7 Ways Your Email Signatures Can Meet the Challenges of Remote Working

Does your team working together in the same office feel like a distant memory? Now with your staff working remotely, there’s a whole new set of challenges to face. How best to track their productivity? Are they sufficiently motivated or in danger of letting service standards slip? Can you still ensure they present a united brand front to the world?

You might be surprised to know that your business email signatures can help with all these issues and more. After all, you and your employees (wherever they’re working from) are still sending tons of emails every day.

Here are 7 ways email signature management can help you:

1. Keep presenting a united brand front to the world With a team of remote workers, it’s essential that they’re all perfectly on-brand when it comes to email. After all, they’re each sending up to 1,000 emails a month – each one an extra opportunity for a customer, prospect, supplier or other stakeholder to see and engage with your company brand.

Consistency is the key to your audience keeping trust in your brand, yet there’s the danger that working remotely increases the temptation for individual team members to get ‘creative’ with their own signatures.

For complete brand consistency, you need an email signature solution that gives you centralised control. That way not only are individual signatures totally tamper-proof but you can also update them company-wide in an instant, ensuring a unified brand front across every email signature and banner campaign.

2. Keep track of your team’s productivity (without being Big Brother) Worried about your work-from-home staff’s productivity? Before you start installing screen-monitoring surveillance software, consider the metrics and insights that email signature management analytics and metrics can give you, without needing to ‘Big Brother’ your staff and undermine their trust. One key metric is email volume. Who are your top senders? Are they working hard or just sharing jokes? Are lower users slacking or just more focused?

What are your top receiver domains? Which companies are your staff interacting with most? What proportion of emails are actually to one another in your business?

But the most important measure is engagement. With Rocketseed’s reporting it’s easy to see which emails had particular banner campaigns applied, how many unique recipients were reached and how much engagement was achieved (total clicks divided by number of unique recipients).

Once you’ve got a clear picture of your most successful senders (don’t be surprised if it’s your sales team), most responsive recipients and most clicked banner campaigns, you can harness these insights to fine-tune your future email signature marketing campaigns and benchmark your team’s performance. Find out more about our email signature reporting and analytics.

3. Keep your marketing cost-effective As we all know, it’s at challenging times like these that budget-cutting decisions raise their ugly head. So when it comes to your marketing budget you need to make some smart choices.

It’s time to focus on cost-effective, responsive channels that deliver direct engagement. Eye-catching email banner campaigns do a great job of driving direct engagement from a channel your staff are using every day, and they’re incredibly responsive. You can quickly design a new banner campaign yourself – banners are just .jpeg or .gif files and there’s no HTML required (or let us design it for you if you’re stretched).

New banner campaigns can be taken ‘live’ in minutes, and central control means you can make company-wide updates to them in an instant. If you’re looking for design tips, try our email signature design guidelines.

4. Keep your service levels high Just because your staff are working from home, you can’t let customer service slip. Going the extra mile for your customers in these challenging times is even more likely to result in them writing you glowing reviews, boosting both your online reputation and your search ranking.

Simply by adding a ‘rate our service’ one-click survey under every employee email signature, your customers can quickly rate their experience – ‘excellent’, ‘good’ ‘average’ or ‘poor’. You can then follow up positive responses with a more detailed survey, a review request and a promotional offer.

Remember, with Rocketseed’s real-time alert feature you can immediately follow up any less-than-positive responses and remedy the issue – avoiding any poor reviews and proving your reputation for excellent customer service!

5. Keep calm in a crisis Crisis management is a key part of any successful digital strategy. It’s at times like these you need to keep your customers, staff and all your stakeholders up to speed without your message getting lost in an inbox full of ‘Crisis Update’ subject lines.

A crisis management email banner campaign gives you an engaging way to update and reassure while carrying on business as near to normal as possible through your everyday business email. You can run your crisis management message in rotation with other banners designed to keep your business moving forward, featuring your latest promotions and advance purchase deals – including on CRM-generated response emails.

To find out more, check out our ‘Managing a crisis with email signatures and banners: The complete guide’.

6. Keep your staff engaged With so many now working remotely, it’s more important than ever to keep your staff engaged and keep your company’s brand culture strong. That’s the great internal communications (and internal marketing) challenge.

By running email banner campaigns on every internal email you can engage with individual employees personally and efficiently whilst also measuring their uptake.

Keep your staff informed by running banners alerting them to all the latest company news and policies, making sure they stay safe and productive at home. If you’ve recently hired new staff, and their only real experience of your business is working remotely, then use banners to drive them to all the on-boarding material they need. Banners can be used just as easily to ensure all staff engage with the latest training content, especially if it concerns the new technology they need to master to work from home effectively.

