The Overlooked Ad Channel:
How Your Employee
Emails Could Drive
Targeted, Personalized
Ads To Your Dream Accounts
Here’s a scenario: two emails land in our inbox at about the same time. One has a high level of design, uses a clever subject line, and was sent to a large list of contacts through a CRM or marketing automation system. The other was sent directly to you by an individual you either know or know of. Most of us will open the second message for the same reason we open hand-addressed snail mail: it was meant specifically for us, and we know that.
These employee-sent email messages are an existing, overlooked ad channel in the form of the signature line at the bottom of the message. Email signature marketing leverages the emails your employees are already sending out as a mechanism to promote something about your brand.
“It’s a great communication channel, because as you know, we’re constantly fighting for people’s attention. This [email signature marketing] is an easy and effective way to do that, because they’re already opening an email and reading it.”
Melissa Hubans, Brand Marketing at Net Health
billion by year-end 2022.
This number is forecast to grow to over 333
Success, however, is not simply a matter of telling all employees what to copy and paste into the signature areas of their outgoing email messages. This interactive white paper will discuss:
will exceed 281 billion.
Research from The Radicati Group shows that by the end of 2018, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day
Email signature marketing by the numbers;
Why employee email works as an ad channel;
Old-school email signature marketing;
New-school email signature marketing;
How you can use email signatures to market;
Results and attribution.
use case from the Sigstr blog:
Email Signature Marketing By The Numbers
of the worldwide mail volume was spam.
about 40%
the user population is projected to reach 4.1 billion by 2021. The data also tells us that
and
2017, there were 3.7 billion global email users,
Before unpacking the opportunity that is email signature marketing, consider the numbers that size up the expanding email universe. From Statista, a provider of market and consumer data, we know that in
The figures from Radicati and Statista are staggering, so let’s take it down to a level on which we can relate. Consider this
A company with 125 employees
Each employee sends an average
of 32 messages per business day
There are about 250 business
days per year
figure to the 1,000,000 emails could result in over 40,000 additional pageviews of a landing page, webinar registration, white paper download or anything you determine.
, as of April 2018, is 4.06%. Applying this
The worldwide average click-through rate for email
In this use case, a single employee accounts for 8,000 messages sent per year! The total for all employees is 1,000,000, and each message is an opportunity to convey a key brand message to a key audience of prospects, customers, partners or investors.
These estimates show that even at a small company, there are about one million email signature impressions a year. If you have more or fewer employees, you can scale these figures accordingly to derive an estimate for your company.
Let’s take this scenario a bit further.
Kristin Ingram, CEO of Ingram Digital Media
“I think an email signature is a valuable resource that we often overlook.
Think about how many emails we send each day. Why wouldn’t we want a way to help spread the word about our businesses to those we communicate with?”
Quiz: Email Signature Marketing In Action
Take this quiz to see if your intuition matches what the data says:
marketers.
,” Sigstr analyzed over 1,000 campaign banners from its top 120 customers to reveal best practices for
The State of Email Signature Marketing
In “
The top three use cases for email signature marketing are listed below, with their incidence of use in parenthesis. Which of these performed best in terms of engagement?
Product promotions (14%)
Resource sharing (27%)
Event promotions (38%)
Answer: A
Product promotions achieved the highest engagement out of all of the categories. Events were a close second.
The prominent color of a signature banner impacts performance. Which color resulted in the highest engagement rate?
GREEN
BLUE
PURPLE
Answer: C
Purple collected the highest engagement, even though only 5% of the campaigns analyzed used the color in their banners.
Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons are standard digital marketing practice. For email signature marketing, which type of banner produced the highest click-through-rate (CTR)?
BANNERS WITH CTA BUTTONS
BANNERS WITHOUT CTA BUTTONS
Trick Question!
Both banner types produced roughly the same CTR.
Why Employee Email Works As An Ad Channel
“An underlying value in all of this is that it is leveraging an existing channel instead of creating something new. We’ve already got a lot of information flying at us on a regular basis. The last thing most of us need is another channel we have to pay attention to.”
Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
We open and read these messages because we get value from the content. Perhaps the message content answers a support question, confirms an event we wish to attend, provides pricing information, announces new product features or benefits, or some other detail about which the sender knew we would care. These employee-sent email messages are trusted communications. And most companies are overlooking the marketing opportunity that they represent.
Recipients of these employee-sent messages open them at a higher rate than system-sent messages because we almost always have some relationship with the sender. Some level of awareness that exists between sender and recipient, creating a willingness, sometimes even an eagerness, to open these messages. Marketing through the signature block better leverages messages already being exchanged.
Hover to see where eyes tend to go!
Old-School Email Signature Marketing
There’s little disagreement about the value of putting marketing content in the signature lines of outgoing employee email messages. The problem has been the method, which before now has been manual. The old-school way to market through email signatures essentially required employees to add a static line or two of text with a link to their email signature lines. A company with 200 employees using this method is likely to have 200 versions of email signature marketing content.
Keith Bateman, Growth Marketing Strategist at GoCanvas, encountered this challenge. He understood the value of signature line content, but just asking employees to copy and paste a recommended block of content into their signature lines wasn’t working. There was no way to enforce brand consistency or ensure that signature block content was compliant.
For Keith, the solution
was Sigstr, a “new-school” email signature marketing solution that allowed him to centrally administer email signature block ad content.
