Your email signature is much more than just a digital signoff. Sure, it’s a great way to provide essential information about who you are and how to reach you. But it can also be a powerful marketing tool, acting as a mini-billboard with every email message you send to clients, business partners, and leads.
When set up correctly, it can even become a place to showcase your best products, turning every email into a marketing tool that generates sales virtually on autopilot. And that’s exactly what this article is all about.
You’ll learn:
- The biggest benefits of promoting products in email signatures
- Best practices for adding product promotions to your emails
- Top tools for quickly adding products to your email signature
- Metrics to track for improving performance
Ready to get started? Then read on below.
Benefits of adding product banners to email signatures
Having product offers in your signature can seem like a distraction, and sometimes it can be. But when done right, it actually enhances your core message and offers a range of powerful benefits for your business.
Let’s explore these benefits below.
Increased visibility of selling products
Your best-selling products have a broad appeal to your target audience. So one of the main goals for your business is to get them in front of as many people as possible.
By adding top sellers to your email signature, you can easily get them in front of people who are very likely to be interested, boosting their visibility in the process. On top of that, you can help people become more aware of what your company sells and does, raising brand awareness and forming associations about what you can offer.
Enhanced credibility and trust
Building trust is a key part of successful marketing. Featuring your store’s products and best offers in your email signature is a form of social proof. Subtly communicating the popularity of your products helps create a desire while also making your brand more credible.
You want your brand to be associated with successful products and what they can do. Having these products as part of email communication reinforces the idea that you’re the go-to brand for specific solutions, which can play a huge role in building trust and closing sales once those customers are ready to buy.
Clicks and sales
Even though featuring products in email signatures has many advantages, there’s still the most direct benefit that matters most: sales. A well-designed email signature that’s enhanced with enticing product banners will lead to clicks and conversions for your business.
Without having to do anything else and without needing to actively ask your team to promote products, you can create an additional traffic source for your best offers, providing a potentially significant boost to sales.
Cost-effective marketing channel
Promoting your products online is expensive. Whether running paid ads, setting up order management software, creating content, or building a social media presence, most ways to get your products in front of target audiences will cost money or time, without any guarantee of success.
Meanwhile, using an email signature to showcase your products costs almost nothing and is very easy to set up with the right tools. Once done, every email communication that would happen anyway becomes enhanced with a marketing message, helping you achieve business goals in a way that’s more cost effective than most alternative methods you could consider.
Best practices for highlighting products in email signatures
Putting a product in your email signature seems pretty straightforward. Just slap a link or a banner with your product and you’re set, right?
Well, in reality, every element in your email signature needs to work together and have a clear purpose to deliver results. And that means you need to follow the best practices of including products in your signature if you don’t want it to become a distraction or even annoyance to your customers.
Let’s look at a few of the most important best practices you should consider.
Keep it concise and visually appealing
An email signature is often the most visible part of the email. But that also means that it can easily become overwhelming and distract from the main message you want to emphasize.
To avoid this, you’ll need to be very deliberate about which elements you choose to include and prioritize. While there are essential details you’ll want to have such as your name, contact details, and job title, other elements can be mixed and matched according to your needs.
When you decide to include top-selling products in your email signature, that means you may have to sacrifice some other elements to maintain a visually appealing design. Using comprehensive email signature software can make it much easier, offering a variety of templates that follow good design principles and highlight the offer.
Use high-quality images or icons
Your email signatures will only be effective if they look professional. And that means the design needs to actually look good, which can only happen if you use high-quality images or icons.
Whether it’s a product picture in the banner, your company’s logo, or even a photo of yourself, these elements need to be high-quality and represent your company well.
When it comes to photos of your product, that can matter even more, because the image plays a key role in creating a desire for what you’re promoting. Great photos can make a strong first impression, creating an instant desire for your products and significantly increasing the likelihood of people clicking through to check them out on your website.
Add a clear call to action
Adding a product promotion to your email signature will make it a central feature of your email. But you still need to share clear directions for users if you want to increase the likelihood of getting them to click through.
That’s why in addition to the product itself, you should use a clear and visible call to action button that encourages people to check out the product’s page. Some options to consider include “Shop Now” or “Learn More”, depending on the offer and your goals.
And if you want to add more urgency, you can also include a copy that emphasizes the deal itself. For example, if you have a promotion that will end soon, adding a “Limited Time Offer” CTA can create a bit of urgency that gets people to click through and act faster.
Optimize for mobile devices
Mobile devices account for more than 40% of all email opens. Because of that, you need to ensure that your email signature is fully responsive and optimized for various screen sizes. Unfortunately, many people don’t consider this crucial element of signature design, and end up with one that looks good on desktop but gets distorted on a mobile screen.
To avoid issues with how your signature promoting best-selling products looks, your best bet is to use a reputable email signature solution with responsive templates and design options that look good on any device.
It’s also important to use shorter text and visuals that translate well to smaller screens, because even a responsive design may look different if you add too many elements. Before launching your signature, you should always test it on different devices and all the main email clients.
Update offers regularly
Effective email signatures must be updated regularly. That includes not only details about you and the company but also the products you’re promoting in the email signature banner.
Even the best-selling product promotions become repetitive over time and need to be tweaked to generate new interest. While you may not always want to change the products themselves, experimenting with different banner designs, CTAs, and promotions can help keep the offer relevant and maintain clicks and sales over time.
If you use a comprehensive email signature management tool, you can also track email opens and clicks, allowing you to gain insights into which types of product banners are working best. You can then use these insights to continually improve performance, generating more sales from every email you and your team send.
Most important KPIs for evaluating performance
The only way to know whether your product promotions are delivering results is to track performance. That means you need to establish the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can tell you whether you’re meeting your goals or need to make changes.
Here are a couple of the most important KPIs you should monitor.
Click-through rate
The click-through rate is an integral measure of success when evaluating whether your product banners work. While a prospect may not necessarily click the link, even if they’re interested, it’s usually a good indicator that you’ve piqued their interest enough so that they at least want to learn more.
The great thing about click-through rates is that they’re easy to track using a solution like MySignature, providing you clear feedback about whether you need to experiment with the banner’s design, messaging, or the product and offer themselves.
Conversion rate
The ultimate goal of promoting products in email signatures is to boost sales for your business. That’s why it’s no surprise that a key metric you should track is how many people actually buy.
If you’re generating clicks but not sales, that can indicate that the landing page for the product isn’t doing a good enough job of establishing trust, creating desire, and getting people to take action. The problem could also be related to the message in the banner not aligning with what people discover once they click through to the product page.
Bottom line
Email signatures have become an indispensable part of business communication. They offer context for who the email is from, give credibility, and provide relevant details about how to learn more or reach out.
But they can also become an integral marketing tool, allowing you to promote your best-selling products in every email you send and creating new sales without any additional effort or cost for your business.
In this guide, we covered why promoting products in signatures makes sense, how to do it effectively, which tools to use, and how to track performance. Now, you should be more than ready to make product promotions a prominent feature of your email communications.
