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The Email Signature: A great (yet often forgotten) branding opportunity
Are you optimizing your email signatures?
A few days ago, a long-lost dear friend of mine reconnected after googling me. (I know, the boys at Google don't like their name converted into a verb...but that is exactly what happened -- my friend used Google to find and email me.) Of all the great tools this new digital media world provides, "connecting" via the Internet remains the most essential asset. Connecting people with ideas, with content, with information, and perhaps most importantly, with other people.
As we all experience now and then, close friends sometimes drift apart never to get back together. Sometimes several years go by and you pick up right where you left off as if no time eclipsed at all. The Jointblog and top first-page Google ranking helped my friend find me again.
Over the past couple of days, we caught up with each other's lives, exchanging pictures and stories, and making plans to get together in the city in the near future. Without the Internet and email, our reconnection would probably never be possible; we've both made several moves since being last in touch, changing phone numbers and addresses along the way.
Google made it possible...so, thanks Google!
Setting aside my personal news and the good deed from Google, there was something exceptionally worthwhile sharing for the Jointblog. It was just a little detail that caught my eye at the end of my friend's email: the pre-saved signature message.
In addition to name and contact info (plus the micro-print corporate blurb about email confidentiality), there was a quote -- which happens to be a favourite of mine. Perhaps my friend's usage of the quote is one of the reasons we have a solid core foundation; a simple code for our relatability.
So often, we email as quickly as possible, without giving much thought to how we manage our "brand", professionally or personally. Email is a direct form of one-on-one marketing. Yes, the most important content in each email we craft is the unique custom messages. But the signature line is an important marketing reminder to keep us connected. It's often the last part of the received email we read right before we reply.
This little story about email signatures sets up a question you may not have asked yourself (or the company you manage): when was the last time you adjusted your signature brand message? Are your employees communicating with the ideal, up-to-date basic "form" that "frames" the content of business email?
There are so many ways today to customize emails, from quotes to graphics to corporate links and news announcements to RSS feeds.
The quote, which is only attributed to "anonymous": "Excellence is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, skillful execution and the vision to see obstacles as opportunities."
When it comes to email excellence -- either professional or personal -- brand excellence can be reinforced with a simple little thing like the right signature line.
I'm grateful my friend continues pursuing excellence.
To read an excellent article based on this quote, click here.
posted by Unknown @ Saturday, October 14, 2006,