Keith Bateman, Growth Marketing Strategist at GoCanvas
“An issue we always had, was that the marketing team was always trying to get us to update our signatures. Everyone’s signature across all the departments always looked different. They looked unprofessional, they didn’t look the same, they had inaccurate information; there were no standards.”
New-School Email Signature Marketing
The new school of email signature marketing is driven by cloud-based technology that integrates with email systems and lets you control the messages that are sent in signature lines. For example, Sigstr seamlessly integrates with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce. Marketers get centralized control, resulting in every employee email that is sent having consistent, current, brand-positive and brand-compliant messages. Using this technology is completely transparent to employees, yet marketers retain control of the messages.
Net Health provides software solutions for specialized outpatient care. The marketing team at Net Health tried old-school signature marketing, sending the sales department pictures and images to insert into sales team email messages. The challenge was that the images got distorted, or they would not get properly linked to landing pages, or they simply forget to remove them when the content expired. The solution was to adopt a signature marketing solution that allowed central control of content but did not require any changes to the way employees sent and interacted with email.
with about 250 employees, getting a frictionless approach that doesn’t require any change to how employees send messages. The power and impact of email signature marketing flows directly from Net Health’s ability to centrally manage signature block content. With Sigstr, the Net Health marketing team can also customize the messaging, so that therapy clients, for example, see therapy-related messages in the signature block.
for email signature marketing
Sigstr
Net Health now uses
Renee Vandall, Vice President of Marketing, Net Health
“What’s nice is that employees aren’t doing anything different. We control it all through the regular work flow of sending email. They just sign on and send emails the regular way.”
Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
“The opportunity to manage what's going into signature lines centrally lets you increase consistency and quality, but also manage different roles in the organization and what different people may see. I may want to put a different offer in front of my existing customers versus something that goes in front of prospects.”
How You Can Use Email Signatures To Market
As Net Health is doing, companies can use email signature marketing solutions to segment what recipients see. That signature block content, since it is hosted in the cloud, can even change after a message has been sent, as it is sitting in a recipient’s inbox.
In addition to using Sigstr with external recipients, Net Health uses it internally to promote internal programs such as wellness initiatives. With employees in four different locations, and several that work remotely, email is a common platform for engagement and collaboration.
The external uses of email signature marketing are perhaps more obvious. At GoCanvas, the primary use of Sigstr is to promote webinar registration. Some things that users are successfully promoting in their email signature marketing efforts include:
Renee Vandall, Vice President of Marketing, Net Health
“It’s been a wonderful way for us to bond culture together in the company when we’re so spread out.”
Erika Conefry, Manager of Marketing & Communications Strategy, Net Health
“We’re able to embed a second call to action in every communication, but it’s not a call to action that’s distracting from the initial one.”
Webinars;
Trade shows, and other in-person events;
New product releases;
G2 Crowd review requests;
Blog posts; and
Videos.
E-books;
Results And Attribution
The marketing landscape is littered with ideas and approaches that sound great but have no data to verify that they really work. Companies are getting measurable results from practicing new-school email signature marketing using solutions like Sigstr.
GoCanvas hosts quarterly user webinars. The initial sessions were not well attended, and Bateman recalls one that had just five registrations. He began promoting these events in email signatures to great success. One GoCanvas account manager’s signature banner alone accounted for 70 registrations one quarter. Today, this webinar series routinely garners 500 or more registrations!
Net Health values the metrics they get that help them attribute results to their email marketing efforts. The team can tell how many webinar registrants came from signature block clicks, or how many people viewed a video for the same reason.
“We know, they didn’t see it on social media, they didn’t see it on LinkedIn, and they didn’t navigate to it on our website. We are able to track all that.”
Erika Conefry, Manager of Marketing & Communications Strategy, Net Health
Keith Bateman, Growth Marketing
Strategist at GoCanvas
“Email signature marketing is a forgotten piece of the marketing stack. I think it’s very much overlooked. We just think that if we put our name and a link to our LinkedIn page in our signature, we’re fine, we have it set up…I think this is an inexpensive, missing piece of almost 95% of people’s marketing stack.”
Conclusion
New-school email signature marketing is a way to better exploit the existing email messages that employees are sending. It requires no change to employee email habits, and it’s producing impressive results. The practice and use of a solution platform to drive it is still in the early adoption phase, overlooked by most companies.
Nancy Harhut, Chief Creative Officer at Nancy Harhut & Associates
“The signature line is a place the eye naturally goes to, and as a result, could be made to work harder for marketers — either promoting current sales/specials, upcoming industry appearances, or new products/updates, all of which are time sensitive messages that can’t be allowed to get old. Or it can drive people to a company’s blog, social posts, or website, which are likely more ‘evergreen’ choices.”
Your employees send millions of emails every year. Sigstr amplifies the value of every one of those employee emails by giving marketers centralized control over their signatures. By including dynamic call-to-action banners within the email signature, Sigstr turns every employee at your company into a brilliant marketer that drives real ROI. From branding to event promotion to the most targeted ABM campaigns, Sigstr gives your employees the ability to distribute content to your most accessible audience.
317.960.3003
interact@sigstr.com
Demand Gen Report is a targeted online publication that uncovers the strategies and solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations, and ultimately, drive growth. A key component of the publication’s editorial coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts.
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