If you send a girl that loves fashion to a SaaS conference on sales development (this one being #Rainmaker16, hosted by our friends at SalesLoft), she’s going to walk away enamored by the fashion of the tech world. It all started with Kyle Porter’s light up shoes.
While Kyle’s flashy shoes lit up the main stage (please excuse the poor dad joke here), arguably one of the greatest things about a SaaS/tech conference is the garb. Following along with the Rainmaker theme of this conference, we chose to bring Sigstr branded umbrellas.
In the growing industry known by it’s shorthand moniker “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service), the opportunities for goofy, borderline sophomoric, puns are hard to avoid. Most notably (and thanks mostly to pop culture’s recent love and affinity for booty) “Nice SaaS”, “Dat SaaS Tho”, and “So SaaSy” are some memorable ones. #Rainmaker16 (heldin Atlanta last week) was no stranger to the plethora of software-related humor.
Social123 brought awesome shirts with a hilariously placed hashtag (shown to the left below, thanks so much Carolyn Fieberman from the Everstring for the photo).
RingLead’s were also very clever (thanks to Ashley Darnell from Social123 for the pic)!
Lastly, I want to thank (but mostly apologize) to the Everstring team for putting up with me as I obsessed over their embroidered henleys!
I was so happy to have met all of these wonderful people and learn from the brilliant minds of the Sales Development Cloud. I already cannot wait for #Rainmaker17, and I can assure you that Sigstr will be back with some even cooler tees!
Raidious is a content centric digital agency. They create all types of digital content for brands – everything from social graphics to video and blogging. Pretty much all of the “stuff” that makes digital marketing work – Raidious specializes in creating.
Through years of creating great content, the team has learned that the traditional methods of distributing content no longer deliver the same results that they used to. According to Craig Lile, Senior Director of Advancement at Raidious, “It’s a lot harder to get your content noticed – brands have fully bought in that content marketing is the way of the future, but getting content marketing to break through is a really tough task for brands to do.”
Raidious’ employees send email all day long to clients and prospects and vendors, and they saw these personal, one-to-one email communications as another way to create advocacy – another opportunity for up-sell and cross-sell within their clients.
“When I saw Sigstr, I thought ‘wow, what a great way to distribute content!’ – and it’s from people that are trusted. It gives our team an awesome way to serve content that has a high probability of getting digested because it’s from a trusted source – and best of all, we can measure everything and continually improve our campaigns”, said Craig.
Solution
Raidious began using Sigstr, an employee email signature management platform, in January of 2015 for their 25 employees. To date, Raidious has run 5 unique employee email signature marketing campaigns, including: hiring and open positions, video and expanded services, a general brand campaign promoting Raidious, and a very specific website campaign. Raidious has 2 default groups: Sales and Marketing, and split their campaigns accordingly.
Results
Raidious’ top 2 campaigns to date include a campaign centered around hiring new talent, and a “Welcome to Raidious” brand campaign:
The hiring campaign generated 26,000 displays and 41 clicks over a month long period, and helped Raidious fill its’ talent pool with well qualified applicants in the local Indianapolis area. The email signature marketing campaign was very targeted and helped bring visibility to the growing team at Raidious.
Meanwhile, the Raidious brand campaign, which was active for 3 months, generated 174,000 displays with 181 clicks and generated many new visitors to the website, along with increased brand visibility.
“The value of ~200,000 impressions is unparalleled,” commented Craig. “It’s a channel we already own promoting content we already have. You simply can’t find a better value for reaching this type of audience.”
Vision
In the future, Raidious plans to test out new Sigstr campaigns. First, the team plans to launch a campaign entitled “This Week in Raidious” highlighting all of the new content and announcements across the company for that particular week. They also plan to launch a culture-centered campaign highlighting the great work environment and promoting Raidious as a great place to work. In the future, they would also like to begin pushing relevant blog posts, as well as create specific guides, such as a social media guide, for their end recipients.
As a business services company, you have a unique challenge as you don’t have a physical product – instead, you offer superior services or solutions and you rely heavily on the relationships that your sales and customer success teams build. You have created a successful company on your people and your brand, and as such, your brand is incredibly important to you – as is brand consistency.
Employee Email Is a Critical Branding Channel
Often times for business services companies, email is the main channel for communication and where your company branding is viewed most often. But are you leveraging the thousands of employee emails (sent from Gmail or Outlook) each of your employees sends directly to prospects, customers, industry influencers, and partners? A single employee will send, on average, 10,000 one-to-one emails annually, and each email represents an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Why not use this high powered channel to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events and job fairs, trade shows, and new diverse offerings? Or win new logos by promoting a referral program to your happy existing customers. Email is a powerful engine for business services company – use it for your brand’s advantage.
How Sigstr Works
Leverage Employee Email Signature Marketing at Your Business Services Company
Referrals:
Referrals, both to recruit employees as well as attract new customers, are important to your business services company. With no physical product, you rely heavily on the relationships your team builds, why not put those thousands of employee emails to work and use the email signature as a referral engine?
Newsletters & Social Media:
For many business services companies, monthly newsletters and social media followings are important so customers and prospects alike can keep up with new content, service offerings, events, and news. Grow your subscriber list and your social media following by enticing email recipients to sign up by using the employee signature.
Events:
Does your business services company frequently attend or host events? How about webinars? Ensure your most important contacts are aware of where you’ll be and when so they can make plans to attend. And best of all, track their registration or clicks via the email signature campaign to determine which events are most attractive to your recipients.
Upsell/Cross-Sell:
It’s likely your business services company offers multiple service options – many of which your customers may not realize (or may have forgotten). Use the employee email signature as a way to introduce new solutions with a call-to-action to visit a landing page, video, or data sheet with more information. Why not encourage your most important contacts to understand more about your business?
Studio Science Use Case
Studio Science is a world-class team of designers, technologists and strategists. Studio Science recognized that their customers spend the majority of their days in email as well. When launching new initiatives, Studio Science needed another outlet to spread the word as quickly as possible.The team began to use Sigstr to promote the company’s most important initiatives and to reinforce its brand through a visual, clickable campaign allowing them to bring design and visuals to the forefront – and control the content and signature itself – with just a few clicks. The Periodic newsletter is an important focus for Studio Science and is promoted through a number of different outlets. In just 1 month of promoting the newsletter via the Sigstr campaign, Studio Science saw 71,052 impressions resulting in 26 clicks to the sign-ups page of the weekly newsletter from the email signature call-to-action alone.
If you send a girl that loves fashion to a SaaS conference on sales development (this one being #Rainmaker16, hosted by our friends at SalesLoft), she’s going to walk away enamored by the fashion of the tech world. It all started with Kyle Porter’s light up shoes.
