Inbound and outbound emails are an integral tenet of virtually every modern-day business. From hospitality companies to offices, retailers to service providers, a huge proportion of queries a company handles day-to-day come in the form of email. An email is often a client/customer’s first point of contact with a company; receiving an email following your initial enquiry might well be the first time they’ve spoken to anybody from you firm.
With such stakes at play, then, conveying your brand’s professionalism and reputability from the off is crucial. Email signatures can play a big part in aiding this, but they need to implemented correctly. Here at Nutbourne, a leading managed service provider in London who offer email signature management services, we wanted to look at some of the benefits in a little more detail.
Brand Identity and Image
Unquestionably, one of the biggest benefits of utilising email signature management services is the added professionalism and gravitas that email signatures offer you. Thinking about it from the perspective of a potential customer or client, the difference is obvious. If the response to your initial enquiry email is footed with a slick and smart-looking email signature, that’s going to make a much bigger impact than a simple “Yours sincerely, Joe Blogs”.
The bar for what customers expect in today’s business world is continually rising; whereas once an email signature might have been something that made you really stand out, nowadays it’s taken as a given that you’ll have one. So, if you don’t? You’re going to struggle to establish a truly strong brand presence.
Email Signature Management Software Offers Consistency
Having an email signature is one thing, however, having consistent signatures isn’t as universally an implemented process as you might expect. Having employees from the same company emailing with different signatures reeks of unprofessionalism almost as much as does not having one, at all.
Convey your Company Tone, Visually
Linked to that point about brand image is the actual usage of image within email signature management tools; many platforms will come with the ability of customising and formatting fonts, sizing and imagery which enables a company to convey its tone-of-voice as much through what they don’t say, as what they do say within the body of an email. An email signature can indicate whether a business is corporate or casual, chatty or to-the-point, abstract or serious.
Greater Scalability
Many smaller businesses create email signatures individually, one-by-one. And, to an extent this works just fine. When businesses start to scale up, however, and you’re adding tens or hundreds of employees – thousands even – then this manual approach is time-consuming, laborious and will result in a far greater number of errors.
These mistakes, it’s worth pointing out, entirely negate the point of even having an email signature; that added professionalism you’re after won’t exactly land if the formatting is littered with typos… Email signature management software, on the other hand, affords easily scalability with the addition of new users and their standardised signatures completed with just a few clicks of a button.
Save Time, Apply it Elsewhere
With manually copy/pasted email signatures, your IT team (if your firm has one) is wasting time it could be spending on other, more important tasks. If this past year has taught us anything, it’s the importance of optimising your productivity and your use of time. Clerical tasks, administrative work and other data jobs are the sort of activities which might once have been a drain of time. With software focusing on business aspects such as email signature management, however, you can automate the more tedious (though no less important) components of quotidian corporate life.
When You Leave Email Signatures to Employees, There’s Always a Risk
Whether they’re simply forgetful, disinterested or, on the extreme end of the spectrum, resentful towards your company – though we hope that that’s not the case! – leaving employees to look after their own signatures can result in problems. Asides from the lack of consistency it can bring, as mentioned before, you’re leaving a big swathe of your company’s professionalism – client-facing sections of the business – in the hands of your employees. No matter how good or trustworthy your employees, this isn’t a smart business choice, particularly for bigger companies where it’s harder to keep a handle on everything that your employees are doing. In other words, email signature management software helps mitigate unnecessary risk.
Contact Us
So, if you’d like to find out more about our work as a managed service provider in London, under which we offer email signature management services, then get in touch! Contact Nutbourne today on +44 (0) 203 137 7273 or by filling out one of our online contact forms. You can also get in touch with us via ChatBot and our team will get back to you as quickly as possible. We look forward to hearing from you!