ask for it. But make sure that you send over a specific time, such as Friday December 11th at 3PM EST. This way the prospect can quickly check their calendar and say yes or no, or propose a different time if you are relevant. Mixmax is a free tool that can insert calendar invites digitally, and will notify you of when a prospect agrees to your proposed times.
Studies show that buyers take 8.5 seconds to read an email. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to time reading each email. But a good way to check, is to send yourself an email and do a scroll check on your smartphone. If the content is clear and concise with no scrolling, then it is short enough to read in 8.5 seconds.
As a recent grad of an esteemed marketing program (Butler University’s College of Business was recently ranked the 2nd best business school in the Midwest Region, Go Dawgs!) I spent four years learning from passionate professors the importance of good marketing practices. With that being said, and as much as it pains me to say this, marketing is often put on the backburner for many companies because of cost, time, and resources.
These 9 Cheap, and Free, Marketing Tools will help you bring your marketing efforts to the frontline without taking a chunk out of your budget.
In a world where “content is king”, the need to create relevant and interesting content has never been greater. If you are ever experiencing a serious case of bloggers-block, enlist the help of this Idea Generator. As an example, I typed in “content marketing” and got results like:
Why the Next 10 Years of Content Marketing Will Smash the Last 10
Why Content Marketing is the 51st Shade of Grey
How to Cheat at Content Marketing and Get Away with it
If you don’t already have Google Analytics, go get it NOW. Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic to understand what your customer really comes to your site searching for and better understand which digital marketing strategies perform best.
Hemingway app helps make your writing bold and clear. You can paste a draft of your blog post in the app and it will give you suggestions on how you can make the post more reader-friendly!
Mail Chimp is my favorite free email list service. It is very simple and user friendly. Anything up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month is completely free of charge.
This free offering by SproutSocial provides you with insight on your response rate and average response time to engaged customers via social media channels. It is not enough to just push out content, you must engage with your audience!
Canva is like Adobe Illustratr for dummies. It is amazingly simple and you can create professional-grade designs. They have a brilliant 23 second how-to video to help you get started.
Charlie combs through your calendar and provides you with one-pagers on everyone you’re going to meet with before you see them! Charlie automatically sends you research before your meetings so that you are never unprepared again.
PRICE: Multiple pricing plans. There is a free plan but for unlimited access the price jumps to $9 per month.
MixMax is an extension that integrates with Gmail that allows you to do all kinds of crazy things in your emails. You can attach one-click calendar meetings, polls and surveys, link previews and even see when people are viewing your emails.
So you have a big announcement coming up for your B2B company, and you’ve been tasked with writing a press release and launching the product, service, whitepaper, conference, or whatever it is you’re announcing. If you’re the one in charge of a successful launch and you’ve done any homework, you know there is a LOT to consider. We know this firsthand as we launched our product earlier this year and make a gigantic splash in the market. So we’d love to share a few ways you can also make a gigantic splash – no matter what you’re announcing.
Here’s our checklist, step-by-step.
Prior to Press Release:
Before writing the press release, get in a room with the visionaries and leaders and define the top 3 takeaways you want out of the press release – big/bold vision, usability, growing team, etc. Then, write the press release at least a week early to allow necessary time for revisions. Remember to load the press release into your publication software (PR Web, Business Wire, or Market Wired) at least 2 days early to ensure you’re good to go.
Do research on media or publications, including 3rd parties or partners, that would be willing to write about your launch, or would feature your press release on their website or publication – build a list that includes their contact information. And remember, sometimes Tweeting a DM at them is a great way to get their attention – and their email address!
Choose the date and time of launch for the press release – be sure to look out for holidays, and remember that posting Tuesday – Thursday is best, so you don’t have the weekends on either side to interfere.
Pursue conversations with media, publications, and third parties by researching what they write about and carefully pitching your story – be sure to make it about them and the benefits they’ll receive (this is right up your wheelhouse!). The fastest thing to turn a writer away is when a story will only benefit you. Get creative.
