Before revealing all our secrets for creating an effective and impactful professional signature, it is important to understand why it is crucial for Sales!
A professional signature is a basic requirement for prospecting and especially for selling better. Why? Well, several reasons can be provided for this question.
First of all, a professional email signature sends a positive image to your prospects and increases your chances of being contacted. Unlike a simple "name + surname" to conclude your emails, a professional signature adds credibility and legitimacy. Indeed, it reassures your prospect about your professionalism, especially if your company is well-known. Whether it's for prospecting or communication, your professional email signature must be flawless to **generate a sense of trust.**By flawless, we mean: clear, readable, free of configuration errors, compatible across all devices, and attractive.When we are faced with prospecting emails with a "non-performing and unattractive" email signature, your prospects quickly form opinions about the company AND the person.You doubt this?We bet you've already found yourself in the following situation:👉 You received an email that piqued your interest. Everything was fine so far.Upon finishing reading the email, you see a broken signature: the photo doesn't appear, the function displays in a column instead of a row...It doesn't send a positive image of the person, especially if the company specializes in digital. Ultimately, you leave it at that.
It’s exactly the same for you. If you prospect with a non-professional email signature, you will be discredited. Your chances of being contacted again will be significantly reduced.Beyond the aspects of legitimacy and assurance, the email signature is a real acquisition channel to exploit. In fact, it is not only used to pass your contact details to a prospect. It can be customized and add value to your emails.When the email signature is customized, it gives the impression to your prospect that your email is a one-to-one exchange and not a mass email. Yes! Your prospects are aware that salespeople send email sequences to many people.So you have every interest in personalizing your emails, your email signature, and offering more.
It is no surprise that **email is still popular.**While we often talk about mass emailing/newsletters, we rarely mention one-to-one emails sent daily by employees of a company. With an average of 121 emails received and 40 sent per employee each day, email remains the primary communication channel in business. It allows communication with prospects, clients, partners, and collaborators.In addition to displaying a considerable volume, one-to-one email shows an open rate close to 100%. So email is not dead, it is still a highly-exploited channel on which you must capitalize for your prospecting... by standing out!
How? Thanks to your email signatures. It’s the perfect tool to communicate content to your prospects and strengthen your value proposition. By integrating a banner, you can communicate about a new offer, a recent award, share e-books, and a bunch of relevant content for your prospects!
Speaking of which, there are 5 micro-moments where your email signature really matters. These moments are of significant importance: the invitation email to an event, the prospect follow-up email…
The Sales funnel represents the theoretical path a prospect takes before making a purchase decision. The goal is to make a prospect aware that you exist and gradually guide them towards conversion, through lead nurturing techniques.And, where does the email signature fit in? It **intervenes from start to finish.**In marketing, we use a call to action, better known as a CTA. Its role is to encourage a lead to click on a page, download a white paper, schedule a meeting…To make your email signature encourage action, you must introduce that famous CTA. This way, you'll be better able to guide a prospect through a funnel and gather information about them.Concretely, what does this look like? Here are some examples.
This stage is about getting known by strangers through social media, your website, **a cold email…**The goal is to catch your target's attention by making them aware of their pain points and then spark their interest.If you're in the case of a cold email, use your signature to promote content that interests your targets.
Example:Let’s say your company offers content strategies for businesses. You can use your email signature to share an e-book on: Content Strategies: What Are the Benefits for Your Digital Marketing?On the other hand, if you sell an IT solution, use your email signature to promote webinars, articles that promote your solution…The content chosen for this awareness stage should grab attention.Be impactful so you don’t miss the opportunity!
At this stage, your prospects are interested in possible solutions to solve their problem. You need to offer high-value content that is especially tailored to the stage of the funnel. Use your email signature to spark their interest. Here is the opportunity to highlight your references, especially the ones known to the public. You can also share customer feedback on topics that resonate with your target.
Example:Let’s say you're targeting accountants, you wouldn’t promote a solution for automating their prospecting actions.No interest for them.Promote customer feedback on a document management solution or invoice processing.
The prospect evaluates the different solutions or proposals available to them to solve their problem. The content of your email signature should no longer just spark their interest: it should show concrete results to highlight all the benefits of your service or solution.If we go back to the content strategy example. You should no longer just talk about the benefits for a company’s digital marketing. You should talk about the ROI achieved, that is, explain the results achieved by companies that implemented a content strategy.You can share a survey conducted with your customers, a podcast with the CEO of a company in a specific sector, etc.The same goes for selling a solution.Whatever the context, highlight concrete results in your email signature to add value and truly make a difference!
Example: At Letsignit, we conducted a survey with 749 marketing decision-makers and published the results. And, we made sure to share it in our email signatures.
This stage can be called a "benchmarking" stage. Your prospects are comparing your offer with those of your competitors, until they contact you or you contact them.You need to continue to highlight the benefits of your solution or service while encouraging your prospect to contact you. It’s a decisive stage to secure a meeting with your prospect. They are ready to be converted into a customer. You need to use your email signature in a way that motivates them to take action and contact you!If you're in the case where you’re selling a SaaS solution, use your email signature to encourage them to schedule a demo with you.On the other hand, if you sell services, you’ll have more interest in offering a free audit.
