Last year, my colleagues at Sigstr started writing about their favorite TV shows. And more specifically, they detailed what it might look like if the characters from those shows had professional email signatures. The trend spiraled after a coworker’s obsession for Game of Thrones got the best of her. Shortly after, our senior marketing manager dove in with his own version, with a post about his favorite show, Parks and Recreation.
And then there’s me. I’ve loved every minute of reading my colleagues’ nerdy obsessions (which I share). I can’t even begin to tell you how excited my dad and I are for season 7 of GOT. Or how I’ve recognized Andy Dwyer is my spirit animal. Either way, this content has inspired my conversations with my own prospects. It’s given unique (albeit, pretend) use cases that can be translated into real campaigns that drive actual ROI. And, it spurred me to keep the trend moving with my own nerdy obsession: comic book superheroes.
To give a bit of an origin story, comic books based on heroic people with extraordinary or superhuman abilities rose to prominence in the 1940s. During that time, Marvel and DC dominated the market. Through the years, superheroes from these publishers have become iconic figures of optimism, showing up on lunch boxes, backpacks, t-shirts and some pretty spectacular movies.
Each superhero has their own set of values and individualized purpose. (Sort of like how Sigstr is out to save the world, one email signature at a time!) Seeing how I have a Deadpool Bobblehead and my own Baby Groot piggybank on my desk, it was really only a matter of time before I wrote about my favorite Marvel superheroes using email signatures to distribute targeted content for their latest adventures.
Iron Man
When Stark isn’t flying around the world in one of his indestructible suits of armor, he jets around as a self-proclaimed “Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist.” As the CEO of Stark Industries, it’s important for our favorite Playboy superhero to continue building the future of his late father’s name stake company, while saving the world and constructing the Iron Man brand. His flashy campaign banner in his professional email signatures is meant to drive event registrations from the “best and brightest men and women of nations and corporations the world over.”
Wolverine
Wolverine was notorious for his tough guy attitude, constant loner status and, of course, perfectly-manicured retractable claws. In recent years, his old adamantium bones aren’t as strong as they once were. And so, he’s welcomed retirement in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He spends his days watching his favorite college football team and fulfills his lifelong dream of owning and running an upscale nail salon. His campaign banner embodies the beauty and simplicity of a proper manicure, but I’d avoid booking an appointment during Michigan football games. He gets a little rowdy when his team’s losing.
The Incredible Hulk
Bruce Banner is a brilliant scientist, with an introverted personality but an overall pleasant disposition. But he has a real anger management issue. Make this guy mad and he turns into a giant green rage monster with a particularly limited vocabulary and an insatiable appetite for destruction. And, unfortunately for our ginormous green friend, being a scientist-turned-superhero can be quite stressful. Luckily, Bruce has found a productive outlet for the bellicosity. He’s started up his own demolition company. His simple campaign banner relays the perfect message to anyone who needs an entire town leveled to the ground, or an old skyscraper that needs to instantly be turned into a pile of rubble. Just don’t make him angry. You won’t like him when he’s angry.
Captain Marvel
The seventh Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, has recently shown interest in retiring from a life of crime-fighting. Apply now, through this clickable call-to-action banner for the chance to be the next Captain Marvel. Benefits include: superhuman strength, endurance, stamina, flight, physical durability, a limited precognitive “seventh sense” and resistance to most toxins and poisons. Preferred experience includes: espionage, pilot training, hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.
Deadpool
Seriously, what’s not to love about Wade Wilson? He’s notorious for breaking the fourth wall. He has a hilariously-dark sense of humor. And there was a comic book series where he killed every Marvel superhero, just because he felt like it. This anti-hero’s campaign is driving views to his newest ebook, in which he claims has a “Fourth wall-break inside of a fourth wall-break. That’s like – 16 walls!”