Ensure you have a proper plan for how you capture any inbound interest: Request a demo form, free trial, etc. Just make sure you can capture their contact information for later follow-up!
Make a list of all of the activities you want to do on launch day, such as:
Update your email signature with a campaign to reflect the big news – remember that often times, the 1:1 employee email generates more branding views than the website or other digital channels! A great resource for this is Sigstr (get a free trial by clicking here).
Email communication out to your prospects, investors, influencers, customers, and friends – encourage them to share the news!
Blog post to go live later in the afternoon to continue the momentum.
Launch on Product Hunt if you have a new product, service, or an updated product offering.
Build a special landing page to direct traffic from your release to (and use the landing page in your email, blog post, etc). This is helpful to keep tabs on traffic and where it’s coming from.
Create a one-pager for your sales team, or a talk track for how to convey the announcement to your customers, prospects, and others.
Have on hand the ready-to-go social posts you want to share from your company account, and also create some tweets to share out with the rest of your team that are “marketing approved”.
Day of Release:
Get up early! Be awake when your press release goes live (7am or 7:30am EDT is a good time – you want it live before any publications share the news)
Turn the press release link into a trackable bit.ly or Google link
Update your social media posts with the links and start sharing socially – be on your social game ALL day replying, engaging, and posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and whatever other channels your company uses – encourage employees to do the same!
Give some social media love to the publications that wrote about you – include screenshots of the articles, etc.
Send out the email communication mid-morning
Schedule your blog post for the afternoon
Respond to questions on Product Hunt and other media outlets – and ensure your executives are doing the same – their voice in the news will mean a lot!
Follow-up:
Tag all of the inbound leads or interest in your CRM system so you can measure the success and close rates eventually
Tailor your demo or free trial around the news – don’t treat these folks like just anyone that requested a demo from your site, ask them questions about how they heard, what got them interested, etc.
Consider other ways of follow-up for high priority prospects, investors, and others: Direct Mail, handwritten notes, case studies, relevant white paper, etc.
You’re probably thinking this is a lot. You’re right, it is! There’s a lot to consider when launching a new product, service, or whitepaper, but the key to remember is diversification. Be where your audience is, and think creatively about how you can not only reach them, but interest and educate them in what you’re talking about. Don’t be afraid to use humor in your social posts or landing page. Be your authentic company self – and get ready for a successful launch!
If you’re interested in download this checklist as a PDF, we’ve made it super easy on you. Just fill out this quick form and it’s yours.
It’s said that the “Your Brand is the Sum of Conversations Happening About It”. And as many know, the best marketing tool available is the conversation that eventually leads toa referral. No matter how much you invest in other tried and true marketing programs, there is nothing that compares to the conversion potential of a trusted recommendation from an individual that has had a positive experience with your brand and company.
But How Do I Get More Referrals?
The easiest way to accumulate customer referrals is to ask customers directly for introductions tothose they feel would most benefit from your product or service. Outside of the direct request, organizations should work to create more formal marketing programs to create a consistent referralstream.
In addition to customer referrals it is also common for companies to start up internal programs to drive attention to hiring needs.Many companiesput in place to reward employees for their efforts to assist with filling the talent pipeline. This might include a cash reward, gift certificates or a tangible item like an ipad or a Fitbit. Check out this post that details how companies can use culture to drive talent recruitment.
Employee Email Can Play An Important Role
A newmechanismthat should be considered when honing in on your referral program marketing strategy is the employee email signature. An average employee sends 10,000 emails annually! For a company of 100 employees, your collective company will send approximately 1M one-to-one emails each and every year. That’s a lot of potential brand and marketing impressions that could be put to use!This intimate touchpoint with customers and employees is prime for the promotion of your internal and external referral programs. Better yet by leveraging an email signature marketing application like Sigstr, internal stakeholders (i.e. Marketing or HR) can streamline the management of referral campaigns within the employee signature to ensureconsistency and adoption.
