Ishan Pandey: Hi Daniel, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind WiseStamp?
Daniel Zweig: So I’m Daniel, the head of marketing at WiseStamp.com. WiseStamp is an email signature management tool. We help businesses make beautiful signatures and unify their brand overall their email communications company-wide. We do this by giving them centralized control over the email signatures of the entire organization.
Ishan Pandey: In what ways can email signatures boost a Company’s growth especially in today’s time and day wherein all sectors are bustling with the huge competition due to multiple players trying to pitch their ideas?
Daniel Zweig: Every day, the typical office worker sends 40 emails. Every day, you have 40 opportunities to sell yourself and your firm in the individual emails you send.
Many individuals approach their email signatures as an afterthought, resulting in a huge potential loss. Those signatures are an opportunity for you to make it obvious who you are, make it simple for others to contact you, and provide them with a place to go to learn more about you, your company, or a project you’re working on.
You’re not getting the benefit of the chance to connect and interact with the individuals you’re emailing if you only include your name and a point or two of contact information in your signature.
What to Include in an Email Signature:
1. First and Last Name
2. Affiliation Info (Such as Job Title and Department)
3. Secondary Contact Information
4. Social Profile Icons
5. Call to Action
6. Booking Links
7. Industry Disclaimer or Legal Requirements
8. Photo or Logo
9. Pronouns
1. Initials and surname: Your name should always be included in electronic communication, just as it should be in snail mail contact, so that the receiver of your letter knows whom it came from. This shows up as the first line of text in the email signature.
2. Affiliation Details (Such as Job Title and Department): Your affiliation information should be included right after your name. Your work title, business or organisation connections, and/or department affiliations are all possibilities. Of course, as you develop a connection with the receiver, your name should become its own pull, but offering this information adds context to the dialogue and your part in it. Furthermore, being a part of a bigger group gives you greater credibility, particularly if the organisation is well-known—this aids in capturing your readers’ attention and convincing them to take your message seriously.
3. Information on Secondary Contacts: Secondary contact information is also necessary so that the receiver knows how to reach you in the future. Phone numbers, fax numbers, and any other mode of contact you wish to promote are examples of secondary information. If you don’t want to give out your direct number, you may use this as a chance to promote your own website, which is a passive method to open the lines of contact without being bombarded with outreach if you don’t want to.
4. Icons for Social Profiles: Your social media presence is an important aspect of your personal brand because it helps you establish a following in your sector and tells others what you care about. What people publish and how they depict themselves may reveal a lot about them.
That’s why including links to your social media profiles in your email signature is a terrific idea. It not only helps people discover new methods to contact and follow you, but it also promotes your own brand.
What’s better? If you publish links to your online material on social media, it may assist increase traffic to it. If you do use social icons in your signature, make sure your accounts are up to date and filled with intriguing, relevant material. (In other words, if you haven’t tweeted in six months, Twitter could be a good option.)
Why not just use text links instead of social network icons? Because icons are easier to recognise for anyone scanning your signature — and they will stand out from the rest of the text. According to NeoMam Studios’ study, colour-enhanced images raise a person’s inclination to read the remainder of the text by 80%. That’s a significant advantage. Plus, icons save a lot of space in a spot where you could be cramming a lot of data.
Even if you have a large number of social media accounts, try to keep your icon count to five or six. Concentrate your efforts on the accounts that are most important to the growth of your company or the development of your personal brand.
If you must include a lot of social network icons, attempt to reduce the amount of other material as much as possible to keep your design from being too cluttered.
5. Invitation to Take Action: A call-to-action is one of the smartest things you can do in your email signature. The greatest email signature CTAs are straightforward, current, non-obtrusive, and consistent with your email style, making them look more like a postscript than a sales pitch. Choose a CTA that corresponds to one of your current business objectives and update it if those objectives change.
6. Legal Requirements or Industry Disclaimer: To prevent the transmission of private information, several businesses, such as legal, financial, and insurance, have special standards on email use and etiquette. As a result, you may wish to check what restrictions your sector has in place and put a caution concerning email transfers in your signature. Examples of email disclaimers may be found at Mail-Signatures, like this one:
“This email contains sensitive information and is only meant for the recipient named in the message. Sharing any portion of this communication with a third party without the sender’s explicit permission is strictly prohibited. If you got this communication by accident, please respond to it and delete it as soon as possible so that this does not happen again.”