Captain America
Our country’s favorite son, Captain America was first introduced by Marvel on December 20, 1940. For reference, that was a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but a full year into WWII. The cover showed our patriotic pal punching Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It sold nearly a million copies. Lately though, Steve Rogers is taking his talents to Broadway. He’s hitting the stage as the lead in the USO’s propaganda production, “Star Spangled Man with a Plan.” His red, white and blue campaign banner is sure to drive ticket sales from anyone who’s ready to save the American Way.
Star Lord
The half-human, half-alien leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, spends a lot of his downtime flying around in his spaceship, The Milano. (Named after the 80’s actress, of course.) Seeing how the 80’s pop culture seems to be his only connection with Earth, Peter Quill (err, Star Lord) has decided to broadcast his love for the decade with weekly webinars showing aliens across the galaxy how to dance like it’s 1988. When his friends asked why he was doing it, he started rambling on and on about some legend from Earth called, “Footloose,” and some great hero named Kevin Bacon who apparently taught an entire city that dancing is the greatest thing there is in life. Ever heard of him? Me neither. People from Earth are weird.
Storm
Marvel’s weather witch has decided to take her weather-manipulating talents to the technology industry. As CEO of a new start-up SaaS company, she’s been taking the world by storm, quite literally. Her new on-demand weather app is putting her powers into the consumers’ hands. Her campaign has boosted downloads of her app, with the slogan, “If you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes!” We’ll see how successful her start-up becomes – consumers are requesting different weather for the same location.
Professor X at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters
This unconventional institute is always accepting new and gifted students to enter its curriculum. So, to boost enrollment, Professor X has upped his marketing game by using his faculty’s outbound emails. This campaign banner is designed to attract scholarly mutants from across the globe to join the X-men. (And maybe learn a thing or two along the way.)
S.H.I.E.L.D.
The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (what a mouthful!), is a counter-terrorism organization that defends Earth against superhuman threats. When this agency isn’t aiding the Avengers with catastrophic threats, it’s running campaigns to drive awareness for what the civilians should do if they’re smack-dab in the middle of some super villain who’s trying to destroy the world. Most recently, the group is highlighting an survival guide ebook, written by Colonel Nick Fury. The long-form content piece, “Excuse Me, Did We Come to Your Planet & Blow Stuff Up?” provides 11 survival tips for an alien invasion.
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!
If you’re a marketer, then surely you’ve heard the statement: “Email is Dead” many times over in the past few years. In fact, just last year an article appearing on Inc Magazine entitled, “Why Email Will Be Obsolete By 2020”, John Brandon made the following statement, “I’m predicting that a new communication channel will replace email by 2020. In fact, there are already signs that business is starting to move away from email as a primary form of digital communication. We have so many alternatives. You can send a text message or a DM on Twitter. You can drop someone a note on Facebook or start a chat.”
Sure, it’s true that the email channel is changing – and that’s a great thing, isn’t it? As the world of technology evolves, so do the options for how we can communicate with our co-workers, families, and friends. We’re sure glad we’re still not mailing letters or picking up the landline phone whenever we need to connect with someone. Calling and sending mail through the postal service certainly has it’s place – just like email does and always will. New channels are being added on a regular basis, and those channels add value in certain areas. Take Slack for instance: the value it adds to internal teams is incredible.
But is that it? Email is dying because other channels are coming on to the scene and adding value, too? Let’s dig in further.
Email Is Alive & Well
If email is dead, then why do we see the volume and opportunity growing with each passing year? According to a recent TechCrunch article entitled, “You Can’t Kill Email”, the channel has never been more alive and well. The article states that,
“Radicati’s most recent Email Statistics Report estimates that by 2019, the number of worldwide email users will exceed 2.9 billion — that’s up 10 percent from 2015. Additionally, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day is also projected to increase, suggesting global email will rise 14 percent over the same period.”
Why is email still growing so fast, even if other prominent communication channels like Slack and Facebook and even Twitter DMs are being added to our list of options? The article states that, “The truth is our use of email is only increasing, because the way we use it is evolving to help us better manage the everyday to-do lists in our work and personal lives. Email is still an integral part of the way we communicate today, and the reasons are many.”
