Dr. Seuss once wrote, “A person is a person, no matter how small.” At Sigstr, we believe that a win is a win, no matter how small. Every win deserves to be celebrated. Some wins merit leaving the office for celebratory Kilroy’s pitchers or Nada margaritas (2 of our favorite go-to watering holes in downtown Indy). Others simply require a Sigstr celebration staple: the walk-up song.
Background & History:
The walk-up song originated in the very beginning, with the original 3 man team of BDRs (business development reps). We have a demo whiteboard in the office that keeps track of how many demos (a meeting with a prospect where we walk them through our email signature app) have been scheduled by each rep. Walking up to the board to record your newest scheduled demo is a celebration in and of itself, but our VP of Product, Sam Smith, upped the ante with the introduction of the concept of a walk-up song (side note: this isn’t the first Sigstr tradition Sam has started, read more about that here).
As each BDR would triumphantly sashay up to the board to add to their demo tally, Sam would play that team members walk-up song. It. Is. Awesome. And this tradition has carried on from when we were a 7 person company all the way to now.
Every member of the sales team has a designated song to be played when they get a win. Sales Development reps get their walk-up songs played when they schedule demos, our AE’s get their songs played when they close deals and our VP of Sales, Kevin Vanes, and CEO, Dan Hanrahan, get their songs played when a partnership opportunity has been agreed upon or they have helped close business. You can see (and make fun of) our sales team’s walk-up songs below.
Celebratory traditions are not limited to the sales team, they exist in every division of Sigstr. The marketing team plays the rap air horn any time we make advancements on the influencer front or a MQL (marketing qualified lead) comes through. If you’re not familiar with the rap air horn, check out this app. Due to an extraordinarily overenthusiastic keeper of the rap air horn (me), we have reached a point that any time we play the horn everyone stops what they are doing and shouts “hot lead, hot lead!”
The product team celebrates new releases and product launches by bringing our DOMO robot to life. Product launches are especially exciting and important to celebrate. Every new launch makes our email signature app better, faster, stronger. The DOMO robot’s dancing can be seen in the GIF to the right.
Like we said, a win is a win, no matter how small. We truly celebrate everything in our own little ways and make sure each team member feels appreciated for their hard work. It is vital to the success of our email signature app and the team. A start-up mentality and sales-driven culture with an office environment that’s exciting and fun to be a part of everyday – we are a 24 man wolf pack and every single one of us is critically important to Sigstr’s success. We celebrate the little wins because everyone’s little wins amount to big wins for Sigstr.
What’s Your Celebratory Tradition?
Do you have unique celebration traditions like we do? We want to hear about them! Tweet us at @SigstrApp and let us know how you celebrate your wolf pack and their accomplishments!
Or better yet, let us know what your walk up song would be!
If you’re a marketer, then surely you’ve heard the statement: “Email is Dead” many times over in the past few years. In fact, just last year an article appearing on Inc Magazine entitled, “Why Email Will Be Obsolete By 2020”, John Brandon made the following statement, “I’m predicting that a new communication channel will replace email by 2020. In fact, there are already signs that business is starting to move away from email as a primary form of digital communication. We have so many alternatives. You can send a text message or a DM on Twitter. You can drop someone a note on Facebook or start a chat.”
Sure, it’s true that the email channel is changing – and that’s a great thing, isn’t it? As the world of technology evolves, so do the options for how we can communicate with our co-workers, families, and friends. We’re sure glad we’re still not mailing letters or picking up the landline phone whenever we need to connect with someone. Calling and sending mail through the postal service certainly has it’s place – just like email does and always will. New channels are being added on a regular basis, and those channels add value in certain areas. Take Slack for instance: the value it adds to internal teams is incredible.
But is that it? Email is dying because other channels are coming on to the scene and adding value, too? Let’s dig in further.
Email Is Alive & Well
If email is dead, then why do we see the volume and opportunity growing with each passing year? According to a recent TechCrunch article entitled, “You Can’t Kill Email”, the channel has never been more alive and well. The article states that,
“Radicati’s most recent Email Statistics Report estimates that by 2019, the number of worldwide email users will exceed 2.9 billion — that’s up 10 percent from 2015. Additionally, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day is also projected to increase, suggesting global email will rise 14 percent over the same period.”
Why is email still growing so fast, even if other prominent communication channels like Slack and Facebook and even Twitter DMs are being added to our list of options? The article states that, “The truth is our use of email is only increasing, because the way we use it is evolving to help us better manage the everyday to-do lists in our work and personal lives. Email is still an integral part of the way we communicate today, and the reasons are many.”
We couldn’t agree more with that statement. None of us communicate via email the way we did when it was first introduced as a channel (and thank goodness!). We can use email as a formal channel, an informal channel, and even a transactional or marketing channel. The uses of email are across the board and will continue to evolve in the future.
Does your team use Slack? Or a project management platform? Ironically, Slack sends an email to you whenever you miss a direct mention. How about Salesforce? Have you noticed that the CRM platform, which tried to eliminate email in the sales process, eventually added Outlook plug-ins to accommodate for email needs?
Take Advantage of Email Volume
If you can’t beat them, join them. Email isn’t going away anytime soon, so how can your organization take advantage of this growing channel and its many benefits?
