The Hidden Power Behind Email Signature Management

March, 2021

It’s no secret that in business, time is money. Spending unnecessary time completing tasks the slow way when they could be done faster with a more effective system is essentially throwing money out the window.

Case in point – email signature management for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Even if you stumbled onto this page, and have never read our blog before, odds are you know your business can benefit from branded emails. After all, having a professional looking email signature can go a long way in controlling and reinforcing your brand.

However, if you’re implementing branded email signatures across your team members the hard or slow way, you are also very likely spending a lot more time than necessary.

Why Managing Email Signatures Across Team Members is Important

The signature area of every email your company sends to an external recipient or even your customers is an opportunity to grow your company. Whether you’re adding a sales offer, nurturing a lead, or just driving traffic back to your website, each person that receives an email is a potential revenue opportunity.

If nothing else, branded email signatures help ensure that your team is aligned in its messaging and that your brand is reinforced to the public. The more people see your unique branding, the more recognizable your company will become. Once they know you, it will be easier to convert them into liking and trusting you.

In an SME, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of emails going out every week to customers, prospects, shareholders, board members, etc… Each of these emails presents a unique chance to increase your company’s bottom line.

The sales team could have one CTA for driving new customers to an onboarding process. Marketing could bring in top-of-the-funnel leads. Customer Success team members might use their email signature to generate recurring revenue from return customers. Even your customer support and IT departments can use their email signature space to improve customer satisfaction, encourage positive reviews, and ask for referrals.

Top-of-the-funnel-leads

The trouble is of course, that managing the signatures of every member of your team takes time.

The Time Investment of Email Signature Management

There are three generally accepted ways to go about managing the email signatures of your team members. We’ll call these good, better, and best. Though to be honest, the good is actually not that good.

(Not That) Good: Leave it to the employees

In this method, management decides to create custom email signatures and appoints an administrator to carry out the task. It’s usually an IT support team member. Mr. IT sends out a template to all of the employees and gives them instructions on how to execute the request.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, all of your employees read it, follow the instructions, and successfully set up their new email signature. However, in most companies, this is rarely the case.

What actually ends up happening in most situations like this, is maybe 75% of the team members even see the email. Of those, maybe half will make an attempt to update their signature following the emailed instructions. In all likelihood, several will end up calling for help, and at the end of the entire task approximately 10-15% will successfully implement their signature correctly, if at all. This is the hard and not effective way.

Better (But Still Not Great): Have the IT team take care of each signature personally

Using this method, you’re likely going to have a 100% success rate in ensuring that all of your team members get their signature set up correctly. Whether you’re using Office 365 signature management or some other email client, the IT team can personally set up each employees new signature. This sounds better than leaving it up to the employees, but it is the slowest way of achieving this goal.

For the sake of making the math easier, we’ll assume you have 200 employees. We’ll also assume you assigned one IT team member with this task. Your IT employee will have to spend approximately 10 minutes minimum setting up the signature for each of the 200 employees. Right off the bat, you’re looking at approximately 30+ hours of work or 4 business days.

Of course, now you need to add in the additional cost of lost time from each employee being disrupted during their workday, and all of those “lost” hours of working time could cost your company quite a bit.

To make matters worse, these time costs are before you even add the time that may be tacked on of employees asking the IT guys additional questions and/or setting up the signatures on additional devices the employees may be using. All in – this could easily be thousands of dollars sunk into managing email signatures, and it doesn’t stop there.

After the week or so that it takes for the IT team members to update all the email signatures, now upper management has announced a new sale and new offers that need to replace all the offers and links sitting in the current email signatures. What does that mean? You guessed it – the IT employee has to start the arduous process all over again. What a nightmare.

We’ve shown you the hard way and the slow way to implement team-wide custom email signatures. Now for the good news – there is a better way that is fast and far easier to do!

Best – Email Signature Management Software

Enter Black Pearl – your one stop shop for email signature management that can be implemented in mere minutes – not days or weeks! When you use the software, you can add a few rules, and add or update the entire company’s email signatures with a few clicks.

Our software is designed so anyone can use it regardless of their skillset, which means no coding required!. Then, if the upper management decides they want to make a change, or a sale becomes outdated, it’s not a problem. A few more clicks, a few more minutes, and all of those email signatures are instantly updated again without any lag time.

Both Google Workspace’s Gmail and Office 365 email signature management is a breeze with Black Pearl’s software. Not only can you deploy beautiful and brilliant email signatures in just minutes, but you can also gather analytics on your emails to see how your recipients are engaging with your messages.

Our software helps you work smarter, not harder, saving you time and money compared with using the long-drawn-out methods described above. We help your team remove the bottlenecks of email signature management so that you can maximize the hidden power behind your email signatures and tap into the marketing potential that has been lying dormant until now. Want to learn more about what Black Pearl can do for your organization? Schedule a free demo today!