Do your company email signatures shed a good light on your brand?

We sent some questions across to Henry McIntosh, Marketing Manager at Crossware Mail Signature to understand how they're helping marketers' control their brand perception today. 

What is Crossware Mail Signature and what is its mission?

Crossware Mail Signature was developed to help company’s control their email signatures. This includes everything from the way that your brand is seen via email, including a legal disclaimer on every email and having an email signature on mobile emails.

It’s a server-based email signature application that automatically adds compliant, personalised and attractive email signatures to all emails. These signatures may include disclaimers, logos, graphics and advertising banners that can be randomised or targeted to specific recipients.

We currently have over 500,000 people around the globe using our software to control their email signatures.

What are the main challenges for brands' regarding email signatures?

The biggest challenge that brands’ face regarding their email signatures is consistency. We often see people within the same company with completely different branding, layouts and designs on their email signature - this comes across as very unprofessional.

The biggest cause of inconsistent email signatures in the mobile phone. Most businesses now allow their employees to send work emails from their phone. But without email signature software like ours, the email appears with absolutely no company branding and often even promotes other products by saying “Sent from my iPhone”.

Don't home-made signatures suffice, and if no, why not? 

“Home-made” signatures can work great with a team of 5-10 people. But any larger than that and you will end up spending a lot of time editing the email signature of every employee on every single work station. When you edit your company signatures with Crossware Mail Signature, as soon as you hit ‘save’, the changes will automatically appear on every employee’s signature.

“Home-made” signatures will also not be included when an email is sent from a mobile device. If using Crossware Mail Signature, where-ever the email is sent from, it will always appear the same.

What does the ideal email signature look like, contain and what would this achieve over a self-made one?

The ideal email signature contains your correct contact info, company logo/branding, website and social media links, plus some targeted advertising.

As I mentioned earlier, you can create a “home-made” signature to include most of the above, but managing your entire company’s signatures becomes a nightmare, as well as not having an email signature on your mobile emails.

When using Crossware Mail Signature, you can create different advertising banners to target different groups of people within your directory, or based on many other variables. For example you might have a different banner ad for all emails being sent to a .com.au email addresses and a different banner for all .co.uk email addresses. Targeted advertising on the everyday email is a hugely powerful tool.

As marketing manager, how have you helped build or sustain your brand? And supported sales? 

The sponsorship of events and conferences is a large part of our marketing strategy. During 2014 I have already managed the sponsorship of 11 events around the world, with another 3 events coming before the end of the year. During these events it’s important that our brand is promoted to as many people as possible but also in a way that aligns with our values. We find that being involved with events allows us to talk directly to our target market in a casual format, which allows us to understand their needs as well as pitch our product. Being involved with large events like Adtech gets our brand exposed to a significant amount of people, in an effective way.

Also, as email signature gurus, our everyday emails are used as a powerful vehicle for driving sales and building our brand. Our brand is incorporated on every single email that leaves Crossware, as well as a variation of targeted advertisements that give the recipient a ‘call to action’ every time we communicate; this has proven to be a very effective tool.

Visit Crossware Mail Signature at stand no 263 to have your chance at winning a Sonos wifi speaker. As a reminder ad:tech London takes place on 21 - 22nd October 2014.