"Employee Engagement is the New Content Marketing Strategy," headlines Marketing Insider Group. A short phrase that perfectly captures the current trend. With declining organic performance on social media (especially for posts published from corporate accounts) and sometimes streamlined sponsorship budgets (caution being the norm in the Covid era), all eyes are turning to a high-potential touchpoint: employees.
Whether we talk about employee advocacy (the ability of employees to become brand ambassadors) or social selling (best practices for prospecting via social networks), the motivations are similar. A message is much better received when it comes from employees.
The Global Marketing Alliance (GMA) has put numbers to this observation: brand messages are shared 24 times more when they come from employees rather than the brand itself.
It is no surprise, then, that marketing teams are increasingly welcoming employee advocacy managers into their ranks, a role often focused on social networks.
According to the same GMA study, the combined number of LinkedIn connections held by a company’s employees is ten times greater than that of the company’s official account. Surprisingly, similar statistics are rarely mentioned when it comes to email.
And yet, the volume of emails sent daily by employees rivals their total social media interactions. On average, each employee sends 40 emails per day. These emails are highly contextual, as they are part of ongoing conversations and exchanged between people who already know or recognize each other.
Moreover, these emails carry a valuable asset: a signature that showcases an identity and conveys a message related to a current campaign, event, or announcement.
By default, email signatures are neither centralized nor managed like campaigns, much like the professional messages employees post on their social networks. On the social media front, many companies have equipped themselves with so-called advocacy solutions – they have plenty of options. With these tools, they can offer ready-to-publish posts to their employees, gamify the sharing of these contents, and analyze performance.
Good news for the advocacy manager: the same approach can be applied to email signatures. A solution like Letsignit provides all the necessary functions to integrate email signatures into marketing campaigns.
Editing signatures, distributing them to the right employee groups, tracking the performance generated… Letsignit turns email signatures into a real communication channel and offers an additional lever for the advocacy manager.
With such tools, the advocacy strategy can easily be implemented both on social media and through email signatures.
It’s a great way to engage all employees, including those who are less active on social networks or hesitant about sharing company messages from their personal accounts.
Because it is inherently part of professional use, the email signature is immediately accepted by employees as a professional channel.
All that’s left is to equip it…
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
