More than half of young white-collar workers start their day groggily going through inbox while still in bed and they continue checking their emails every few hours during the day. This email checking addiction gives us marketers an opportunity to reach out to our potential clients, educate them, convert them and keep them loyal with the help of a little detail, which until recently has been hugely overlooked – email signature. If you haven’t tried using it yet, then read on to find out how you can and should make email signatures part of your marketing strategy.
First of all, I want to make it clear that by email signature we don’t mean just a few lines of contact information, or in other words a common sign-off. Email signature has evolved into a separate marketing tool that you can use to raise your brand awareness, personalize emails, drive conversions, improve sales and make your customers stay loyal to your business. It’s nowadays possible to add email signatures into automated email campaigns as well as receive data about their click-through rates which will help you with the optimization process.
Let’s take a closer look at the email signature and which of its elements and features you can use to the fullest to support your marketing efforts. 
Email Signature Features from Marketing Perspective
- Company’s logo
Using your company’s logo, brand colors and fonts raises your brand awareness, making it memorable and easily recognizable. It’s a gentle, non-obtrusive way to advertise yourself, get under the skin of your customer and stay on their subconscious level.
- Your photo
Inserting your photo into the email signature helps you “humanize” your emails. Owing to automation, which facilitates our work as marketers, email campaigns are notorious for sounding robotic. That’s why it’s crucial to show the recipient that there’s a real human being behind the automated message.
- Clickable social icons
Social platforms have become part of our life (and for some their whole life), so don’t underestimate their power. Adding social icons, linked to your company’s social profiles will give you an opportunity to engage, educate and delight your prospects.
- Call-to-action buttons and banners
Banners and Call-to-Action buttons, if added to your email signature, will promote your latest content, new products, upcoming events. They will give a little nudge to your prospects in the right direction of converting them through the buyer’s journey.
- Track analytics
In order to understand how your customer behaves and what kind of attention your product is receiving, you can add UTM parameters to track in Google Analytics to measure conversion through setting up goals. Another way to gather all the data concerning email signatures in one place is to have analytics of views, clicks and general CTR embedded in the email signature generator itself. That’s what we did at NEWOLDSTAMP and our clients liked this idea.
- Signatures for different departments
You should keep in mind that different departments in your company have different goals, that’s why you could create specific signatures with banners or CTA buttons which would be aimed at achieving their specific purposes. It goes without saying, that they should still be consistent with your brand, but this diversity will help you zero in on accomplishing specific tasks for your company.
- Optimized for mobile devices
Being mobile-friendly is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity as mobile claimed more than half of all email opens in 2017. Email signatures can now be modified to satisfy the requirements of different smartphones. You can design email signatures by using vertical templates with large, well-spaced buttons and images, as well as add links to apps, like Google Play or Apple Store, thus simplifying the installation process for your customers. 
Litmus 2018 State of Email Report
An email signature is such a versatile tool, like a Swiss Army Knife, which you can pack with you to help your customers convert during their buyer’s journey.
So join me, to find out how we can utilize email signatures to their fullest marketing potential on each stage of the buyer’s journey.
AWARENESS
Creating a positive first impression
This stage is all about engaging and enticing your subscribers. Email signatures can help you create a positive first impression on this initial stage by building the trust and perception of your brand in the recipients’ minds.
You can achieve this by using our best practices:
-keep your email signature minimalistic
Your task while creating an email signature is to catch the subscribers’ eyeballs, not distract them with a cluttered mess. Keep your signature clean and simple, this way it will be easier to attract their attention to something valuable like a logo, banner or CTA button.
-stick to your brand colors
You need to ensure that your clients are receiving consistent brand experience through all channels and across all environments. That’s why, while designing your email signature we recommend using your brand colors. You can easily do that by choosing your brand’s HEX color code and pasting it into the email signature generator’s color palette.
Our experience:
When we were creating our own email signatures at NEWOLDSTAMP, we decided to stick to our corporate color blue.
-include a professional-looking headshot or logo
Marketers will go out of their way to capture their customers’ hearts. Adding a photo can help you create a more intimate, friendship-like experience built on trust. Another perk of using a photo is that your subscribers will remember you better, you will not be another faceless employee of some company (if you were just using a company logo).
Our takeaway: when we were experimenting with photos, we found out that recipients tend to interact and respond up to 15% more to emails containing signatures with a headshot rather than a company’s logo.
-add a link to your website
Adding a link to your website is a total must-have. This is a primary source of information about your company, so your customers should have the opportunity to find out more about it, every time you communicate with them.
Warming up your leads
Having created a good first impression, you need to take the second step – warming up your leads. You can achieve it by giving them an opportunity to learn more about your company. For instance, we’re using banners with “Click here to learn more” or “Subscribe to newsletter” CTA, thus directing our clients to our blog or website and educating them about our product and benefits they can receive by using it.
CONSIDERATION AND CONVERSION
Close sales with CTA buttons and banner campaigns
Now that you know more about your customers, your goal is to coax them into choosing your product as a solution to their problem. We recommend you to create different types of banner campaigns and CTA buttons for your Marketing and Sales Departments. Marketers should analyze prospects’ behavior and based on that use links in banners leading to more targeted content. Your Sales Department may be at the same time advertising in their banners and CTA buttons free trial periods of demo versions or discounts.
Fun Fact: We at NEWOLDSTAMP made a series of seasonal banners, which helped us to create a festive mood for our clients and promoted seasonal sales and discounts in our signatures.
Engage clients to join communities by using social icons
Social icons linked to your company’s social accounts provide your client not only with another source of content but also give them a sense of being part of a community. You can pair social icons together with ‘Follow us’ CTA buttons, and lead them to your social pages where you can also promote some latest or upcoming events, seasonal sales or discounts.
Compel your prospects to download with apps
Add Google Play or Apple Store apps together with ‘Download NOW’ CTA buttons, to create a sense of urgency and give them the channel through which to do it – these apps. Facilitate the decision-making process for your clients and persuade them to download this app right away.
LOYALTY AND ENGAGEMENT
On the final stage of the buyer’s journey, your goal is to retain and convert your customers into brand ambassadors. An email signature can support your marketing strategy at this stage if you do the following things:
- Include links in the banners to the new valuable content about product updates, future webinars, promo campaigns, subscription renewals, loyalty programs.
- Ask your customers in the CTA button (which links to a survey page) to give their feedback about your product;
- Use social icons to link your paying clients to special VIP communities on social platforms, where you can post videos with your employees explaining some of your product’s new features and other useful content. This way you’ll make your clients feel like part of your company, where they can comment, give feedback and suggestions, and refer your company to friends.
Summing up
Business email signature has evolved from being just a few-lines footer at the end of the email to an incredibly versatile marketing tool. With the help of the best email signature generators nowadays you can create email signatures that will attract, engage and convert prospects during all stages of the buyer’s journey, at the end of it transforming them into your brand ambassadors and advocates.
P.S.
Thanks a lot, NEWOLDSTAMP team for the article.
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