This post was written by Dan Hanrahan of Sigstr.
About Dan: Dan has spent over a decade starting, leading and growing technology businesses. His experiencespans technology recruiting, eCommerce and marketing technology, and he’s played key roles at companies like Brooksource, iGoDigital and ExactTarget. His latest business, Sigstr, makes it simple for marketers to take control of branding and marketing in the employee email signature.
As a sales manager, you need to empower your team to close more business and generate more meaningful conversations with prospective customers – all while ensuring they remain focused and uninterrupted.
In order to generate more sales opportunities, activity is key. Business opportunities are created by those who work hard to add value, build relationships, and hustle. Your team spends countless hours finding the right prospects. Then it’s about activity… calls, emails, direct mail, but for most, email remains our most frequent touchpoint. While we all want more meetings and face time, the fact is the average employee sends 10,000 emails annually.
28 emails per day, per person. It’s insane, but we email because it works and its efficient. So how can we get more out of every send? As sales managers, we can’t look over the shoulder of every rep before they hit send, but we can ensure an email closes with a branded call-to-action around our most compelling events and marketing content.
Throughout my career in sales and now leading a sales team as Founder and CEO of Sigstr, we’ve tested hundreds of various types of email signature campaigns and calls-to-action. The email signature is an amazingly powerful medium.
Not only can you enable your team with your best content, but you can ensure a branded professional close to every send.
Moreover, when a campaign appears in the email signature, you can bet the sender will take time to read and understand what is in her own signature.
Your sales team can generate more business and branding opportunities through relevant pieces of content that can be automatically added to their personal email signatures (think Gmail or Outlook). These personal, one-to-one email communications result in more opportunities to showcase your solution and, more importantly, be a helpful resource.
Here’s why your sales team should give email signature marketing a try:
1. Sales Enablement: By including campaigns in email signatures that promote a specific piece of marketing content, such as a new customer case study, a relevant eBook, or a new webinar series, your sales team will have to keep up with the new content. They’ll need to understand the content well enough in order to speak adequately about the campaign to prospects and customers.
2. Consistent Brand: An email signature marketing platform, such as Sigstr, allows the administrator to set up a single signature template for employees which can include the signature appearance, social media information, formatting such as font and text size, as well as the marketing campaign such as the case study we mentioned above. Because the brand guidelines can be locked down and the marketing campaigns turned on and off by one administrator, no longer do you need to worry that your sales team members have an out-of-date signature, or one that doesn’t meet your company’s brand standards.
3. Engagement with Marketing: When marketing wins, sales wins. Sales teams that leverage marketing content through the use of their email signatures create alignment with their marketing departments. When marketing tools such as thought leadership pieces, events and webinars, case studies, and videos are shared with engaged prospects and customers via email signature campaigns, marketing content is exposed to a larger audience. Ultimately, the sales team benefits with leads and engaged opportunities.
4. Sales Productivity: When using an email signature marketing platform, there’s no need to interrupt salespeople to make updates to their signatures (at Sigstr, we recommend activating a new campaign every couple weeks, so this could be incredibly distracting if done manually). In fact, your sales team members can use Sigstr even within Salesloft Cadence or other marketing automation tools. Instead of being distracted, your sales team can stay focused on prospecting and closing business while the administrator automatically updates the campaigns which appear in real-time, which no effort on your sales team.
The goal is to drive awareness and give something of true value to the reader – not just another sales pitch (which you can be sure the recipient will tune out – wouldn’t you?). Email signatures promoting marketing content engage prospects and customers by pointing them towards new, helpful resources. In doing so, your sales team is giving the reader more information that could be helpful to them as they’re searching for the right partner.
Check Out Salesloft’s Rainmaker 2016 Email Signature Campaign:
We hope you can join us for the rise of the Sales Development Cloud at #Rainmaker16 on March 7-9!
Through these campaigns, you can direct your recipients to a landing page that requires basic information such as name, email address, and company. By having them fill out a bit of information, you will generate more qualified leads.
Want a super easy way to start using employee email signatures to generate more sales opportunities and closed business? Sigstr can help! Click here to learn more about how, and start your complimentary 30-day trial.