Email signatures are one massively overlooked part of email marketing. Most businesses use the signature area to insert their logo and contact information, but that's about it. As you are about to see, you can reap many benefits if you use the email signature area properly. This article will tell you how to turn this neglected area of your business communication into a potential conversion goldmine, so keep reading!
What Is a CTA Email Signature?
A call-to-action (CTA) is an integral part of any digital marketing campaign. In short, a CTA is a point in your landing page, video, blog post, or email where you ask the audience to do something. "Subscribe to our newsletter, "Make sure to like, share and subscribe," "Check out our free webinar/ebook" – those are all examples of calls-to-action. You can see CTAs basically on every page on the web as everyone is trying to sell you something.
So, a CTA email signature is just a call-to-action inserter in the email signature section. Although this doesn't seem groundbreaking, it is much more important than it first appears.
Why Are CTA Email Signatures That Important?
While you should look to include CTAs in all of your marketing content, email signature CTAs are an absolute must for one reason in particular – email frequency.
We won't tell you how landing pages, YouTube videos, or blog posts are unimportant but think about their nature – people rarely come back to read the same article or watch the same video. As for the landing pages, they will hardly click on the same ad again. That means that a CTA on those types of media/pages will be seen/clicked by the same person only once, which is the best-case scenario.
Email signatures appear on every single email you write. What's more, in your regular business correspondence, you are likely to send multiple emails to the same person or emails to multiple people at once. And, because of CC, if you have an email correspondence with a client, their whole team will see the email. That means everyone will see your signature too, and the call-to-action included in it.
Unlike with most other CTAs, if someone doesn't click on a CTA the first time they receive an email from you – no big deal. First, the email will stay in their inbox, and the nature of emails means they might get back to it later. And if that doesn't happen, you are likely to send them a reply in the future anyway, which will create a new conversion chance.
How to Create Effective CTA Email Signatures?
Let’s go over our easy-to-follow guide that will help you create effective CTA email signatures and improve conversion rates in just three simple steps.
Step 1: Make A Professional Email Signature
Before adding CTAs, you need to work on your email signature, ensuring it looks top-notch. For this purpose, it is a good idea to use an email signature generator. These useful tools have a ton of templates and layouts, which are a great starting point. Just make sure you customize them – don't just put your information into the template, it will look too blank and generic.
Your email signature should still have basic info such as name, position, company name, company logo, contact information. You can use a free logo maker, add the right contact information, and make sure your signature looks professional overall. But, it is imperative to leave room for the CTA in the most visible part of the signature.
Step 2: Create a Powerful CTA
The hardest part is making the call to action. This is a science of its own, as copywriters are earning a living doing only this.
In a nutshell, your call-to-action needs to be short and demonstrate value to the target audience, giving them a clear reason to click. For example, if you sell online training, you can put a "watch this free online training video" CTA in your email signature, which will help you drive more registrations to your courses.
Also, if you are running a sale, you should put that in your CTA to create a sense of urgency or offer some other type of customer incentive. It's also a good idea to use short but powerful marketing words such as free, limited, expiring, now, and imperative - watch, click, go, buy, join, and subscribe.
These words trigger emotions and are much more effective than something like: Please, sir/ma'am, if it's not a problem, feel free to click this link and subscribe to our newsletter, it will mean a lot to us, and we might send you some promotional emails from time to time, hoping that you will buy. SUBSCRIBE HERE! is much better.
Step 3: Make your CTA Stand Out
Once you are satisfied with your CTA, it is time to make it stand out. It needs to stand out from the text around it visually – otherwise, it might get unnoticed.
The least you can do is to use bold and CAPS LOCK. But, if you want to do it properly, you should create a banner or a button for the CTA. If you can't do that, that's also OK, as long as the CTA is clearly visible and draws readers' attention. It should be the most dominant part of your email signature, not drowned in the sea of less important information surrounding it.
When your links are the CTAs, always remember to use branded links. A branded link is a Short URL that incorporates your domain name. It will not only stands out and expand the brand awareness but will also gain trust and increase the click-trough rate.
Remember to Change Your Email Signature CTA From Time to Time
Another awesome thing about email signature CTAs is that you can change them whenever you need to. While some CTAs like "read my latest post here" can always work, it is best to use email signatures for more important things.
Promotions, special sales, invitations to events, or local marketing opportunities will be more likely to get you closer to making a conversion than a "subscribe to my newsletter" button. However, even something as simple as that is better than nothing, as it will put more prospects into your sales funnel.
Final Words
"Content marketing doesn't end with your blog. It should be a key part of your product too." - Massimo Chieruzzi.
Massimo put it nicely, as some less obvious marketing opportunities can bring results. Even something as simple as putting a CTA in your email signature can turn out to be a massive conversion boost. Those small things can be huge difference-makers, and the best thing about them is that they are super easy to implement and completely free.
Therefore, don't wait, add CTAs into your email signatures now. Let us know when they start driving more conversions so we can invoice you for this great piece of advice you got from this article. You're welcome!
About the author:
Helga Zabalkanska is a CMO at Newoldstamp (500 Startups backed) and MySignature. She has over 10 years of experience in digital marketing with a data-driven approach. Helga is a startup enthusiast and SaaS lover.
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