7. A photograph or a logo : A picture is a terrific way to add some personality to your email signature. Consider using a professional picture in your signature if you want to add a personal touch so that people who have never seen you may identify your name with your face. Alternatively, you may include the company’s logo in the email to increase brand recognition.
9. Pronouns: While not popular in email signatures and definitely not needed, including your preferred pronouns in your signature might be useful, particularly when contacting someone you’ve never met. It also removes any uncertainty if your name is seen as gender-neutral.
Ishan Pandey: The human population has been greatly affected by the global Covid-19 outbreak, from businesses and healthcare providers to merchants and professionals. Do you think the pandemic has hastened the implementation of digital signatures across all sectors?
Daniel Zweig: Working remotely has been the new normal since the Covid-19 epidemic. This presents a new set of issues for financial institutions, which are required by law to keep records and assure business continuity. In this setting, it is critical for financial institutions to be able to continue to conduct legitimate and enforceable transactions, preserve electronic records with full evidential value, and meet their regulatory record-keeping needs utilising electronic methods.
Despite a moment of tremendous social and economic worry, the proper deployment of technical measures, such as email signatures, has made everyone’s life at work easier, and we think that such measures will continue to be implemented.
Workplace productivity and efficiency have skyrocketed, making us more competitive even after the present epidemic has passed.
Ishan Pandey: One of the most disregarded parts of a well-rounded marketing campaign is email signatures. How can businesses utilise this modern marketing technique properly and, most importantly, how can they be made aware of the benefits of a well-crafted email signature?
Daniel Zweig: Here is a guide on how to write email signatures:
1. Your name, affiliation, and supplementary contact information should all be highlighted.
2. Colours should be basic and consistent.
3. Make use of the design hierarchy.
4. Make connections that can be tracked.
5. Make use of dividers.
6. Your phone number should include an international prefix.
7. Make your design responsive to mobile devices.
1. Make your name, affiliation, and supplementary contact information as prominent as possible: Your name appears first, as you would expect. Your affiliation and other ways to contact you should be included right after your name.
Your affiliation might be your work title, your firm, potential school, or any comparable group that you think your receivers would find useful. Of course, your name should ultimately stand on its own, but choosing a more well-known brand name — and even its logo — assures that your readers notice you and take your message seriously.
It’s also crucial to have secondary contact information. You may not want to advertise your personal phone number, but you may use this chance to promote your personal website, which is a passive method to open the channels of contact without being inundated with unsolicited calls.
2. Use a limited palette of colours that are both basic and consistent: When it comes to branding, consistency is key, and your email signature is no exception. Adding colour to your email signature will make it stand out from the rest of your message. If you do decide to utilise colour, keep it to one or two colours in addition to the dark text.
3. Make use of the design hierarchy: It’s all about delivering your facts in a way that’s easy to understand. Since your email signature is more likely to be a list of facts than a fascinating tale, you’ll want to employ hierarchy to draw readers’ attention to the information they should read first.
4. Make links trackable: Suppose you include your CTA and social network symbols in your email signature, along with a few links. Is anybody, however, really clicking on them?
Make the links in your signature trackable, just like any other link in your emails, to see whether they’re drawing traffic and having an effect.
5. Create a mobile-friendly design: Apple’s iMobile accounted for 46 percent of all email opens in June 2018, according to Litmus. Furthermore, mobile users check their email three times as often as non-mobile users.
You’ll want to keep mobile users in mind while drafting emails, including your email signature, as the number of individuals who read email on mobile devices grows.
Making your email signature’s design simple to see and clickable for mobile users is one of the most important ways to make it mobile-friendly. This is where the concept of scale comes into play. Make sure your text is big enough to read on tiny mobile displays and that your links and buttons are large enough to touch with their fingers.
Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about the B2B model adopted by email signature companies?
Daniel Zweig: For sure, to give you an example, WiseStamp simplifies into less than an hour a task that can take a business ten hours to implement otherwise. Our users have to use our email signature generator to create a professional company email signature and integrate their email provider with our system, which is very quick and easy to do.
