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thanks for joining us for another awesome webinar so happy you could be here with us I'm Colin Campbell and playing host today I'm the director of marketing at sales hacker and I am 100% pumped to be joined by Bobby Narang he's the VP of Sales at open sense say hi to the people Bobby everybody great to be here today thanks for being here also here is Lauren alt she's a good friend and the marketing campaign manager right Lauren correct that's the outrage hi all right thanks so much for being here so this one's really special everybody so if you're joining you're you're you're lucky to actually be here for the live one because I think this is an interesting topic people are gonna have a lot of questions the benefit of being live is you can ask those questions and you don't have to watch the recording and wonder what the answers to your questions are so today we're talking about how to kind of hack your email how there are some tricks and tips and kind of secrets like these places in your signature and in deliverability don't worry we're not gonna make that part boring they give you an edge right like we always talk about how I think some of the best salespeople are great marketers and some of the best marketers are also fantastic salespeople what we're talking about today I think lives right at that intersection so this is where you can find an edge we're going to talk about how to improve your email signature without help from IT how to sneak under the radar of your brand team and a couple other really cool little hacks so Bob earrings gonna walk through all that Laurens gonna tell an amazing story and you're gonna be like wow I want this so one thing two things to cover before we get into it and then I'm gonna hand it over to Bobby first of all as usual we're recording this so if you have to step away for any reason don't worry well show you the recording later and then the second thing is right now guys go to the Q&A box down at the bottom of your screen click it and introduce yourselves can you tell us your name and what you got in your email signature right now I'll start in my email signature I've got my phone number my email a logo and I think just a link to the website I'm Bobby Mike there's a couple things later Bobby might put me on blast later for that hey it's just for the good of the community you know what I'm I'm my own biggest laughingstock so I don't mind you call him you know all right Bert Linda hi Bert Damian Kelly's got his logo his name email and a book a meeting link clay Nobles is here a picture that's good name title contact info logo and links Bert Landa has name name of the company contact phone number Wow smart Trevor Trevor Abbott just like his whole his whole signature in there so he's got a title link to the website phone email all right a lot of the same stuff here some some smart people are adding some extra stuff and already doing some interesting things here cool I like it I like it everybody I see you barb okay hi barb thanks for joining us okay so without any further ado since everybody's joined everybody's got their Q&A box open and they're ready to ask questions and participate I'll hand it over to Bobbi who's gonna lay out a bunch of secrets and hacks that you can put into your email to increase engagement get more replies and just sell more stuff awesome thanks Collin I really appreciate that intro and I actually really love that point that you made about your belief that some of the best marketers maybe make some of the great sale great salespeople and and sort of great salespeople also tend to make great marketers I think we see that trend more and more in in sort of modern sales with you know if you think about sort of outbound prospecting and being able to create that engagement within a recipients inbox whether it's with Creek coming up with creative email signatures or interesting content in the body of the email I mean these are all things that we as salespeople are kind of required to do today in the modern sales process in order to really engage with our prospects and and make conversations and eventually deals happen so I love that point love that point that you made and I think this very much time kind of falls in line with that it's just another layer that we can add as you know some of these practices become more in frenched you're always going to want to look for that edge and things that you can do a little bit differently to make that impact and so that's where I think there's there's probably going to be some interesting opportunity for discussion today I want to start really quickly I know Colin was was so kind to introduce myself I'm Bobby Narang VP sales at open sense lauren alts on the line as well campaigns manager at outreach so want to give her a shout out also but I want to take a quick second today to just really provide a quick overview of what we're gonna kind of cover today Laurens gonna start off by just sort of clearing the air in terms of common misconceptions that perhaps even she and her team had around email signatures and campaigns prior to implementing some recently and and and provide a little bit of an overview of just a victory a win that that perhaps was maybe they bet on but to see the results we're gonna kind of hear a little bit of a story around that we're then gonna transition a little bit to talk about email signatures and and really what is what are their impact why are they so meaningful why do they matter today in the modern sales practice and specifically around email signature banners how to even make effective banners like we call this the sales hacker community so I have like a pretty neat I think trick to leverage some of your existing marketing functionality your marketing campaigns to create banners sort of on the fly and really some ideas of how you can make the most out of those banners throughout your sales process so email deliverability basics is something i think is worthwhile in covering because I think signatures are something that you would modify in your email and frankly any time you make a modification your email add attachment include a link maybe modify your signature there are some potential impacts that you should be aware of from a deliverability standpoint but with some really easy low-hanging fruit tools I'm gonna provide you with today we can make sure that we're kind of getting ahead of those