Your email signature sucks and how to fix it
People seem to obsess over them, making theirs unique, eco friendly, oversized, undersized, made of metal, made of plants, yoga mats etc
But… it doesn’t seem like the same focus has been placed on email signatures. For many of us who send a lot of email (50+/day) and hand out 1 business card rarely any focus on business cards vs your email signature is misplaced.
Today I am going to share a little test we ran at adbank with our email signatures that had some interesting results and how you can efficiently benefit from upgrading your email signature as well.
The Idea:
We wanted to have an email signature that communicated the unique value proposition of BLADE and made people pause so they took the 2 seconds needed to understand it.
The value proposition of blade is install our ad blocker and replacer and receive free crypto while you browse like you normally would!
It takes 60 seconds to do and once done you are setup forever with the ability to use referral links and share with others.
Execution:
Tyler the adbank UX/UI designer came up with the following design and instructions…
Step 1 – Concept – What simple single GIF animation communicates your unique value proposition for your business?
Step 2 – Creative
Working with an in house designer is handy but UpWork or Fiverr could also be options for getting what you needed done.
Here was the creation Tyler came up with on round 1…
Step 3 – Implementation
Implementation is not as straightforward as you would think. Here are the step by instructions for getting everything setup…
EMAIL SIGNATURE INSTRUCTIONS:
Step 1: Download your signature from the google drive folder
Step 2: Go to your own GSuite accounts google drive and create a new folder titled “email signature”. NOTE: this needs to be its own folder at the top level of your drive.
Step 3: Upload your email signature to your new “email signature” folder.
Step 4: Turn on link sharing and then “sharing settings”
Step 5: in the sharings settings, click advanced in the bottom right corner.
Step 6: In the advanced sharing settings, under the “who has access” title, click the blue “change” button.
Step 7: Turn the settings radio button to “on – public on the web” and press “save”.
Step 8: Now go to your email and click the settings icon and select settings from the menu.
Step 9: Scroll down to the email signature text box and click the image icon. NOTE: make sure the checkbox that says “insert this signature before quoted text” is checked.
Step 10: In the image selector, navigate to the google drive tab
Step 11: Navigate to your signature gif and select it by pressing “select”.
Step 12: Scroll to the bottom of the settings page and click “save”
Step 13: Your email signature should now automatically be embedded every time you compose an email!
Results:
We didn’t have all the tracking we could have had setup (should have used link tracking) but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. In the first week several people shared with me…
- “Saw your signature and finally signed up”
- “That was the coolest email signature I have ever seen”
- “I thought what you guys were doing was complicated but that email signature explained a lot of it”
As a result we are going to be implementing a similar approach across other businesses and setup better tracking to see what works and what doesn’t work.
If you have ever had a clever strategy with your email signature I would be interested in hearing about it!
