By Cody Lents, Partner and Customer Steward at COVI, Inc.
In today’s fast-paced business world, email has become an essential marketing touchpoint, allowing companies to communicate with customers and stakeholders quickly and efficiently. With the number of email users worldwide set to hit 4.37 billion in 2023, it’s becoming increasingly important to make a good impression and provide relevant information to recipients with every email you send. One common and effective way to achieve this is through leveraging the email signature, which appears at the footer of your email and helps recipients understand who you are and what you represent, like a digital business card.
While standardized email signatures have become an integral part of business branding and communication strategies, managing them is a challenging and repetitive task that, with no means to audit, doesn’t always yield successful results. End-users manually managing signatures can cause inconsistencies in layout and information, resulting in poorly designed signatures that negatively impact a business’s communication and marketing strategy, branding, and reputation. Even creating templated signatures to address these issues can lead to broken links, further hampering communication and causing recipients to ignore a company’s emails altogether, resulting in lost business opportunities. What’s worse is when the information is inaccurate or outdated resulting in incorrect expectations being set and missed, stressing existing relationships.
To address these challenges, companies can turn to third-party solutions that offer automation to signature management processes, designed to cater to businesses of all sizes and help them remove the unnecessary time, disruptive re-work, and limited means to catch non-compliant signatures associated with email signature management.
In a perfect world, anyone could do this with a flip of a switch, however, current technological limitations require forethought, training, and a managed implementation. A well-executed project management process takes a collaborative approach and strategically aligns technology with the organization’s goals, including the following steps:
>Evaluation
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> Consultation
> Initial Setup & Training
> Execution
By implementing automated signature management, companies can enhance their internal culture, reduce liability, and improve their clients’ experience, positively impacting their mission and bottom line. Furthermore, these solutions save time and effort for HR administrators and supervisors by eliminating the need to manage individual user signatures, reducing the risk of inconsistencies or errors.
Automated signature management takes advantage of the highest touchpoint we have with our customers (email), while simultaneously limiting the risks to our team’s morale, customers’ expectations, and the company’s reputation, associated with human-managed signatures.