and ensuring that we're doing the right things to make sure the messages are hitting the inbox and then we'll kind of close out with some additional insight into the results of outreaches initial cam and can I just say on the point of deliverability when I hear the word deliverability I kind of want to go to sleep but I also know that like everybody else feels that way so what I do is like drink a cup of coffee and then try to pay attention because I know if everybody else is sleeping on it it's something I can so that's the part everybody should take notes on take notes on all of this but if nothing else deliverability because if you're going to put effort into improving your email signature and doing some of these tricks you got to make sure it gets to where it's going yeah I think that's a great point and we're just gonna talk about very much the low-hanging for just some really really easy world yep cool so let's actually get going here Lauren I'm gonna toss the baton to you and I would love for you to talk a little bit about some of your initial misconceptions perhaps about the email signature channel yeah thanks Bobby um I was little I was a little bit confused as to why you asked me to talk about my misconceptions before we implemented email signatures maybe I'm the most jaded marketer you know or because I'm a marketer who appreciates outbound sales since I work at outreach but I I'm assuming that a lot of other people had the same concerns whether you're a marketer or salesperson or why not as as I did when it comes to seeing somebody an email signature management know as kind of a marketing channel the first one was that I was I was obviously concerned about deliverability Colin says that he falls asleep when he hears that word but as marketers I I mean I built my career and email marketing in a marquee knob so that's something that were the word that we're scared of but that we embrace and we talk about it a lot so that was something that I am immediately thought that would be affected by implanting this into our outbound sales emails the second thing was that response rates on our outbound sales emails with decrease so I worked very closely what to make sure that our outbound sales team and our sales development team is able to convert inbound leads to meetings as well as work outbound lanes and so I was concerned that that you know the email signature as a channel would take away from responding to our emails I'm at the end of the day that's the goal it's like to drive bottom line and set medians and you know have growth so I wanted to make sure that in many something like this within a sales email versus like having links out to landing pages in a marketing email would drive the results that we're intending so Lauren you were concerned that they would click the link instead of responding not in addition to responding yeah yeah so all of our sales emails are plain text obviously and we don't have a lot of links because though the goal of them is to get people to respond and to for our Cirrus be able to book a meeting with them and so you know my traditional marketing world was that marketing emails are for awareness and for nurturing and for educating and to get form fills and all that kind of stuff and that sales emails were then to convert and to build up what I want a relationship I wasn't sure if we could do both so that was that was like a concern that I had the third was like I'm not sure if it's the lead generating channel I've been like successfully avoiding about cold emails from people within this space for a few years now since I heard about it maybe not the best thing but I I just wasn't sure if it was a scalable lead generating channel for us and why they're not like I just assumed there was other low-hanging fruit there and I wasn't sure whether or not it actually could drive inbound leads instead of just awareness and the fourth was that I wasn't sure it would render really part really in our shows engagement platform which of course we use outreach I wasn't sure you know how that would work how it land in other people's inboxes when it was sent through our outreach servers so that was the last concern I had and the fourth one's really easy to prove wrong cuz Bobbi just I think I met you at Dreamforce and you're like I'll just send you an email from my phone from outreach and then it landed in my inbox and it was actually you know and it Rendell rendered perfect because I was like ours doesn't support HTML I think I said that and you're like I figured it out and then we go to the next slide for me you can see this is just an example of an email that was sent from outreach yesterday actually to my inbox and so in fact rendering was not really a problem for us the way that we use it now is effective and you know doesn't skew anything so those were the common misconceptions that I I hadn't I assume that other people on the line marketers are they have and so I wanted to share that so has affects me bought me awesome yeah I do remember that interaction and I was very excited to show that to directly out of outreach has an outreach user ourselves so appreciate that that anecdote so let's let's keep it moving here a little bit you know before we take off with the email signatures I kind of just want to set some additional context here of how you want to kind of think about leveraging signatures in your outbound emailing whether it's prospecting or in day to day follow-up I call this sort of a pre-flight flight checklist I've ever since I watched Top Gun as a kid I just just loved the idea of you know haven't having to walk through these so I bring it to email outreach and prospecting so basically we're gonna start with some of the things that we're going to use to sort of create impact with the email signature it's not just about the banner that that whole email signature I think you know seeing some of the things that you all are already doing with the signature in in the Q&A window it kind of conveys that clearly we all understand that there's there's impact to be had there so let's let's talk first about some of the basics branding why that's important making sure that your information is accurate and clickable as you know more and more emails are being viewed set and viewed for mobile devices that's a huge way to create impact high value things that can be done to create impact again I heard folks are already doing some of these things