Worried about staff morale? Run email banners featuring one-click staff surveys to see how they’re all doing working from home, and what they think the company could do to make the experience easier (and them happier). For banner designs to keep your staff engaged, check out our 33 great email signature banner examples.

7. Keep it real Human contact has suddenly become a rare commodity – from round-table meetings to the water-cooler catch-up. But just because your staff are ‘remote’ doesn’t mean your SaaS providers have to be. It’s at times like these that you want to talk with your software providers to see how they can best help meet your business needs.

It’s why we’ve always emphasised the importance of having a dedicated account manager – a real person you can discuss your business situation with and find out how your email signatures and banner campaigns can help meet your goals… especially in these turbulent times. Here’s 7 reasons why a dedicated account manager can make a real difference.

It’s never been more important to present a united brand front, and I hope this blog post has inspired you to look to your email signatures to meet the current challenges. Want to get your email signatures working harder for you?

Schedule a Product Tour and see Rocketseed in action!

Register here.

Why Marketers Should Stop Treating All Social Platforms the Same

Animoto recently spent US$30,000 across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to find out what type of videos perform best on each platform. What did they learn? People are using each platform quite differently and, as a result, they are engaging with different types of content on each platform.

We see a lot of brands and businesses posting the same videos across all the platforms - Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. But our tests confirmed the hypothesis that plastering the same video everywhere doesn’t take advantage of each platform’s strengths.

In order to be more effective with your video marketing, the key is to take a tailored approach. Think about what your customers are doing, the mindset they are in, and what they are looking for when they visit different social platforms. Then, create your content with that in mind.

To make your life easier, here is a little cheat sheet I put together about how audiences are watching videos across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and what types of video content work best.

Check it out and read on to learn more.

How is your audience watching video across different platforms?

Facebook Videos

Let’s start by getting to know your audience on Facebook. On Facebook, your potential viewers are:

• On the go. 88% of Facebook users access the social network on a mobile device.

• Watching without audio. 85% of Facebook videos are viewed without sound.

• Short on time and scrolling to discover. Facebook audiences are heading to the app when they have a few spare moments and scrolling through the feed to discover what’s new.

What does this mean for your video content? I recommend sharing updates about what’s new with your company. Share your latest products, your fall fashion line, new services, new locations, new deals. The key word is new.

Get started with our New Collection template. It is built to showcase a new collection of products and you can easily drag and drop your own product shots in and customize the look and feel for your brand. I also recommend using our Aspect Ratio feature to make this template square, as square videos stand out because they take up 78% more space in the News Feed.

PRO TIP: When you sit down to make a video for Facebook, it is important to keep in mind that your potential viewers are scrolling through their feeds rapidly. Start with your most compelling imagery up front to capture attention right away.

Instagram Videos

On Instagram, viewers are behaving in a similar way to those on Facebook. They are on the go, scrolling on mobile when they have got a spare moment. In the feed, they too are often listening with the sound off, though they are more likely to listen with the sound on when checking out Instagram Stories.

The main difference, though, is the type of content that is resonating with Instagram viewers. We have found that inspirational content is what really does the trick on Instagram. Instagram began as a platform for sharing stunning photographs and, although it is now a home for all kinds of content, it is still the inspiring, visually stunning content that stands out.

When you approach video creation for Instagram, keep inspiration in mind. Start with compelling imagery, tell a story that inspires, share a quote, or show something interesting.

PRO TIP: On Instagram, you can post a link in your bio but not in an individual post in the feed. For this reason, it’s important to tell a story in your videos that’s self-contained. Viewers should be able to consume your content, like it, and then scroll on. But the inspiration should stay with them.

To learn more, check out our complete guide to Instagram video.

Twitter Video

There are lots of benefits to using video on Twitter. Tweets with video get retweeted 6X more than photos and 3X more than GIFs. But if you’re looking to get the most out of your Twitter video efforts, you will need to cater your content for your audience’s behaviour.

On Twitter, similar to Facebook and Instagram, your audience is on the go, on mobile, and scrolling to discover. But what they are looking to discover is what is happening right now. They are interested in current news, current trends, and to be a part of the conversation around what is happening in the moment.

For this reason, more ephemeral updates about what is happening right now are the most effective. For instance, when I speak at a conference, I will share the place and time I will be speaking shortly before my talk begins.

You could share a flash sale, jump on a trending topic, or promote an event that is about to occur, as in this example.

PRO TIP: When sharing videos on Twitter, do not forget to include relevant hashtags. This will help you get your videos in front of more people.

