GROWTH-1: How to Automate Email Signatures to be Dynamic

Take control of all employees’ email signatures

Save hours creating new signatures and requesting employees update them to match your latest offer. Update the signature promo as often as needed without having to ask people to do anything ever again.

…after the first setup of course!

-- Growth Post #1 by Greg Fournier.

The Philosophical Part.

Marketing’s digital revolution, has brought about a change in the profile of marketers, that have had to adapt and become a little more technical. It’s not about being a great developer in a particular language or even knowing a little of every language out there. Rather it’s about understanding the fundamental principles of how stuff actually works. When you login to Google, what actually happens? Do you know?
 
Much like Columbus’ egg, this understanding means some simple tricks become very obvious. This article is a great first piece to this new blog because it illustrates this perfectly. It covers a solution that is ridiculously simple and which most people will be able to achieve with their own tools, at least I hope! And yet it is something that makes a huge impact to the efficiency with which we, marketers, can leverage the email signature of all our employees, without them needing to do anything at all but add it once!
 
There are 2 simple steps to getting this project to work, and if you have the same tools we do at Smartly.io, then you’d have the perfect solution.

But since this project is so simple I feel there is an opportunity to do something better. So, rather than providing you a step by step guide of what to do to for you to claim control of all your company’s employee email signatures, I’d like to attempt to teach a marketer to think differently, so you can do it yourself.
 
If you feel the approach isn’t for you, then just skip ahead to the bottom for the “solution” so to speak.

Step 1. What is an image in an email?

You send an email to a friend with an image. (Do people still do this?)

Anyway, you add it as an attachment.

But when you send your monthly newsletter out and that has an image it's not an attachment, is it?

It’s just HTML referring to a specific location online.

So, you are sending out an email that has code saying open the image in this location and place it here in the email. So, what would happen if you were to change the file that exists in that specific location, and reload the email? If you guessed the image would change in the email, you’d be right!
 
So all you need is:

(1) to find a place where you can “host” your email signature banner, and replace it each time you want to change the promoted content! We use HubSpot to do that but you can actually use all sorts of tools to achieve the same effect, including Google Drive.
 
And

(2) Figure out how to use this in a signature of non-marketing emails. For now we’ve only experimented with Gmail but all it requires is adding the image by Web Address (URL) instead of trying to paste it in or selecting it from the library. From there you can actually copy paste the rendered signature to other email clients. We’ve tried Apple Mail successfully! This suggests you can copy paste rendered HTML cod into client so it should be supported in most places!

Step 2 - What happens when I follow a link?

There are way more qualified people to explain this in full detail, but someone once described it to me as such: Browser sends request through the router to you Internet Service Provider (ISP), which checks with Domain Name System (DNS) servers which allows them to determine they need to send the request to the Google servers, which is then returned to the browser via the ISP.
 
Fun times right! And also why should you care? Well turns out, if you, as a marketer, manage your company website, then you likely can tell your servers to point browsers that request certain things to certain places… Get it yet?
We’re lucky to be able to handle 302 redirects easily via Hubspot user interface, and this varies greatly depending on your setup. But when there is a will there is a way!

If your content management  or website management tool does not give you this option your domain manager will be able to execute this.
 

Wrap up.

So that’s it, you now understand what is required for this project to work.

An image you can update, and a link you can redirect whenever the main content you want the entire company to promote changes. You can even consider implementing different versions, perhaps for each region you operate in or product lines!

Feel free to share implementations you’ve come up with based on this simple little trick! Hope it saves you and many employees countless hours updating email signatures!

If you want a short form of the solution to this project, just take a look below.