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? 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 onboarding 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). Here’s 7 internal marketing ideas to improve employee experience.

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 post has inspired you to look to your email signatures to meet the current challenges.