We couldn’t agree more with that statement. None of us communicate via email the way we did when it was first introduced as a channel (and thank goodness!). We can use email as a formal channel, an informal channel, and even a transactional or marketing channel. The uses of email are across the board and will continue to evolve in the future.
Does your team use Slack? Or a project management platform? Ironically, Slack sends an email to you whenever you miss a direct mention. How about Salesforce? Have you noticed that the CRM platform, which tried to eliminate email in the sales process, eventually added Outlook plug-ins to accommodate for email needs?
Take Advantage of Email Volume
If you can’t beat them, join them. Email isn’t going away anytime soon, so how can your organization take advantage of this growing channel and its many benefits?
Consider this statistic:on average, an employee will send approximately 10,000 emails each year, so a company of 100 employees will send 1M emails per year and a company of 500 employees will send 5M emails a year! Can you see how this channel can play an important role in your marketing mix? According to a recent article by OfficeTeam, it may be one of the most overlooked marketing channels.
Sigstr’s email signature generator was created to tap into the enormous marketing opportunity that lives in the email signature layout. The email signature has been getting much more attention over the past year as marketers and companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to see email signatures as an important marketing asset. The employee email signature is quite possibly the #1 place where your company’s brand is viewed most often – maybe even more than your company website.
Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse service or product offerings? In addition to promoting your company’s most important initiatives, use Sigstr Signatures to ensure that every employee’s email signature layout meets brand standards and formatting requirements. Email is a powerful engine for companies of all kinds – use it for your brand’s advantage. And not only that, it’s a channel that can be measured meticulously and improved upon almost immediately.
Here are a few of our favorite email signature layout examples:
Request a demo today to see how Sigstr can help with your company’s email signature layout. Or, click below to access our latest resource:
It’s a question asked frequently by prospects. With so many marketing mediums already at play, it can be difficult to imagine adding another channel to the mix. After all, isn’t leveraging a company website, blog, and countless social profiles enough?
The truth of the matter is that we live in the digital era and new ways of engagement emerge every day. In order to stay relevant, businesses have to embrace a multi-channel marketing strategy to create a cohesive and impactful brand identity. Instead of shying away from new medias, marketers must embrace the opportunity to capture an audience’s attention in innovative ways.
Finding the perfect balance of mediums can be complicated. When evaluating a new channel, like Sigstr and your work email signature, it’s important to understand channel strengths and weaknesses in relation to your overall marketing strategy. There are a variety of factors to consider. Many owned medias like websites and social accounts give you the benefit of control and cost efficiency, but have no guarantees. Paid media such as display ads are easy to scale, but suffer from declining response rates. Earned media is the most credible, but can be hard to control. Marketers are tasked with finding the perfect channel combination to create an effective and memorable audience experience.
Sigstr is unique in the fact that it is an owned channel that is utilized by individual employees during one-to-one interactions. Most owned medias like websites, blogs, and social profiles are promoted from a single source and the audience consumes the content at a single location. Sigstr provides the opportunity to promote content during thousands of individual email interactions with prospects, customers, partners, and important stakeholders. Therefore, every single employee using Sigstr in their work email signature is a brand advocate and promoter of the company’s most important marketing initiatives. The added bonus is that leveraging direct relationships to distribute content establishes a level of trust uncommon in owned media.
So, IS Sigstr a needed marketing component? The answer depends on your goals and objectives. At the end of the day, marketing channels must work together to create a compelling story. Individuals consume content in a variety of ways and it takes repetition for a message to resonate. If you’re not seeing the response you’d like from current marketing efforts, you may need to revamp your channel strategy to include the addition of new medias like Sigstr.
Check out these helpful resources to learn more about Sigstr and how your work email signature can be used to distribute your content:
Well, what can I say? I graduated. It’s over. I did it.
I know most of you are saying, “Hey, any idiot could do that.”
“Well, it was tough for me. So back off!” (Billy Madison, anyone?)