Example: If you work for a marketing agency specializing in SEO, encourage your prospect to schedule a site audit.Show them that you stand out in your approach.
After purchasing your service or subscribing to your tool, communicate best practices to your clients to maintain their engagement and foster loyalty.Never forget that a satisfied customer is a returning customer. You have every interest in working on your email signatures for post-purchase, especially if you want to sell additional services.
Example: Use the email signature to inform about updates, new features, available training, contests, or even work on customer retention.
Manually personalizing your email signature is no small task, as several issues arise. To create a professional email signature, you have two options:
As mentioned earlier, it's in your best interest to prioritize a one-to-one approach. Without a dedicated tool, it's impossible to personalize your email signatures effectively. Another element to consider: deliverability. Personalizing your email signature without a dedicated tool increases the size of your emails and directly transfers them to the spam folder. It's hard to grab the attention of your targets... The ideal solution is to find a user-friendly tool that addresses all these issues: personalization, compatibility on all devices, excellent deliverability, automated and centralized signature management... The advantage of this type of tool is that you can analyze the behavior of your prospects: click rates, number of downloads via banners... With this information, you can adjust your sales actions via your email signature and move your prospects through the funnel. On this note, we have selected a range of useful tools to personalize your email signatures and make them effective.
Letsignit is a SaaS solution that allows you to easily create, manage, and deploy email signatures for a large number of employees, with the ability to integrate marketing banners. The tool offers a range of features to personalize your email signatures at each stage of the sales funnel. With just a few clicks, you can create professional email signatures. You can also customize them by adding communication banners, including a call to action to your website, a blog post, a downloadable whitepaper, a podcast, or an event invitation... No technical skills are required to use the tool. It has been designed so that anyone can use it without specific training. This way, you can track interactions with email signatures and the associated marketing campaigns.
Whatever elements you add, you won't encounter display or deliverability issues. Furthermore, the solution is compatible with the following services: Office 365 (Microsoft 365) & Outlook, Exchange, Salesloft, Pardot, Outreach, Hubspot, Lemlist, etc. The cherry on top: you can track the behavior of your prospects (clicks, downloads, etc.) and adjust your sales actions!
This tool allows you to schedule meetings in a simple and professional way. It helps users streamline exchanges with their contacts, free up time, and focus on their work. The real advantage of this solution is the ability to integrate your Calendly calendar with various tools: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Hubspot... Depending on the tool you synchronize Calendly with, you'll be able to manage your contacts and analyze certain metrics. This is particularly the case with Letsignit, as Calendly integrates into the solution and is managed automatically. A true time-saver for sales teams! By integrating a dedicated scheduling button into the email signature, they can increase their efficiency.
Bitly is a software that allows businesses to create, manage, and share branded short links for their blog, landing pages, etc., in order to collect data on people who clicked: geographical information, search rankings, traffic sources... But it is generally known for shortening the length of URLs.
In the case of an email signature, if you include a link to your website or content, you'll be able to track your prospect's interactions with your content, for example: the number of clicks by date. To go further with tracking, you can add elements to your URL, called UTM tags. With these tags, you can gather more information, for example: identify the source of campaigns that converted leads. This will also allow you to know the ROI of your email signature campaigns.
What's the connection with Bitly? The more tags you add, the longer your link will become. The tool will be helpful to hide the UTM tags and shorten the links. From a user perspective, a short link is more reassuring than a long one with incomprehensible information... Tip: If you don't want to add extra steps to track your links, the Letsignit tool allows you to gather certain data. :)
Canva is a fun and intuitive graphic design platform that allows users to create visuals, presentations, posters, documents, videos, social media banners, etc. Over 250,000 free and paid graphic templates are available in various fields. Once you’ve chosen your template, you can customize it: text, font, colors, photos, etc. The real strength of this tool is the ability to create content without graphic skills.
Why use Canva for your outreach? There are several reasons:
This article will help you create banners; you’ll find all our tips and tricks here: 4 Tips for Creating an Effective Banner.
At this point in the article, you’ve understood that the email signature is a channel to leverage for your sales actions. Here are a few tips to implement to give yourself the best chance of success and achieve your goals.
A professional email signature includes essential information about you and your company. It should help your prospects easily identify you and potentially research more about you. What are the key elements of your email signature? Here are several:
Here’s an article to help you create CTAs for your email signature: 7 Tips for an Effective CTA in Your Email Signature
Here are 4 mistakes to avoid in order to optimize your signature. While there is essential information to include, some details are not necessary at all. You must also pay attention to certain criteria to ensure the readability of your signature.
What You Need to Remember from This Article:
👉 The email signature is a virtual business card! It has a significant impact on your image and legitimacy.
👉 When your email signature is well-utilized and personalized, it becomes an ally for your prospecting actions.
👉 Insert content through your email signature to add value to your prospects and strengthen your value proposition. The goal: move your prospect through the sales funnel.
👉 Use tools to centralize the management of your personalized email signatures, create your banners, and measure their effectiveness.
👉 Less is more. Don’t include unnecessary information. Prioritize your contact details, company information, your CTA, and your banner with content.
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.
