Blog

What’s Your Sign?

Email. Every day, we send, reply, and forward. We CC: and BCC:, file and archive, read and delete. In the process, our typed words travel to offices down the hall and businesses across the planet. Of course, the primary goal of our emails is to communicate the message we’ve typed. However, email can easily do so much more. Email can be a marketing tool.

Now, we’re not talking about using applications like MailChimp, which allow users to send and manage email marketing campaigns (Make sure you subscribe to the TribalVision blog, though! We’ll cover this soon!). We’re just talking about the every day emails we all send to our colleagues, co-workers, clients, and customers. Each and every one of those emails is a free opportunity to hand out a virtual business card by way of your email signature.

What’s Your Sign(ature)?
If you’re not currently using an email signature, or if you’re using a plain text signature with just your name and title, you’re missing countless, free, daily marketing opportunities. Think about it for a moment: a client checks an email from you on his phone and wants to discuss it with you immediately but doesn’t have your number stored in his cell. If that number were in your email signature, your client would have access to it in a single click.

Or say that client wants to share your thoughts with another colleague by forwarding your message. With a proper email signature, not only does that colleague receive all of your contact information, but he also sees your logo, perhaps your slogan, and has instant access to your website and social media feeds. That simple, forwarded email has allowed you to establish your corporate image before the recipient has had any direct contact with your company at all.

Thankfully, it’s easy to integrate attractive, purposeful signatures that not only help you share contact information, but also allow you to seamlessly include social media links, websites, and even your company logo in a full-color, HTML format.

What if I don’t speak HTML? Or write it, or do whatever it is HTML does?
For those of us who don’t know how to create an email signature in HTML (read: nearly everyone who doesn’t work in I.T.), there are some great programs available to do it for us. Our favorite: WiseStamp.

WiseStamp is a free tool that allows users to create custom signatures. One of the things we like best about WiseStamp is the ability to have multiple signatures on file. This allows users to have, for example, a “business” signature, but also a “personal” signature. WiseStamp also allows for images, logos, social media linking, RSS feeds, Twitter scrolling, and more.

So, perhaps the question isn’t so much, “What’s in a name?” but “What’s in a signature?” And these days, the answer should be “everything!”