There are three things that will be imprinted in my mind in relation to graduating from the greatest college out there (Indiana University – Go Hoosiers!) and starting my career. Surprisingly, it does not include walking across the stage and receiving my diploma.
Taking my last college final (it took me 12 minutes) and the pure nirvana I felt subsequently
The palate-pleasing beer and its name (Nefarious Nectar) I shared with my girlfriend right after that last college final
Receiving a call from Sigstr‘s VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes, with an offer to join the Sigstr team as a Business Development Representative
I interviewed with over ten different companies and received four job offers. This being said not to stroke my ego or toot my own horn, but to point out the amount of opportunities I sorted through to find the perfect one. This was also pretty tough, as I was commuting back and forth to IU’s campus in Bloomington four times a week and working between ten and twenty hours on the weekend at St. Joseph’s Brewery. Adding job interviews into that schedule was difficult to manage. Note to self: breathe, it’s over.
I talked with Kevin for about ten minutes on the phone and promised him that I was ready to learn and ultimately come in and work my little hiney off. I consider myself to have a decent amount of Sales experience for my age after an internship with the Indiana Pacers (side note: a Sigstr customer with some cool email signatures) and a few other “Sales” jobs throughout college. However, at the time, if you asked me to define marketing, buyer personas, or lead nurturing in an intelligent manner, it would result in a prompt answer of “uhhhhh”.
My job title is “Sales” or a “Business Development Representative” depending on who you ask, but really I like to look at it as a hybrid between Sales and Marketing. Drew Kelley (that tall guy pictured above) introduced me to Sigstr, and likes to define us as “smarketers”. See what we did there? My goal everyday is to help Marketers drive brand consistency and unlock an unused Marketing channel through cool email signatures.
Today marks my one-month anniversary here at Sigstr. During that time, I’ve gone through a crash course on Marketing, Sales, tech, how to iron a shirt, and everything else in between to prepare myself and close the knowledge gap. Google searches included (but were not limited to):
“What is demand generation?”
“100 Marketing terms that every Marketer should know”
“What do cool email signatures look like?”
“How to be an adult”
Everyday, I learn something new. Everyday is an opportunity to gain knowledge and get better at my craft.
Sigstr is a team of about twenty of the most hard-working, fun to be around, tech savvy, individuals that I have the opportunity to go shoulder to shoulder with (literally…we’re touching shoulders and need more office space…and its coming). Sigstr is a growing force to be reckoned with – which you can read more about in last week’s press release. Every army needs a general, and I can’t say enough good things about our leader. Dan Hanrahan, Sigstr CEO and Founder, has taught us all to work hard and celebrate our achievements (you can read more about that here).
We’re a scrappy group, helping marketers craft cool email signatures and open up a new digital Marketing channel. When you think about an email signature, you may question how something so simple can have a huge impact on a brand. That’s fair…I get it. But if you think about the average amount of emails one employee sends annually (10,000…yes 10,000), you can start to see the opportunity it presents as a new channel for your digital marketing toolbox.
With that, I’ll finish this post the same way I started it…with a quote. “If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”
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).
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.
Author: Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner of High Alpha
High Alpha is a venture studio that conceives, launches, and scales next-generation enterprise cloud and SaaS companies.
Good luck to Scott McCorkle and all of my friends with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud this week as they prepare to launch Connections 2016! I have always loved Connections – the conference brings together the best digital marketers in the world to learn, share, be inspired, innovate and celebrate together.
So many incredible highlights over the years – Subscribers Rule!, Malcolm Gladwell, Sir Richard Branson, Michael J. Fox, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Soledad O’Brien, Jim Collins, Indianapolis Symphony, Train, The Fray, Steak and Shake at 3am, Imagine Dragons and many more.
This week, I am excited to see Sigstr (one of our newest High Alpha companies) exhibit at Connections and plug into this dynamic and vibrant marketing ecosystem. Sigstr is a next generation marketing tech company focused on the often-overlooked and very powerful channel of 1-to-1 employee email communications.