When you think about most small to medium size companies with, let’s say, 35-50 employees, and even more so big companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, emails are always a bit of a wild west. Everyone kind of has their own way of doing it. This means that company emails are not harnessed for focused goals. For example, branding, marketing, or recruiting.
Using the email signatures tool, a company can quickly implement a consistent email signature for all the employee’s emails and publish email marketing campaigns, HR campaigns and simple design updates any time, without having to involve anyone other than the admin. Imagine the relief for managers that used to require each of their 1000 employees to update the company signature on their own email.
Ishan Pandey: The study of worldwide market research Email Signature Manager extracts includes data on market size and patterns and the causes and characteristics that influence them in the short and long term. What, according to you, has been the major push behind the rising popularity of global company email signatures?
Daniel Zweig: In many ways, Covid-19 finished the ongoing digitalization process that occurred in the past few years. As more people are forced to stay at home, they are learning to trust digital transactions online. Moreover, businesses are moving to digital platforms to be able to supply the demand.
Email is still by far the most common form of communication between business and their clients. Email is the main tool for customer relationships, support, sending invoices, etc.
After Covid, most first impressions occur in email communication, and this created an increased awareness of the need for a more professional looking email. For most people, this means having a great looking email signature, which for them is the digital equivalent of a business card.
Ishan Pandey: Professionals frequently complain about their inability to write mails, citing clarity, brevity, and velocity as primary roadblocks. Please share with us a few easy pointers that will help you communicate more effectively while also saving time.
Daniel Zweig: Effective communication is the key. More than just sharing information is required for effective communication. For most professionals, I imagine this just means trying to get into the head of the person you’re writing to.
To give you an example, for a SaaS company like WiseStamp, which sends over 40 thousand emails each month, it is all about deciphering the emotions and motivations underlying our user data.
Effective communication can be a natural inclination. However, sometimes, something goes wrong when we attempt to interact with others. We say one thing, but the other person hears something completely different, resulting in misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, and conflict. This might create issues in your relationships at home, school, and work.
Many of us will need to master specific crucial skills in order to communicate more simply and effectively. Learning these skills may deepen your relationships with people, establish more trust and respect, and enhance cooperation, problem-solving, and your general social and emotional health, whether you’re aiming to better communicate with your spouse, children, employer, or colleagues.
The following are some of the most common communication roadblocks:
Stress and irrational emotions: You’re more prone to misjudge other people, convey confused or off-putting nonverbal cues, and fall into harmful knee-jerk behaviour when you’re worried or emotionally overloaded. You may learn how to swiftly cool yourself before resuming a discussion to prevent conflict and misconceptions.
Inability to concentrate: When you’re multitasking, you can’t communicate properly. You’re virtually guaranteed to miss nonverbal signs in a discussion if you’re checking your phone, preparing what you’re going to say next, or daydreaming. To communicate successfully, you must remain focused and avoid distractions.
Be willing to make concessions: If you can both bend a bit, you may be able to discover a pleasant middle ground that relieves tension for everyone involved. Compromise may be easy for you and beneficial investment for the future of the relationship if you know the other person cares considerably more about an issue than you do.
If necessary, agree to disagree and take a break from the situation so that everyone may relax. If feasible, take a walk outdoors or meditate for a few minutes. Physical activity or finding a quiet spot to recover your equilibrium might help relieve stress immediately.
Practising assertive communication skills: An empathetic statement shows that you care for the other person. Recognize the other person’s position or sentiments before expressing your own demands or opinions. “I understand you’ve had a lot on your plate at work, but I’d want you to make time for us as well.”
When your initial efforts are unsuccessful, you may use escalating assertion. As time passes, you grow more firm, which may involve laying out the repercussions if your requirements are not satisfied. “If you don’t follow the deal, I’ll be obliged to take legal action against you,” for example.
To help you gain confidence, practise assertiveness in low-risk circumstances. Alternatively, see if you can practise assertiveness methods on friends or family members first.
Disclaimer: The purpose of this article is to remove informational asymmetry existing today in our digital markets by performing due diligence by asking the right questions and equipping readers with better opinions to make informed decisions.
The material does not constitute any investment, financial, or legal advice. Please do your research before investing in any digital assets or tokens, etc. The writer does not have any vested interest in the company.
