Successful Email Signature Marketing: The Art and Science

Woohoo, we’re in a new decade, and 2023 has surely brought along considerable changes.

Maybe not along the lines of flying cars and teleportation like we had hoped, but it’s been a major change indeed. It would be an understatement to say there has been a shift in the way business is done. It has altered the way brands market their products and services.

With offices and workspaces shut, all of us sheltering at home, hoping to evade this treacherous virus. The impact of digital technology on business and its functions is, therefore, at an all-time high.

Even though you’re probably at home, figuring out a way to work away from your office desk, missing the sound of the copier or paper shuffling, it doesn’t mean everything’s changed; your brand identity remains the same.

Though your brand identity will remain constant, there are certain aspects of your marketing strategy that you can tweak and modify to adapt to the changing times.

Maybe, we could start with something small like an email signature?

It is a common belief that you tell a lot about a person from their shoes. In the words of Forest Gump “My mama always said you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes, where they are going, where they been”.

Well, what if I told you that ‘There’s a lot that can be told about your brand from its email signature?

Don’t believe me? I don’t blame you. But what if I could show you how email signatures work and why they are currently a great marketing tool?

What are Email-signatures?

Are you familiar with email signatures? If you are, that’s great. If not, don’t worry about it. There is no better time to learn than the present. Not to forget that email signatures have also grown to become great marketing tools.

No matter what people say, first impressions matter. But in the case of an email signature, bottom impressions matter!

With more than 500 billion emails sent every day, how do you get your email to stand out among the crowd? It is important to put out great content that sets you apart from the rest.

But a great start alone won’t be sufficient; you need an epic finish as well. And that is where email signatures come in.

Think of it this way; your email signature is your business card in the digital world (where most business is done, these days). When you send an email, you have the opportunity to attach your digital business card at the end of every email to make your brand, services, and your name etched in the memory of your clients or subscribers.

Email signatures are a clever way to make a lasting impression on the recipient. They are not only a quick way for customers to access your contact information, but they also serve as a platform for marketing your brand and achieving your marketing goals with the right marketing channel.

Here are just a few areas where email signatures can help you:

• Provide information about your brand
• Create awareness for your campaigns
• Increase traffic to your website
• Notify your contacts about offers or releases.
• Encourage people to get in touch with you
• Generate leads and close deals.

Besides your name and contact details, your email signature can also include:

• Job title
• Other contact details, such as an alternative email address or phone number,
• Website or blog links
• Social media links
• Privacy policy

At the end of the day, email signatures are supposed to best represent your brand. So, it’s up to you to take that call on all that needs to go in there!

I hope you now have a good understanding of what an email signature is, and how it can enhance your sales and marketing.

As the saying goes – ‘The world is your oyster. In this case, ‘your email signature in your oyster’.

Let’s go deep-sea diving into the ocean of email marketing!

What is email signature marketing?

Are you wondering what email signature marketing really means? I mean, how could a signature possibly market your brand, right?

In a sense, email signature marketing (just to sound cooler, we can refer to it as email sig marketing) deals with the various ways of using your email signatures as a marketing tool. Simply put, if you can use your email signs to accomplish your marketing targets, you are doing a good job of email signature marketing.

With the pandemic limiting us to our homes and the office work culture becoming elusive with each passing day, it’s becoming harder to meet people in person to market your brand. In this case, an email signature can help fulfill your marketing objectives.

How effective is email signature marketing?

I understand your business concerns.

If your marketers send out too many emails, they probably become spammers, and this could potentially lead your subscribers or clients to unsubscribe to your email newsletter or offers.

Whereas, on the other hand, if you send too few emails, your subscribers or clients may get disengaged and even forget your brand. And we certainly wouldn’t want either scenario.

It could be a little difficult to find the right balance, especially for small businesses or startups that are just starting to experiment with their email signature marketing campaigns.

Once you figure out that balance and know how often you need to email your customer or subscribers, you’ve crossed the first hurdle.

Then comes the second hurdle, optimizing the potential of your email signature. Your brand’s email signature serves as prime email real estate under your contact details. You may use this space to launch or showcase a new product feature or a promotional deal. While segmenting your cold outreach mailing list or organizing a follow-up series, you could also add a personalized call to action to support your marketing goals. An effective email signature marketing software can make work more simple.

And a great thing about email signatures is their versatility. You could also turn your email signature into a signature banner. The attached email signature banner will include additional details required and implicitly advertise any big announcements or activities that your brand is participating in.

Such a banner can also notify clients about future deals or discounts; it can highlight awards and achievements received by your staff, and this will add more value and credibility to your brand.

Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

How often should you engage in email marketing?

When it comes to how often brands should send email marketing campaigns, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Brands should try to send at least one email per week. A lack of this, their email list may become disengaged, and the brand will start losing visibility.
• Sending one or two bulk emails per week is optimal for most brands, particularly if they have just started experimenting with email signature marketing campaign.
• Sending an email every alternate day or more often would significantly lower the level of engagement and affect the growth of the brand.

The single most important factor that you need to keep in mind is that you should add value to your emails. Whether it’s great content or personalized offers, a call to action or interesting social media link subscribers will engage with your brand’s campaigns as long as they receive value, which can boost your marketing efforts.

The math and science of email signature marketing

Now, what if I told you there is a science behind email signature marketing? You heard that right science. And there’s a little bit of math as well. Does it feel like you’re back in school?

Don’t worry; I will keep this short.

First, let’s look at the math.

A single employee delivers (on average) 28 emails a day or 10,000 emails a year. Each of these emails is an opportunity to increase awareness and interaction with the brand. This is also a kind of brand awareness campaign. Let’s say a company has only 100 employees, that number isn’t impossible, a large number of companies would have about 100 employees.

But think about it this way, it translates to making about a million impressions a year. And imagine if the company has 500 to 5,000 employees? Just imagine the number of impressions the company could make.

Imagine making 1000 memorable impressions just through your email signature.

Now, coming to the science of it.

Hello Anamika,
We are glad you opened this email. We hope you might be interested in our new vacuum cleaner and that can keep your house sparkly clean. Let me know if you would like more details.
Best regards,
John Doe.

How does that email sound to you?

If you are the email recipient, wouldn’t you probably lose interest in the second sentence? Trust me, this is no conjecture. I can back it up with science. A study was conducted by Sigstr and EyeQuant that used eye-tracking technologies to create perception and attention maps to study and notice hot spots of how people read emails.

Here’s what they found out.

An email with a generic signature like the one mentioned above would attract more emphasis to the text of the body with minimal attention to the e-signature. In the case of internal communication, it works wonders because you need your team member to pay attention to the content. However, in the case of marketing or drawing attention to the email, it doesn’t create any inclination to respond.

On further analysis of the study, it was found that branded signatures attracted more attention than non-branded ones, but only under certain conditions. Look at the following two examples of attention maps:

Did you notice a lot of interest is drawn to the banner in the second example? If you didn’t pay close attention to the first one, you probably missed the CTA. You can go back and check.

These findings show us that email signature has the potential to be used as a great marketing tool. According to a survey of NewOldStamp in which they took a sample of 750 marketers, 41% are on board with using strong branding email signatures. They’re game for email signature marketing. The metrics that were used to analyze the efficiency of email signatures as a marketing tool were the number of clicks; emails opened, impressions, and increased web traffic.

Content and structure of email signatures for marketing

As you can notice, there is a lot of thought and strategy that goes into developing the best email signature for your brand. It may be daunting, but you can use free online signature generators like ‘Sloovi’s email signature generator tool’ to design the perfect signature for yourself, your employees of your team members. Both for professional and personal email signature.

Building a relationship with someone without meeting them face to face is challenging, but adding more elements to a business email signature will certainly go a long way to make that interaction more engaging.

Below is a list of elements that you can include.

Professional purposes:

• Your professional title
• Affiliate company
• Contact information, such as phone number, website, office address, social media links (but only those linked to your brand)
• Company logo
• Call to action, social proof, blogs, etc.

Marketing purposes:

• Social media icons
• Website links
• Blog or landing page links

Client relationships:

• A link to your page with your mission or motto
• A link to a video of your services
• A link to your birth story
• Customer testimonials and reviews

Sales purposes:

• Latest offers or deals
• Promotions for regular customers
• Holiday greetings with a link to your webpage

Conclusion

Now that’s the arts, science, and math of email signature marketing.

Creative and unique business email signatures are not just communication tools, but they also strengthen marketing, sales, and enhance customer relationships. Don’t forget to use this opportunity to make a lasting impression on your brand, for an email could be etched in your customer’s memory forever.

Go minimal and add only the most pertinent information about yourself, creating the most professional yet alluring image of your company email signatures. A picture speaks a thousand words, so make sure there that your brand visually appeals to the audience.

And you never know, in the following decade maybe, just maybe our dreams of flying cars and time travel may come true.

But for now, work on your email sigs and watch your brand ambassadors sign off in style. Here, you can find a guide for the perfect email signature for sales, professionals, freelancers.

Check out some professional email signature templates at Sloovi!