Consider this statistic:on average, an employee will send approximately 10,000 emails each year, so a company of 100 employees will send 1M emails per year and a company of 500 employees will send 5M emails a year! Can you see how this channel can play an important role in your marketing mix? According to a recent article by OfficeTeam, it may be one of the most overlooked marketing channels.
Sigstr’s email signature generator was created to tap into the enormous marketing opportunity that lives in the email signature layout. The email signature has been getting much more attention over the past year as marketers and companies of all shapes and sizes are beginning to see email signatures as an important marketing asset. The employee email signature is quite possibly the #1 place where your company’s brand is viewed most often – maybe even more than your company website.
Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse service or product offerings? In addition to promoting your company’s most important initiatives, use Sigstr Signatures to ensure that every employee’s email signature layout meets brand standards and formatting requirements. Email is a powerful engine for companies of all kinds – use it for your brand’s advantage. And not only that, it’s a channel that can be measured meticulously and improved upon almost immediately.
Here are a few of our favorite email signature layout examples:
Request a demo today to see how Sigstr can help with your company’s email signature layout. Or, click below to access our latest resource:
It’s a question asked frequently by prospects. With so many marketing mediums already at play, it can be difficult to imagine adding another channel to the mix. After all, isn’t leveraging a company website, blog, and countless social profiles enough?
The truth of the matter is that we live in the digital era and new ways of engagement emerge every day. In order to stay relevant, businesses have to embrace a multi-channel marketing strategy to create a cohesive and impactful brand identity. Instead of shying away from new medias, marketers must embrace the opportunity to capture an audience’s attention in innovative ways.
Finding the perfect balance of mediums can be complicated. When evaluating a new channel, like Sigstr and your work email signature, it’s important to understand channel strengths and weaknesses in relation to your overall marketing strategy. There are a variety of factors to consider. Many owned medias like websites and social accounts give you the benefit of control and cost efficiency, but have no guarantees. Paid media such as display ads are easy to scale, but suffer from declining response rates. Earned media is the most credible, but can be hard to control. Marketers are tasked with finding the perfect channel combination to create an effective and memorable audience experience.
Sigstr is unique in the fact that it is an owned channel that is utilized by individual employees during one-to-one interactions. Most owned medias like websites, blogs, and social profiles are promoted from a single source and the audience consumes the content at a single location. Sigstr provides the opportunity to promote content during thousands of individual email interactions with prospects, customers, partners, and important stakeholders. Therefore, every single employee using Sigstr in their work email signature is a brand advocate and promoter of the company’s most important marketing initiatives. The added bonus is that leveraging direct relationships to distribute content establishes a level of trust uncommon in owned media.
So, IS Sigstr a needed marketing component? The answer depends on your goals and objectives. At the end of the day, marketing channels must work together to create a compelling story. Individuals consume content in a variety of ways and it takes repetition for a message to resonate. If you’re not seeing the response you’d like from current marketing efforts, you may need to revamp your channel strategy to include the addition of new medias like Sigstr.
Check out these helpful resources to learn more about Sigstr and how your work email signature can be used to distribute your content:
Events rock. Conferences are the best place to learn from and rub elbows with the best and brightest marketing thought leaders in the business. Finding the right events for your company to attend can be a tall task, as there are hundreds of thousands of conferences put on in the U.S. each year. We love events. Good things happen when we have face-to-face time in front of our most important prospects, showing them tips and tricks with their html email signature template. It’s a big part of our marketing strategy, so we put a lot of time and effort into identifying where we need to be.
Below is a list of the top 16 Digital Marketing events we’ve compiled and put on our radar for the 2016 and 2017 year:
Is there an event we missed that you think should have made our list? Let us know! Tweet us at @SigstrApp and we will update the post accordingly!
And if you need a new creative way to promote an event your team will be exhibiting at, or hosting yourself, here is some inspiration for your html email signature template.
Risking it all at an incredible speed. Why go 245 mph, weaving in and out of other cars, and inches away from a concrete wall? For the incredible reward. For the thrill of the ride (and hopefully a nice glass of milk after it’s over).
It’s May. It’s Indianapolis. It’s the largest single day sporting event in the world (350,000 fans), the Indy 500. Growing up with superheroes like Rahal Andretti, Unser, and Hinchcliffe (my son’s hero) makes Indy natives admire those that risk it all for huge rewards. It’s in our DNA, and a part of the reason why Indy has a thriving marketing tech start-up world.
The risks are different, no doubt. But the principles of joining a SaaS startup are similar. Calculated risk, going really fast, trusting your team, and believing that the journey and ultimate reward are worth it. Thanks to the Sigstr team who believe in the journey and that we will ultimately finish first.
The best drivers have the best teachers. It’s why there are multiple generations of Andretti’s and Unser’s. Thanks to our investors and advisors who meet with us, guide us, and support the Sigstr family.
I’d like to dish out a few more thanks. First, to the Indiana Pacers, for being a great Sigstr customer and hosting my Dad and I at the speedway for a practice day.
Thanks to another Sigstr customer, Arrow Electronics, for sponsoring James Hinchcliffe (and for creating awesome email signatures)!
Thanks to the Indy 500 for giving us superheroes and injecting the fascination of speed and big rewards into our DNA.
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.
The product team celebrates new releases and product launches by bringing our DOMO robot to life. Product launches are especially exciting and important to celebrate. Every new launch makes our email signature app better, faster, stronger. The DOMO robot’s dancing can be seen in the GIF to the right.
Thanks to another Sigstr customer, 
