Email remains one of the top marketing channels for driving sales, but it’s not just email content that can facilitate objectives such as brand awareness, lead generation or increasing sales. Email signatures can also be used to drive these objectives, per a new report [download page] from Newoldstamp.
Two-thirds (66%) of the more than 750 global marketers and small business owners surveyed for the report say they rely on their corporate email as their main source of interaction with customers and prospects. Additionally, 61% working for small businesses send more than 10 emails daily, while three-quarters (74%) of solopreneurs send up to 10 per day.
And, while an email signature may seem like an added flourish at the end of a communication, many use these signatures to achieve specific marketing goals. The most common objective for email signatures is to raise brand awareness (82%), while others use them with an eye to driving traffic to their website (48%), generating leads (34%), increasing sales (25%), announcing new products (23%), promoting events (19%) and retaining customers (19%).
Generating Traffic and Measuring Performance Prove Challenging
The majority of those surveyed report that they have used email signatures for marketing either regularly (45%) or occasionally (18%), while more than one-third (37%) only use them to provide information such as name, company and contact information.
Those that do use email signature marketing report some difficulties. Three in 10 (29%) cite generating traffic and leads as their biggest challenge. One possible reason for this could be due to what information marketers provide in their signature. While the majority include basic information such as name (98%), company name (92%), business website (91%), phone number (89%), email address (83%) and title (81%), far fewer include a call-to-action button (29%).
As with other forms of marketing, tracking and measuring performance is another challenge – cited as the main obstacle for 28% of those who are using email signature marketing. The report also found that only about one-quarter (23%) are actually measuring the performance of their campaigns, with 8 in 10 (79%) using clicks as the metric of choice.
Others say that they find it difficult to set objectives and KPIs (16% share) and to target the right audience (13% share).
Email Signature Marketing Adoption Low
While these challenges do present a roadblock for those who use email signatures for marketing purposes, they aren’t necessarily the reasons why marketers aren’t quick to adopt it as a channel. For example, only 13% of small businesses not using this form of marketing stated that difficulties with measuring the effectiveness of email signature marketing campaigns was the leading reason for not using it as a marketing channel. Instead, the main reason for not doing so is because of a lack of resources to manage a campaign (26% share) and not knowing how to use email sign-offs for marketing (23% share).
Indeed, only one-fifth (19%) of marketers surveyed say they will definitely use email signatures as an additional marketing channel in 2020, while 58% are still on the fence on the prospect of using email sign-offs for marketing.
So, who benefits most from adding promotional elements to email signatures? Per those surveyed, sales (39%), marketing (38%) and customer support (12%) appear the reap the most benefits from doing so.
The full report can be downloaded here.
About the Data: Findings are based on a Q4 survey of more than 750 global marketers and business owners with about half (48%) being from the US. The majority of respondents represent small businesses (44%) and solopreneurs (51%).