Interested in trying employee email signature marketing at your company? Give it a try on us! Start your free 30-day trial now: www.sigstr.com.
The email signature is an important reflection of you as an individual or of company you represent. In fact, it’s estimated that employees send about 10,000 1:1 business emails annually. For a company of 100 employees, that’s 1M emails every single year! That’s a lot of branding opportunities to showcase your brand and even include a resource call-to-action. But how do you do it?
We break it down into an easy step-by-step guide to not only update your Gmail signature, but to utilize the real estate at the bottom of every single email sent to showcase your brand and to generate interest in your company’s most important initiatives. Follow the 4 easy steps below:
Step 1: Open Your Gmail Account to the Inbox Screen
Log-in to your Gmail Account and open to the Inbox Screen (home screen)
Step 2: Navigate to the “Settings” Screen & Scroll to Bottom
To access settings, click the Gear icon (little screen grab of the icon) in the top right corner.
Step 3: Ensure “Signature” is Selected and Update Signature in Box with Personal Info
Step 4: Include a Graphical CTA in the Signature Box
Using a tool like Sigstr, you can unlock the marketing potential of the thousands of one-to-one emails your employees are sending every single day. It is smart marketing through email signatures.
With a few clicks in Sigstr, marketers can automatically inject a clickable image, called a campaign, to the Outlook and Gmail email signatures. These campaigns are updated automatically, can be filtered by groups, and all with no IT or employee action required.
Here are a few example campaigns from Sigstr customers:
Studio Science generates new email newsletter opt-ins
Angie’s List promotes upcoming tradeshows and conferences
Lesson.ly shows off their unique team culture
TinderBox shares their newest available product
The signature is a no-brainer for marketing, but it can also promote customer support resources, or hiring opportunities. Need some inspiration? Download our free resource and snag ideas on “10 Ways to Promote Your Most Important Content” and sign up to try Sigstr for a free 30-day trial by visiting: https://app.sigstr.com/users/sign_up
Step 5: Click “Save” and Update Sigstr Campaigns at www.Sigstr.com
Now that you have saved your signature and have included your first Sigstr campaign in your email signature, you’re done! From now on, just visit Sigstr’s website to update your campaign in just a few clicks and have it appended to every single employee email – or just your own.
Many thought leaders and business executives in the SaaS industry talk about the water bucket as an analogy to business – especially in SaaS. Your revenue and your churn. Your challenges and your success. This bucket is your story. And when it comes to your customers, there are many touch points that came into play when earning their business. These factors come from your marketing efforts with lead generation, the thought leadership content you distribute online, the partnerships you have created, or by word of mouth. But it all likely started with a trusting relationship.
Once these customers see the value in what your product or service can provide, they start sharing more of their pain or challenges to see if you can offer other solutions or services. Building a relationship comes with time, but in these valued customer conversations, it is important to keep them up-to-date with the latest information. Customer success reps should share product notes, case studies, blogs and articles to earn credibility, yes, but also to ensure your valued customers are aware of important product updates or industry changes.
Prominent SaaS companies would tell you that roughly 80% of their new customers come from their existing customers. The true value of customer success is not just from the lifelong value of those businesses, but from word of mouth and engaging with customers peers and referrals. These conversations can often be started by sharing stories of another similar customer that has found success using your product or services. When it comes time to share these case studies, product updates, thought leadership pieces, or other relevant information, how do you engage your customer success reps without causing them to lose focus?
Campaigns in email signatures can play a very important role in customer success through including important company initiatives in the hundreds (or thousands) of one-to-one business emails your employees are sending every single day. Let these email signature campaigns be a conversation starter to help customers feel further connected to your brand. Learn how Angies List uses Sigstr to power email signature marketing for over 400 account managers.
