For every dollar that companies spend on email marketing, they earn an average of $36 in return. The high ROI of email marketing makes it one of the most lucrative marketing channels to leverage, and ecommerce stores should take advantage of the opportunity to promote their products and brand in every email they send to customers.
But marketing emails aren’t the only kinds of emails you can use for marketing purposes. Email signature marketing is a subtle tactic to make all kinds of emails work harder for your brand. When you send customer support emails, for example, you can use the signature to recommend products, announce new products and promotions, and more — assuming you provide great customer service above the signature.
Continue reading to learn why email signature marketing campaigns are such a powerful addition to customer service emails, plus tips and examples to help you develop email signature marketing designs that drive more website visits and purchases.
What is email signature marketing?
Email signature marketing is the strategy of placing marketing messages at the bottom of your customer emails in the signature section. These are not marketing emails: They are usually customer service emails that only use the signature for marketing recommendations.
Common examples of email signature marketing include:
- Your company's phone number, social media icons, or other contact information
- Clickable product recommendations
- Announcements of new products and sales
Thanks to the various marketing opportunities they provide, 82% of email marketers use email signatures to boost brand awareness, get more web traffic, and boost on-site conversion rate. So, while email signature marketing may seem overly salesy, customers are accustomed to marketing messages at the bottom of emails. As long as your email provides adequate value to the email recipient, capping it off with tasteful marketing does more good than harm.
What are the benefits of email signature marketing?
From lead generation to raising brand awareness and social media followers, you can expect a wide range of benefits from email signature marketing. Here are a few of the main advantages:
Provides important contact information
The law of least effort is an important part of great customer support. Once you send an email to a customer, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to contact you back. One simple way to ensure that customers can easily contact you back is to provide your contact information in the email signature. Once the customer is done reading your message, they'll have all the info they need to get in touch right in front of them.
Give customers a clear call to action (CTA)
When a customer support team resolves an issue, that doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation. You can use email signature marketing to give customers a clear path to re-engage with your brand and get excited about shopping on your site with a clear call to action (CTA).
Examples of CTAs in email signature marketing could include:
- Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated
- Check out our newest drop
- Shop 30% off sitewide this Black Friday
- Follow our new TikTok account for daily giggles
- Sign up to attend our upcoming webinar before the pricing increase — registrations end soon
To maximize the click-through rate (CTR) of your CTA, try and keep them short, active, and value-focused.
Build trust with social proof
The bottom of a customer support email could also be a great place to share positive feedback you’ve gotten from others. You could include a screenshot of a glowing review of your brand, a feature in a publication, a link to a case study, or a shoutout from an influencer in your industry to catch the attention of your email’s recipient and get them even more excited about your brand.
Announce new products and promotions
Sending emails to announce new products, sales, and other events directly is highly recommended as an ecommerce growth tactic — chances are, you already do this kind of email marketing. But even the emails that aren't specifically discussing these things can still be used to promote them.
Again, since customers have come to expect marketing material in the signature section of a business email, they probably won't mind if you get a little off-topic in this section. By designing eye-catching email signature banners to promote sales and new products, you can turn every email your company sends into a marketing effort.
Steer customers toward purchases
Announcing new products and sales is one way to drive conversions with email signature marketing, but it's just one of several marketing strategies. Creating a call to action (CTA) for customers to book a demo or free trial is another option for ecommerce companies selling products that can be demoed.
Using promotional banners to promote product recommendations is another highly effective option. By analyzing customer data, you can even make personalized product recommendations for an even better click-through rate. Lastly, offering discount codes can be an effective way to generate sales from email signature marketing, too.
For more strategies on how customer support reps can steer customers toward purchases in support communications for CX-driven growth, check out our CX-Driven Growth Playbook.
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Boosts email response rates
Business emails that include an eye-catching, professional email signature receive 32% more replies than those that do not. Including contact information makes it more convenient for customers to respond. The fact that many email signatures feature CTAs encouraging the customer to contact them back also helps. Whatever the reason, customer replies are always a positive thing — and the fact that email signature marketing can boost them substantially is a compelling reason to consider it.
What can you include in your email signature marketing?