Sigstr enables marketers to standardize professional email signatures (so important for brand consistency) and leverage the precious real estate of 1-to-1 employee emails to promote events, white papers, job openings, new products and much more. Marketers can manage these campaigns with segmentation tools, powerful analytics and enterprise controls.
I am very excited to see what the best marketers in the world can do with the Sigstr technology!
Our VP of Product, Sam Smith, had only been at Sigstr for a few weeks. From what I remember, I believe he thought I was crazy. I liked Sam a lot, but I had no idea if he was writing code or just logging into Hacker Typer all day. This was one year ago today.
Sam’s first project was releasing groups into the Sigstr email signatures product. At that point, we had campaigns only and one size fits all. No control for email signature templates, very basic Outlook/Google integrations, no groups, limited UX, and so on. Groups was the #1 most requested feature from our first 25 customers, so we built it. It was a game changer (but at this point only in concept as Sam had not launched his first release).
On Quatro de Mayo, Scott Dorsey and Eric Tobias (our friends at High Alpha – at which point both High Alpha and Sigstr were brand new together) asked what we were doing to name the release. ExactTarget and iGoDigital were amazing companies these guys built and led. They always named their releases – it was a fun culture thing and helped as we talked about what happened in which release.
Sam quickly realized the next day was Cinco de Mayo. After approximately 8 seconds of deliberation, we had a nomenclature for our releases:
booze | number
1 second later, the release was dubbed Tequila Cinco. Clearly, that was the last time Scott or Eric ever suggested that we name a release.
Aside from the naming, and most importantly, the release itself was perfect. Game changing functionality that was exactly what our customers wanted. Fast forward to today and exactly one year later, Sigstr has a product that stands up branded email signature templates and unlocks marketing opportunities in every email employees send. And we do it for some of the world’s largest companies.
So here’s to Sam and our product team on the one year anniversary of Sam’s first release. You guys dominate, and pose for pictures like it’s the cover of a new Mumford and Sons album (here’s one below from our 1st ever Sigstr Field Day). We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for your hard work.
If you lead or are a part of a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product. Instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you.
We’ve created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #3.
Sigstr created an ebook that details 7 clever ways to boost your business services brand with the best email signatures, and today we’ll highlight clever tip #4.
Clever Tip #4: Don’t Mass Market to Your Target Market
Product companies sell to the masses through large scale advertising efforts. Trying to follow in the footsteps of these companies, many service firms attempt to first build their brand by advertising through traditional channels like tv, radio, and billboards. But for a service brand, this can be a waste of time and money. It’s not targeted to your specific audience and it costs too much (given the likely return).
The dynamics of brand implementation are just different for service companies. Business service companies need consistent articulation of their value proposition across all touch points of the marketing and sales process.
While catchy jingles during primetime tv might work for a product company, they are simply inappropriate for a business services firm. But the right marketing program, that “touches” your prospects regularly with highly targeted messages will increase awareness and recognition. So the next time you call to schedule a meeting, they’re more likely to take it.
Ready for the Clever Tip?
Consider using a remarketing strategy (such as Google AdWords) for those that visit your website or landing pages. Because you are remarketing to people who have already shown an interest in your services, you get more bang for your advertising dollar. Each additional impression increases the chances that you will gain a new purchase, and even existing customers benefit from being regularly reminded about your business services brand.
This week’s clever tip is brought to you by Sigstr. We help you build the best email signatures that you can standardize across your entire oranization. Sign up now and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures.
Your employees hold the responsibility as a brand ambassador to your company. So in order to have a successful rebrand or brand refresh to update your company’s look, you need every single employee to embody your new corporate identity. That means following specific steps to ensure that each and every employee is using the right logos, templates, fonts, and colors in all internal and external facing communications.
A lot of careful consideration goes into determining what a new visual identity should look like – one that’s memorable, drives awareness and makes it easier for your sales team to win deals. Usually this sort of endeavor is months if not years in the making, and can take an army of team members to make it successful. But while the tactics of this are important, the true importance is embracing what you and your employees believe your company brand and values should represent, and facing the world as a united front.
