What Is Email Signature Marketing: A Secret Growth Channel

This guide is part of our Email Signature Marketing series:

1. What is Email Signature Marketing (ESM)
2. How to do Email Signature Marketing
3. Email Signature Marketing examples (that bring results)

Email Signature Marketing Ads

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What are Email Signature Marketing ads?

Email signature marketing ads are a CTA that is added to your business email signature block. ESM ads mostly come in the form of email signature banners. Running these ads lets you advertise your offers without adding an extra dime to your CPA.

ESM ads provide more exposure to your marketing promotions. You can use them to generate leads and prime prospects for conversion when next presented with the same offer through your other marketing channels.

Why Use Email Signature Marketing

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Why should I use Email Signature Marketing?

The quick answer is that it’s profitable. It costs you nearly nothing to set up this marketing channel, and it serves as a constant running campaign that makes use of the activity you are doing anyhow.

This makes it a low-cost, high-potential marketing channel that helps you sell with every email you send, whether you attempt to or not.

You might be thinking that you have already focused your marketing campaign on so many different platforms, like social media, videos, your website, or through your email newsletter. Is adding marketing features to your email signature really worth the extra effort? Absolutely.

According to a survey, 62% of businesses are already using email signature marketing (ESM). So, if you don’t want to fall behind your competition, it’s a good time to get started. 

As I said before, setting up your ESM doesn’t take too many resources to create an email signature with marketing features, so it can be a potentially high-reward, low-risk, and low-cost effort on your part.

So, just how can you use ESM to bolster your campaigns and start generating more leads? Let’s take a look at a few ways you can implement it in your own emails.

A survey we gave our B2B clients showed that ESM campaigns yielded positive business implications. On average, our clients had 22% more clicks, 32% more email replies, 10% growth in their social media reach, and 15% more leads.

Email Signature Marketing KPIs

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What are Email Signature Marketing metrics KPIs

Email signature marketing makes use of your signature block as an ad placement for your company. And naturally, you would want to measure your ad or campaign performance.

To do that, you should apply the proper tracking and send the information to your respective analytics platform for measurement and analysis.

Main Email signature marketing metrics:

1. Email signature impressions
2. Email signature clicks
3. Email signature click-through rate

You can create your own metrics based on your business needs to measure your email signature campaign contribution.

You can measure things such as Purchases, Demo signups, or Pageviews that were generated from your email signature.

1. Email signature impressions

This metric is usually provided by your email signature management platform. It is the representation of the number of people who viewed your email signatures across all company emails.

I say “representation” because in practice, your signature manager will simply count the number of times the signature appeared in an email viewport (inside the screen where it can be seen).

If you are using your email signature for branding and brand awareness, then the email signature impressions will be your most important metric.

For a big company that sends out a lot of emails, signature impressions can be in the thousands per month.

Email signature impressions can also be used for internal company purposes.

Many companies with a large chunk of their employees working remotely use this metric to assess the degree to which employees view their brand logo on a regular basis.

This is very important since it’s a major contributor to employees’ brand identification, in an age where some people never see the inside of the company office.

2. Email signature clicks

The email signature clicks metric is fairly straightforward. We all know what clicks are. But an email signature block can pack a lot of links for its tiny space.

It’s, therefore, crucial to measure each link or link type separately.

If a single email signature block has links, emails, or clickable phone numbers for different business sections or departments, you should apply separate tracking for each.

For example, your signature can have a phone number for Sales, an email address for Support, and a Marketing banner leading to a landing page.

Each of these should be measured separately for the sake of clarity and for the future use of the corresponding business department.

Email signature clicks are tracked and measured using a UTM string with the relevant Source and Medium.

3. Email signature click-through rate

Email signature CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions recorded by your email signatures.

This metric is usually provided by the email signature manager tool, but you can calculate it manually if needed, provided that you have the reliable impression and click data available.

Email Signature Campaign Types

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What are common Email Signature Marketing campaign types?

Email signature marketing campaigns are a subcategory of email marketing campaigns.

In ESM campaigns, add a CTA in the email signature block, thereby expanding the function of the email signature beyond simply providing contact information.

ESM campaigns are most often used for brand awareness campaigns, but are used for other diverse needs, such as support, Sales, HR, or running email signature marketing ads.

There are as many ESM campaign types as there are business goals.

It would be wise to segment your company email signatures according to departments or groups that have unique goals.

If you take anything away from this article, it should be this: segment your email signatures and the campaigns they run.

For your convenience, we took the liberty of collecting the most common use cases for email signature marketing campaigns.

These are the most common campaigns we see our clients use on a regular basis.

We split the campaign types into the respective departments that use them so that you can skip to what’s relevant to you.

Go through the campaign types below to find the best way your business could start applying email signature marketing.

Marketing campaigns

• Offer sales and special deals
• Promote your social media
• Build your newsletter email list
• Grow your YouTube channel
• Offer Black Friday discounts
• Encourage product onboarding
• Promote your webinars
• Grow your Instagram

Sales campaigns

• Sell directly from your signature
• Initiate Sales video calls
• Schedule meetings (button)
• Schedule meetings (banner)

Brand awareness campaigns

• Keep brand consistency in all emails
• Show off your brand spirit

Customer Support & Customer Success campaings

• Ask for feedback or reviews
• Offer support

HR & legal department campaigns

• Let people apply when you’re hiring
• Add an email disclaimer

Email Signature Marketing Software

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What is the best Email Signature Marketing software?

You might be thinking that all the ideas for links, icons, or banners for your email signature seem great. But how do you actually put them into practice?

Well, you can craft images, banners, color schemes, and designs on your own. But unless you’re a graphic designer, this is time-consuming and probably won’t yield the best results.

That’s where we can Wisestamp can help you.

WiseStamp is an easy-to-use email signature manager that you can use to create personalized professional email signatures in just a few minutes and deploy them in your private email or across the emails of thousands of employees.

Maybe you’d like to try the WiseStamp Signature Manager to see if it could work for you.