There are a wide variety of elements that you can include in your email signature. While you probably don't want to include them all in the same email, you can pick and choose different elements depending on your email signature marketing goals.
Here are some marketing and branding elements to consider including in your email signature:
- Individual information about the agent/email writer
- Branded assets (such as your company logo)
- Links to the company website/landing pages
- Additional contact methods (phone number, social media icons)
- Customer service announcements (like new support channels)
- Company announcements (like a rebrand)
- Discount code and promotion announcements
- Product recommendations
- Content (blogs, webinars, and more)
- Clear calls to action (CTAs)
When used correctly, each email signature element presents an opportunity to promote brand awareness, generate sales and other positive customer actions, and make contacting you more convenient for the customer.
Step-by-step guide for creating an email signature marketing campaign
Like every marketing campaign, email signature marketing campaigns need to be given careful thought and consideration. It's important to define your campaigns' objectives and then design them step-by-step to reach those objectives.
To create email signature marketing campaigns that actually generate sales and other positive customer actions, here are the steps that you should follow:
1) Choose a design and location for your email signature
Before you decide on the specific branding and marketing elements that you want to include in your email signature, it's first important to choose a design and location for the signature. Starting with location, you'll obviously want to put your email signature at the bottom of the email. However, you've got many options regarding the size, format, and exact positioning of your signature.
You can get as creative as you want with your signature's design, too. The colors you choose, the fonts you use, and any other design elements you include are all key parts of your email's branding — choose wisely.
If you want more instructions on how to create email signatures, check out:
- How to create email signatures with HTML
- How to create email signatures in Microsoft Outlook or Gmail
- MySignature.io: An easy-to-use email signature marketing software
2) Discuss the goals of the email signature marketing campaign with your team
All email marketing campaigns need to have clear and measurable goals, which is also true for email signature marketing campaigns. From driving visitors to a landing page or homepage to promoting sales, you can design email signature marketing campaigns to accomplish many different objectives. Pinpoint the goals you want your campaigns to accomplish and discuss them with your team before you start to email clients with new signatures. This way, everyone on the team can build a signature that aligns with those goals.
The most common metric for successful campaigns is click-through rate (CTR), or the rate at which people click the link included in your signature. Check out this article to learn how to measure CTR in Google Analytics.
3) Craft your email signature (keep branding in mind)
Once you choose a basic design for your email signature and determine the goals for your email signature marketing campaigns, it's time to craft your email signature. You can hire a designer to create your signature for you, or you can do it yourself. Choose your email signature elements based on your campaign goals and design around these elements. For example, if your goal is to increase sales on a certain product line, make one of your signature elements a product recommendation from the line. Of course, it's essential to keep branding in mind throughout the design process and ensure that your email signature is consistent with your company's overall branding.
If you need help designing a professional and eye-catching email signature, then email signature templates, email signature generators, and other types of email signature software can all be excellent tools.
Check out this article to see 16 useful customer service email templates.
4) Roll out an email signature marketing campaign
Now that you've chosen your email signature design and goals for your email signature marketing campaign, it's time to put that campaign into action. You can choose to have every support agent use the same email signature in their messages, or you can design multiple signature designs/campaigns and deploy them both at the same time. Using multiple email signatures will allow you to A/B test which ones deliver the best results, but many companies prefer to utilize a single signature design for brand consistency.
Whether it's multiple signature designs or a single one, rolling out your email signature marketing campaign is as simple as attaching your signature design to the customer support emails you are already sending.
Related reading: 8 plug-and-play email marketing automation sequences to try today.
5) Monitor your campaign's success with KPIs and metrics
Email signature marketing might be a relatively passive marketing strategy, but it is still essential to closely monitor the results of your campaign. KPIs such as click-through rate, response rate, and conversion rate will all tell you how effectively your campaign is performing so that you can fine-tune it for better results and greater ROI.
The exact KPIs you want to track will depend on your specific campaign goals. If you are trying to drive sales via product recommendations, KPIs such as click-through rate and conversion rate is especially important. If you just want to raise brand awareness and aren't directing your customers to a product page, the response rate might be a more telling KPI.