the calendar link including some some elements that reduce friction and increase engagement during your sales process and then finally of course the email signature banner and and what that can potentially mean for your prospecting or your selling under the hood then again we just want to touch on some really low hanging fruit tools that you just want to be aware of easy things that you can do to make sure that you're doing everything you can to make sure not only that your message is received but then ultimately that it's well received as well so just want to set some context around this before we kind of start talking about email signatures and I love this sort of the screenshot of exhibit and pick my ride I don't know again I like to frame myself as an elder millennial we were kind of joking about this before kicking off here but but yeah we're gonna we're gonna make sure that your email signature has a signature has a signature so let's go ahead and talk a little bit about our first tip here and this is really about that sort of the impact of your branding so I really just want you all to kind of take a step back and think about this for a second for every hundred people in your company the average person says on average about thirty four emails a day five days a week fifty days a year there's about a million emails being sent for every hundred people in your company and the average email we have sort of a really powerful analytics platform on our backend so we get some really interesting insights into this the average email is opened on on average between two and three times so 100 employees will create between two and three million brand impressions every year just just in their day-to-day sending from gmail Outlook will devices whatever and so really you know and I'm wondering if you all have ever encountered this this this lack of consistency in your email signature branding is something that it's it's creating an inefficiency in fact we we oftentimes work with customers to help to implement that sort of standardized branding and I got to tell you this is a really funny story we're working with a customer once and one of their engineers actually had you know not not an inspirational quote per se but an entire block quote of Klingon beneath their email signature which you know we were working with them we actually found a Klingon translator on Google it was somewhat innocuous but certainly something that left the brand brand teams John the floor that we were you know attachment sort of scraping off but but really I think you know you wanna you want to sort of as a sales team and again I love the idea of working on a team and I know sales people we have our ways about us but ultimately we are working together as a team wearing the same uniform creates an impact and and I think that's something that's that's somewhat underrated and something that I'd totally encourage you to kind of collaborate with your team on and I like to cite these examples and elder millennial elder millennial movies here little giants I'm sure you remember the rag a group of kids who ended up looking pretty pretty intimidating in their in their proper uniforms and of course the Mighty Ducks one of my all-time favorites it just makes a difference when you're all sort of putting your brand out there during their prospecting during your selling looking aligned and making sure that everyone's kind of again working together to achieve that consistency so that's sort of like tip and trick number one I'm sure there's some element of this that you're already doing today in fact one of the ways that most people and and call and I hate to do this to you but it's going down man it's alright it's not um it's not uncommon but a lot of times in order to achieve that consistency and wear that same uniform a really easy way to do that is simply to take your colleagues email signature and kind of just copy and paste it into your own that's fine but here's a tip that you need to be aware of sometimes when you copy certain elements of the signature over so for instance in this case I'm gonna point out Colin's email address the the that mailed to or the actual click through a target sometimes doesn't change even though you change change the email address from your colleagues that you've copied and pasted in fact and when Colin and I were communicating about this webinar last week I noticed that his email when you clicked on it actually popped open mailed to to his colleague Sydney and this is just sort of like a common thing that happens sometimes but something I was like hey man hope you don't mind but I might put you on blast or in our webinar about this sort of common thing that occurs occasionally it could have been trying to siphon off some of his emails too soon totally I would never so if that's the case if you want to siphon off your work to your colleagues and forget this time but just something to be aware of because I see this all the time it seems really simple to just copy and paste but if you're not paying attention you're gonna end up with not only sort of email addresses but you can actually make your phone numbers also clickable and and this is actually a really I think interesting and potentially powerful use the signature is about 30% of the time recipients are going to be viewing your email from their mobile device think about how difficult it makes it for me as a recipient of Collins email if I can't click on that to trigger a call on my iPhone or my Android so just a little again oops simple trick here is you know create a hyperlink around your phone numbers use the format tell colon and include your phone number and all of a sudden like when you're sending emails no matter where someone is viewing it from you're gonna have that quick ability to just again reduce that friction increase the engagement and that's really what we're looking for as as salespeople at every turn alright so before anybody starts making fun of me what you're saying is this is a very common mistake absolutely okay I'm not a liar I already fixed the email link but now I can go in now I know how to fix the telephone link that's a good tip yeah yeah you totally did I was looking for this example and I had to take through a few emails to find it so I'm glad to see that you did but but yes do your point in in the name of getting wearing that same uniform that copy and paste method often times will yield this