At Sigstr, we understand that the process of pulling off a successful rebrand or brand refresh can be time consuming and challenging, so we’ve given you a head start by developing a quick checklist. Use this to ensure all of your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted as you refresh your company’s identity, but add to it as you uncover more areas and document those for your next brand refresh (hopefully many years down the road)!
Suggested Phase 1:
Employee email signatures / email signature format
Website homepage & key website pages
Social media channels
Sales & company powerpoints
Product demo environments
Business cards
Company blog
Newsletter, customer communications, and marketing automation emails
As you’ll see from the checklist, one of the first items we suggest your company updates in your re-brand is employee email signatures. Why? The employee email signature is often the only interaction prospects have with your company, and each employee at your company likely sends about 10,000 emails per year to your company’s most valuable contacts. For a company of just 100 employees, that’s over 1M brand impressions just by email alone! And while in the past whenever your company updated a font or a color, you had to send an email out to all employees (like this), that doesn’t have to be the case.
Sigstr’s email signature generator solution combines a cohesive email signature format with engaging campaigns, all in one easy-to-use software platform, easily managed by a single administrator.
Sigstr Signatures:Individualized, employee-specific names and titles. Centrally controlled branding, content, and information.
Sigstr allows your company to gain control of employee’s email signatures to ensure proper formatting and branding on every single employee email signature. No longer will you have to worry about outdated signatures, formatting issues, or wrong uses of colors or fonts. And best of all, get the data to see what’s working!
How Does It Work?
With a few clicks in Sigstr, marketers can automatically inject a clickable image, called a campaign, to the Outlook and Gmail email signature format or change icons, fonts, and allowable text in employee signature lines. These campaigns or signatures are updated automatically across all employees and can be filtered by groups. And best of all? No IT or employee action required.
Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building your professional email signature format.
Today, Sigstr announced significant advances to its product announcing three important new product capabilities, including:
First, with central deployment capabilities, the install process removes the need for employees to install the application individually. The Sigstr admin now has the ability to push updates via the application portal.
Second, multi-brand companies can now utilize different signature templates for various subsets of employees now allowing several signatures to be simultaneously active across the organization.
Finally, Sigstr’s SalesLoft integration enhances marketing efforts within the SalesLoft Cadence application by appending a Sigstr Signature and Sigstr Campaign to Cadence email communications.
“Building an exceptional and easy-to-use product is incredibly important to the Sigstr team,” said Sam Smith, VP of Product at Sigstr. “Our customers are replacing their manual and time consuming ways of updating signatures, and we have built a product to make this process seamless. These new product updates are critical to our users, and we are hard at work building further integrations and product updates that will deliver incredible ROI and brand cohesion.”
In addition to the SalesLoft integration, Sigstr has a variety of integrations available for Microsoft and Google. Push Sigstr to all employees, or have each employee run a one-time Install. Don’t stop there! Consider Sigstr for any tool you use to send email:
Read More & Get Started with an Email Signature Creator
Want to learn more about Sigstr and its recent product announcements? View the entire press release here.
Ready to get started with the power of an email signature creator? Sign up for Sigstr and start your free 30-day trial today to begin building professional email signatures, or check out the most recent Sigstr resource:
TechPoint
Well, what can I say? I graduated. It’s over. I did it.
Today marks my one-month anniversary here at Sigstr. During that time, I’ve gone through a crash course on Marketing, Sales, tech, how to iron a shirt, and everything else in between to prepare myself and close the knowledge gap. Google searches included (but were not limited to):
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.
Author: Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner of 
“Building an exceptional and easy-to-use product is incredibly important to the Sigstr team,” said Sam Smith, VP of Product at Sigstr. “Our customers are replacing their manual and time consuming ways of updating signatures, and we have built a product to make this process seamless. These new product updates are critical to our users, and we are hard at work building further integrations and product updates that will deliver incredible ROI and brand cohesion.”