6 ways to use your email signature to promote your project for free
It’s often hard to allocate resources in marketing, especially for small businesses. Spending a large portion of your marketing budget on a large campaign might lead to an expanded customer base, tons of new sales leads and increased brand awareness. Or it might not. Calculating return on investment is tough.
If you need to promote a new product, a webinar, event, or website, and you can find a way to boost your project on the cheap (or even for free!), then you’ll be ahead of the game. Email signatures are an often overlooked way to convey your marketing messages. Here are a few email signature tips and tricks you can use to do email marketing on a shoestring budget:
1. Include a link to the landing page
Hopefully you’ve set up a landing page for your project. If you haven’t, go and do that now! Landing pages are a great way to describe your project and gather email addresses for participants. If you include the link to your landing page as part of a well-designed banner in your signature, you can really you’re your reader’s attention. This way, even if you’re not emailing someone specifically about the new project, they can still access the necessary information if the banner sparks their interest.
2. Link to your social media profiles
Include links to your company’s social media profiles and any special profiles or event pages you’ve set up specifically for your new project in your signature. This way you give your recipient an easy way to get more information about your project, and it’s much easier for them to interact with the brand. Just make sure that any social media channels you include are kept up to date!
3. Add value to your email
Adding value to your emails by linking to useful resources in your signature is a great way to make a first impression, especially if you’re cold-contacting a potential sales lead for your new product, or informing potential customers about your event or webinar. You could, for example, include an e-book, white paper or case study that clarifies how your new product helps customers in a sales outreach email.
4. Create quick templates
One way to manage email marketing campaigns is to use a CRM system with built in email capabilities, or an email marketing service like MailChimp. These solutions can be quite expensive however, and when you’re working with a tiny budget, the cost can be hard to swallow.
An easy solution is to use email signatures to create multiple ‘ad-libs’ style email templates. It may involve a little more work on your side, but such templates work really well for outreach or first contact mails and marketing campaigns. If you’re running multiple campaigns (promoting a product and an event at the same time for example), you could create different signatures for each campaign you plan to run and switch between them depending on the person you’re emailing.
5. Include your logo and website
You are a representative of your company and brand, and as such, your email signature is like a business card. For extra polish, you should include your company or product logo in the signature. This boosts brand awareness and is a subtle way to share your brand with the hundreds of people you email each day. If each member of your company or team does the same, then each is contributing in a small way to raising your brand’s profile.
6. Use centrally controlled signature software
Presenting a unified signature across all members of a company shows continuity and commitment to the brand image. This way, each member of your company can boost your brand, product, event or campaign, and it’s easy to change each employee’s signature to represent new marketing goals. It is also a great way for management to ensure that all email signatures comply with the legally required disclaimers.
There are several free software products on the market that allow administrators to centrally control signatures and disclaimers in employee emails. Some even support beautiful graphics and provide templates to create these.
Email is a free and very flexible tool! Take advantage of it to boost your marketing goals and raise brand awareness.
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Author Profile:
Siobhan is the Marketing and Communications Manager for Lookeen Desktop Search. She loves finding ways to make the most of freely available tools to achieve marketing goals, including email and social media.
