As content marketers continue to put more emphasis on content promotion and distribution, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to amplify content. Some great pieces spread naturally, but it's rare to display the right content pieces to the right people without first setting the table with effective amplification across paid, owned and earned channels.
Paid distribution is a repeatable and scalable way to amplify content, but you should still invest time looking for more efficient, organic forms of promotion to help drive down your overall distribution costs... like email.
I'm not talking about mass email marketing, though. I'm talking about employee email signatures.
Think of how many emails you send on a daily basis to relevant individuals and companies. Now multiply that by the number of employees in your company and just imagine the power that email signatures have as an owned content promotion channel.
On average, individuals send over 100 billion business emails per day; those impressions mean far more than what a display ad can deliver because it’s one-to-one communication with current or prospective customers and other relevant entities.
Marketers spend a lot of time and resources creating content and then either don’t do anything at all to promote their work, or just throw a bunch of money at it and hope it attracts the right kind of visitors and attention. Sound familiar?
We go through all the familiar forms of content promotion across all channels, but our email signatures are all too often overlooked, despite it being a constant stream of quality impressions.
To illustrate this, here are a few examples of some companies taking advantage of their signatures:
At ProofHQ, we leveraged Xink’s campaign tool to help us distribute our whitepaper, 4 Insights Proven to Increase Marketing Agility, via our newsletter and have seen a steady uptick in downloads directly from our signatures, which otherwise wouldn’t have occurred.
Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware, does an outstanding job of promoting video-based customer testimonials of Yesware through his email signature, which helps create context for the conversations he's having with prospects.
While promoting content through your email signature results in more traffic and downloads, it also serves as collateral which can assist your customer-facing teams in sales, marketing, client-services, and support.
Getting in front of key individuals is a major part of any marketing campaign, so being able to effectively turn your email signature into a marketing channel is a huge advantage, and one where you can significantly drive down your cost-per-lead and cost-per-acquisition averages.
Promoting content through your signature is an excellent way to nurture prospects while increasing traffic, but it can also serve as a direct engagement platform.
For example, Tuft & Needle, a disruptive mattress company, implemented a customer feedback option through their support team’s email signatures, which is an incredibly powerful way to gauge customer happiness.
You can express your opinion on their services by choosing ‘Great’, ‘Okay’, and ‘Not Good’. This transparency and commitment to customer service serves the company’s brand and support team by creating more trust and engagement with both prospective and current customers.
When executing a content promotion strategy, it’s important to build context with as many of the right people as possible and to think through all the channels s that are feasible and appropriate to create a value-add conversation. While there are many ways to do this, email signatures provide a simple, cost-effective way to promote messages in a more passive manner and take advantage of a valuable owned channel in peer-to-peer email.
