Guest post by Taha Sheikh | Personalized email signatures are a powerful way for you and your sales team to foster stronger relationships with your prospects.
Each outgoing email can be signed with personalized sender information such as social profiles, phone numbers, addresses and other relevant contact details. When sending emails to a large distribution list, it is also possible to automate signature personalization for each recipient so that it appears as though the email was sent directly from someone relevant to them - for example, the signature of their account manager.
We looked at customers who included personalized signatures in their emails and compared the click-through and open rates of these emails to those with no signatures from the same customers, and observed that email click-through rates for emails with signatures was more than double that without signatures. This seemed reasonable to us - one would expect that people are more likely to read through and engage with content that they believe was curated for them by somebody.
We also observed a drastic difference in open rates of 35.4% versus 7.2% respectively. We thought of a few things that may help explain this. Since emails from a salesperson are typically more relevant with prospects who are further along in the buying cycle, we expect better engagement when they see an email from a person at a company they are already talking to. Also, emails without personalization tend to be the largest, most unsegmented campaigns - typically the lowest performers. However, there were some additional factors that may have had an impact - what else can you think of?