Promote Nurturing with Signature Lines

I have this theory that any email communication can be used to nourish your prospects and customers. Everyone at your company uses a signature line when emailing, right?

They probably include a link to your website, maybe your company blog.

What if they included a compelling question or controversial statement and linked to the answer/explanation content that addresses it?

So instead of a sig line that goes this way:

John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677
www.xyzcompany.com

You could have one for prospects:

John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677

Wasted time searching for info may be costing your company $1.5M every year. Find out why...http://xyzcompany.com/wasted_time

And you could have one for customers:

John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677

Did you know the new BLOOP feature can shorten time to revenue? Tips to start using it today...http://xyzcompany.com/bloop

You may need to provide a list of provocative statements and links to your staff each week, but if you're continuously creating content this shouldn't be a big deal. The fact is, you probably have a lot of content you can put to good use right now.

You may not be able to segment as tightly as you'd like, but you can increase the satisfaction, interactions and engagement of those your company communicates with outside the realm of marketing.

Experiment with using these above and below the actual signature information.

For example:

Thanks,
John

***
Did you know the new BLOOP feature can shorten time to revenue? Tips to start using it today...http://xyzcompany.com/bloop
***
John Smith
Manager of All
XYZ Company
666-223-6677

Monitor traffic to these content offerings to gauge interest levels. You may even discover a shifting priority or problem-to-solution scenario that applies to a prospect or customer segment you hadn't considered.

Don't make it a sales pitch. Make it helpful.

Have your staff create two email signatures - one for non-customers and one for customers. Or assign the link of the week for the most common type of correspondence specific groups of employees engage in. Each week all they'll need to do is update their signature files with the new info. It's a copy and paste, not rocket science.

This doesn't have to be a time consuming ordeal. But, it can reap some great results and be instrumental in generating dialogue between your company and your prospects and customers.

Start with salespeople's sig lines. Add customer service and support. Test. Expand...etc.

In this challenging economic time, providing helpful insights in addition to whatever the email addresses could turn all your employees into nurturers.

Comments

[Nick Beale]

Great idea Ardath. We use Gmail (Enterprise version) and there is a feature which allows you to save canned responses and then drop these into your emails. It makes it very easy to set up responses for customers (tips, tricks) and responses for potential clients (pain and solutions) etc. I imagine there are similar features in many other mail clients. This makes it very easy to achieve your suggestions above.

All the best

Nick

PS - Thank you for such a great blog, your insights and strategies are really valued

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks, Nick. I'm glad you found it helpful.

Outlook also allows users to create multiple signature files and it's easy to click and choose which to use with each email.