6) Adjust, improve, and test the campaign
The primary reason for monitoring the success of your campaign is so that you can adjust and improve your email signature design as needed. If your campaign isn't delivering the results you hoped for, fine-tuning the design of your email signature or the marketing elements it includes may yield better results.
A/B testing is one great way to test and improve your email signature marketing campaigns. By using multiple signature designs and measuring their performance, you can determine which ones are most effective for different marketing goals and use those exclusively going forward.
Email signature marketing campaign statistics
A great email signature can be a powerful marketing tool, and plenty of statistics can back it up. Here are a few interesting stats that highly the effectiveness of email signature marketing:
- Eighty-two percent of email marketers use email signature marketing to boost brand awareness
- Emails that include a professional email signature yield 22% more clicks, 32% more replies, 10% growth in social media reach, and 15% more leads
- Forty-five percent of marketers use email signatures for marketing/brand awareness purposes on a regular basis
- Improving brand awareness is the most common goal of email signature marketing, with 41% of marketers stating that brand awareness is the main objective of their email signature
Amazing email marketing signature examples
Given how popular email signature marketing has become, there are plenty of great examples of it being put into practice. Here is a customer support email from Dr. Squatch that includes an excellent email signature:
Note that the email signature includes the agent's full name, the company logo, a link to the home page, and a product link. It's a simple design yet one that includes both brand awareness elements as well as marketing elements. The goal of this signature could be to drive conversions via the product recommendation link or simply raise brand awareness via the logo and home page link.
Here's another example of an attractive email signature from Swordfish Communications. Here the agent gives the recipient the information they need to contact them directly as well as multiple methods for contacting the company, and corporate social media profiles for a nice touch of social proof.
Lastly, here are a couple of examples of email signatures featuring banners that are clearly designed to promote sales:
This email signature features an animated banner, a sale announcement, and a clickable CTA and is a great example of some of the unique and eye-catching things that you can do with email signature banners.
Here's another great example of an email signature banner designed to make the signature timely and promote a seasonal sale:
Along with an eye-catching banner that promotes a seasonal CTA, this email signature also features other attractive seasonal design elements such as pumpkin social media icons and a stylish "happy holidays" sign-off.
How to create PS Macros in Gorgias to drive more sales
In Gorgias, you can (and should) create a permanent signature with your name and contact information. But we believe overly-gaudy messages in the signature get in the way of providing excellent customer service. Below, we’ll share how you can create and include a wide variety of subtler marketing messages at the end of your emails.
In Gorgias, you can create a library of templated Macros for all sorts of purposes. The most common templates are answers to frequently asked questions like “Where is my order?” or “Do you ship internationally?” But you can also create Macros for marketing purposes at the end of your email — we call them PS Macros.
Here’s an example of a PS Macro getting added to a Gorgias user’s library of Macros:
Once this Macro is saved, the user can search for the Macro to include in any message to a customer — regardless of channel (email, live chat, social media, and so on).
Here’s what the complete message, including the support information and the PS Macro, could look like:
You can create a library of these Macros for a variety of purposes:
- Link to a new or best-selling item: “PS - Check out our new collaboration with Rihanna HERE - you don’t want to miss this.”
- Offer a promotion: “PS - Use my code 4UFALL for 15% off your next order. Click HERE to shop now.”
- Create a limited-time offer: “DON’T MISS OUT! Use code HOLIDAY to save 20% on everything in the store this Black Friday.”
- Give customers the VIP treatment: “PS - Use my code VIP15 to get 15% off our new Fall scarves. This herringbone knit is my personal fav.”
Keep customers coming back with Gorgias
Crafting a professional and eye-catching email signature or PS Macro is an excellent way to turn every email your company sends into an opportunity to promote your products and brand.
With Gorgias, you can design multiple PS Macros and automatically attach those signatures to your customer support emails. Gorgias’s Macros provide a better email signature management solution, letting agents choose among email signature templates for different times of the year, customers, and marketing objectives without requiring your agents to change their signatures manually.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of how Gorgias can turn your customer service operation into a revenue-generating machine. Book your demo to learn how Gorgias can help your brand grow.
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