The email signature? Is this really an opportunity for growth hacking? When it comes to your marketing efforts, this admittedly is probably not top of mind. And you’ve probably seen – or been the recipient of – some really bad ones with weird pictures and an odd mix of fonts that doesn’t do much for first (or second!) impressions.
Including relevant information in your group emails or email newsletters is still important for growth hacking, but there are a lot of missed opportunities in another company email. What we’re focusing on here are the individual emails that go out from your customer support team.
Two general considerations for the email signature are the application of your company’s brand standards and a compliance statement for any legal statements that need to be included. Assuming you have already included those basics, let’s now look at additional ways to take advantage of this often overlooked real estate.
Social Media
Clearly, a use case for email signatures is to include social media channels. But take a step further than simply including all your social networks. Instead, focus on a specific network where you want to grow fans or followers. With this strategy, recipients of your email have only one channel to explore rather than clicking on every single one. You don’t want to ignore the other channels, so you rotate them out in different months. Maybe one month will be Twitter and the next is Pinterest.
Whether you mention one channel or multiple ones, provide a reason to for the recipient to join you on the network listed in your email. This alone is a big opportunity for growth hacking because it sets you apart from other vendors that only include the basic icons.
Content Sharing
You worked hard for your earned mentions and spent some money on your paid content, which is why you want to use multiple content strategies to put it out there. The email signature is an opportunity for continuous content marketing.
Your customer support signature hopefully already includes solutions to common problems in the email signature and possible a link to your knowledge base. But what are some recent blog posts that resonated with readers? Instead of only providing a general link to your blog, highlight an article that was popular so recipients have a specific reason to click on your site and hopefully sign up for additional updates.
Measure It
Once you’ve applied these growth hacking techniques with your customer support email, you know want to know if those efforts are working. Obviously, CTR and conversions on your site are valuable metrics, but also look at growth on the networks mentioned in your signature. If you heavily promoted Facebook one month in your signature, did you also see a growth in new Facebook fans?
New subscribers for your email newsletter as a result of people coming from individual emails is another metrics. To make that easy to track, set up a separate sign-up form for your email newsletter that is only for subscribers that clicked on a link in a customer support email signature.
With Google’s URL builder, you can also track any clicks from your email signature. For example, if you have a link to your knowledge base in the signature and add parameters to it, you can see how many people arrived there as a result of clicking an email signature link compared to other traffic sources.
Marketing is not just the responsibility of the marketing department. Your customer support team can help promote content and information through an email signature. It’s a great opportunity to share a message because once recipients open your email, you have their attention and permission to market to them. But, the short attention spans still apply in any format online, so think carefully about what exactly you want to convey in that moment.
Now that you’ve applied these techniques, take advantage of the metrics you can receive from HappyFox, giving context and reducing the chaos. Schedule a personalized product demo