YouTube Video

YouTube audiences are quite different from audiences on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This is primarily because, for the most part, they are not just scrolling for random videos. They have come to YouTube specifically to search for content that they are interested in.

For this reason, your audience on YouTube is more engaged, watching with the audio on, and prepared to watch longer form content than on other social platforms.

When creating content for YouTube, you will still want to make sure you capture the interest of your viewers quickly. But drawing attention with an eye-catching first image does not hold as much weight as it does for feed-based scrolling. Instead, you will want to hold your audience by sharing valuable information at the jump, and all the way through your video.

PRO TIP: On YouTube, your video’s title and description is just as important as the video itself. It will help you show up when potential viewers search and will also help them understand what your video is about before they opt in to watch. Make sure your title and description clearly match up with the value your video provides.

And there you have it! If you are looking for a little extra inspiration or video ideas, we are here for you!

This article was originally posted on Animoto.

Looking to develop your Social Media but not sure where to turn? Need help planning or executing your next Social Media Campaign? Struggle with Digital Ads and Content Creation? Let V5 Digital guide you. Any organization can move forward with small incremental changes, but building for the future in today’s rapidly evolving environment means taking bold chances and making insightful decisions. If you would like more information, book a free consultation today.

How V5 Digital made Namibia fall in Love with Digital in 2020

Love Digital winners (from left to right): Mr Joe von Schumann with a lamb braai pack from BraaiTime, Namibia’s most loved Meat App, Mesdames Cherien Simataa with a voucher for a Social Media Marketing Masterclass from D.O. Digital Academy and Heidi Christ with the Amazon Echo Smart Speaker as well as Mr Armin Wieland, founder of V5 Digital.

When V5 Digital celebrates, we celebrate BIG! In February 2020 we launched our Love Digital competition to celebrate Valentine’s month, while fostering a love for digital and creating awareness for the V5 Africa - our Love for Data & Digital Conference. How did we achieve this?

But first 🥁 🥁 🥁 … who are the competition winners? Watch the video below to find out!

We asked Amazon Alexa to announce our three winners in the “Love Digital" competition.

Our omni-channel approach meant that the campaign drove awareness across social media and email, bolstered by the strategic use of influencers and the social media account of a popular local radio station. Excited Namibians clicked through to the competition micro-site, where they could quickly fill in their details on the online-form to stand a chance to win one of three enticing prizes: an Amazon Echo Speaker, a Social Media Marketing Masterclass, and a BraaiTime braai pack. While on the mobile-friendly micro-site, consumers also learnt about V5 Digital’s Love for Data & Digital Conference and could reserve their seat for the dynamic event.

V5 Digital loves digital and strives to remain on the cutting edge, which is why we used best practice Marketing Automation software from industry leader SharpSpring to help the Love Digital campaign come to life.

This means that when consumers filled in the form on the micro-site, they received an automated email confirming their entry - thanks to SharpSpring. That’s not all: SharpSpring has made sure that every recipient’s email was personalized according to the preferences they entered in the form. If you selected the option that you would love to win the Amazon Echo speaker and you would be most interested in V5 Digital’s email marketing services, you should have received an email tailored exactly to those preferences.

We used email triggers to identify consumers who did not open their original email, so that we could send them a gentle reminder of the competition opportunity. The next trigger guaranteed that all recipients who opened the original email received a follow-up the next day – packed with V5 Digital’s top online trends for 2020. Consumers could read just the overview of trends or click on a trend that caught their eye to read up more on our website. On top of helping recipients fall in love with the ever-evolving world of digital, this email contained fully trackable links, so that V5 Digital could understand which content consumers found most appealing.

A SharpSpring Visual Workflow assigning consumers to a dynamic list

The great thing about Marketing Automation is, that it means fewer grey hairs with less to worry about. Case in point: we used SharpSpring to ensure that a week after we sent out the first email, all recipients automatically received an email containing all the information their hearts could desire about the V5 Digital service, which they had indicated they would be most interested in.

The service preference they had indicated there was also automatically added to their Buyer Persona, helping V5 Digital develop a 360-degree view of every lead. From a reporting standpoint, SharpSpring’s campaign attribution tool revealed which sources contributed to campaign entries.

V5 Digital is a SharpSpring Silver Level Certified Partner

If you would like to know more about how SharpSpring's Marketing Automation can help your business prosper, or if you’d like more information about any of V5 Digital’s services, book a free consultation to find out how you can fall deeper in love with digital.

And if you didn’t win this time, don’t fret – there are plenty more competitions coming up from V5 Digital, so keep your eyes peeled.