Angie’s List Case Study
Try Sigstr for Your Customer Success Team
Your marketing team can have the control of these email signatures with a platform that requires zero IT efforts and is updated in real time. Sigstr is helping marry your excellent marketing content and call-to-actions with the conversations you are having with customers and future customers. Sign up for your 30-day free trial of Sigstr now by visiting: https://app.sigstr.com/users/sign_up
Hiring the right people at the right time is crucial to driving the growth of a company. As a talent recruiter, you are not trying to draw attention to a company’s product/service, but rather the company and its unique culture. In the Economist’s review of Charles Ellis’ bookWhat it Takes: Seven Secrets of Success from the World’s Greatest Professional Firms, it was stated that the best firms are “fanatical about recruiting new employees who are not just the most talented but also the best suited to a particular corporate culture.” Promoting company culture is a key component in the recruiting process. Herein lies the company culture-sharing conundrum: what is the most engaging and efficient way for talent acquisition teams to share company culture via traditional recruiting channels?
A recent LinkedIn article entitled The Power of Visual Storytelling in Email Marketing by Judy Chen speaks of the importance of including visuals in email marketing initiatives. The key takeaway from this article is “Don’t try to go overboard.” Email signatures, which are included in every single business email sent (think Google Mail or Outlook), are an ideal space to capitalize on this opportunity and turn job candidates or even prospects into employees. Sigstr allows talent acquisition teams to take advantage of this space at the bottom of every single business email sent and manage it effectively. By injecting marketing call-to-actions into each employee signature, recruiters are ensuring that they are engaging prospects with their company culture automatically – in every email touch point. An Indianapolis-based company is currently promoting their company culture via this Sigstr campaign.
This image hosted in their signatures routes the recipient to their team page. This does an exceptional job of portraying the humor and fun-loving nature of their company culture that has become their DNA. Sigstr’s email signature marketing campaigns allows Lesson.ly to measure the success of this campaign through real-time analytics, which enables Lesson.ly to gage the effectiveness of utilizing the Sigstr campaign in their recruiting and sales efforts. The campaigns are automatically attached to each employees’ email signatures and can be updated in just a few clicks, ensuring the brand and message is always up-to-date.
We know your company has its own DNA – those things that are woven into every thread of who you are. Want to see firsthand how you can promote that special company culture and increase the efficiency of your talent acquisition team? Get started with your Sigstr free trial today.
TechPoint
Evercontact
Weve recently enjoyed following along with 
“One of the best ways to improve in your conversion rate optimization is to have an explainer video on your site that tells your audience why your site or service is for them. If you ever take a look at the top selling products on ClickBank, you will notice that nearly all of them are using explainer videos on their landing page. Extremely long sales pages worked well in the past, now it’s all about the sales video. Make it engaging, interactive and of course ending with a call to action for your target audience. Be sure to check out my how to create killer explainer videos article for how to create one for your site.” 
“Storytell. It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve conversion rate. Tell me why you started your business. Tell me how you are using your products. Tell me what your customers are gaining from working with you. Let me feel your pride and emotion. If I don’t feel something on an emotional level when I visit your website, then I’m just going to compare on price and then you lose. Storytell more for improving conversion rate optimization.”
Secret #3: Sean Smith (
“I recommend investing in great visuals for improving your conversion optimization rate. The prospective customer has to be able to visualize using the product, and if you have gorgeous visuals and video, you help the customer break the buying barrier. Research indicates products on a white background work better than a busy background. Investing in great visuals is beneficial for both sales and website conversion.” 
“Whether your marketing department produces great content, case studies, videos, or product descriptions, getting your marketing message through to your target audience is critical. Each company employee is estimated to send about 28 emails per day or 10,000 emails per year, and each of those emails contains an email signature. Smart digital marketers are using the email signature’s untapped potential to promote their most important products or initiatives within the signature area of each email. Put the email signature to use with marketing campaign software that helps your company brand employee signatures with approved fonts, formats, colors, and even social media channels, while also promoting the company’s most important content or initiatives via clickable images called campaigns.”
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.