result so just something to be aware of as you're sort of getting your signatures configured consistently a prostitute awesome I love that tip that's looks such an easy thing yeah awesome I was really pleased to hear that that some of y'all already using your book and meeting link I mean like this one's really straightforward we don't need to spend a ton of time on it but again the theme of reducing friction increasing engagement takes our team on average about four emails to book a meeting like whatever they use the case is whether it's a sales meeting some success meeting whatever including this meeting link it's just a way that again we can reduce that friction it promotes almost a sort of like open door policy with your customers which again you know with our businesses you you want to really make sure that that customer feels like they have access it's one of those things that ensures that you have a happy customer and someone that's less likely to kind of feel like they're being neglected trading this open-door policy with the eat the the calendar link is just it's a really powerful addition and the cool thing is like if you're using an outreach outreach has their calendaring tool HubSpot has calendaring tools calendly i mean you can use any of those services to make this a really I think valuable add-on to your email signature again in the name of reducing friction increasing engagement so really simple one we don't need to spend a ton of time on that so then let's finally talk about the banners which is why everyone's here today I think you know one of the first questions I want to ask and I think a lot of people will ask when when you hear sort of the engagement numbers this is why do they work so well I think Lauren alluded to this a little bit earlier that as a marketer and a decision maker and within her organization she's getting dozens of emails from from prospectors every single day they probably don't look terribly dissimilar than what you're seeing on my screen here where you have sort of a body a potentially clever message that maybe create some conveys some elements of the value proposition we call that in the context that I'm conveying today we'll call that the active engagement okay so hey this is who I am this is what we sell do you want to set up a meeting to talk about it however if you notice in the bottom of the screen what really catches your eye on this page is actually that that banner and and and they outreach created a beautiful one was a subtle animation very much catches the eye more so than frankly anything else in the context of this message call that passive engagement okay so your message is sort of in the body of the email that you're sending and is template and you know it's it's it's what we're using to drive those those conversations but really what's jumping out on the page to someone who sees about 50 of these types of emails every single day is this really attractive eye catching banner that's sort of presented passively so so we we're finding that actually when we look at the numbers we looked at some research that that MailChimp actually put forth this year where we looked at a link in the context of your or traditional email marketing whether it's you know MailChimp message whether it's a drip email from from outreach sales off top spot sequences on average your links are being clicked about two-and-a-half percent of the time what we see with banners however is a number that is almost twice as much on average between four and seven percent of your recipients are actually clicking on those email signature banners so the impact is somehow significantly more and again when we think about why that is it's sort of that active versus that past engagement what's actually catching your eye in the context of dozens and dozens of emails that are going out for prospecting purposes on a day to day basis there are some easy things that can be improved but then also like having in email signatures but then also like inclusion of a banner so when you look at organizations that are thinking about adding something like open sense I don't know I imagine maybe part of the reason it's hard for people to get their heads around this is because there are so many it's a complex sale like there's marketing who cares about the branding there's sales people who care about how they look and then they have to implement it like on an individual level and then there's probably some IT inclusion right sure so like if I'm a salesperson and maybe this isn't gonna come from my budget yep give me advice for like how I can make a case and how I can start to like is it just that I have to hack my own email signature and start to use it and be an example or you know like how do I go about that well I mean you can you can certainly start there but I think like as sales people think about all the initiatives that are coming down the pipe from marketing you know you're attending an event logo event so your marketing team might say hey these are the thousand people in your territory that you need to reach out to to promote this event or hey we recently featured in in a forest or Gartner report you send that out to your top 100 clients many of these initiatives are reflective of the activities that mark is already engaging in like you know event promotion content creation you know hosting conferences I mean these are initiatives that organizations are already kind of engaging in and I think what's useful about this is that whereas like your typical email blast probably has if you're lucky about a twenty percent open rate emails that sales people are sending are open on average like ninety percent of the time so it's this trusted channel through which again we can we can leverage the sort of passive engagement to promote initiatives that frankly are already are already occurring so I think like just understanding that hey look marketing is trying to find ways and channels through which to promote these initiatives the sales in the sales channel is one that again we talked about for every hundred people in your company but a million emails are being sent I mean it's an opportunity there that's already on the table that whether you do it on your own or with a tool like ours it's there for the taking and and we want to really encourage companies to to take that opportunity and make the most of it so I know we're going to talk about deliverability later right cuz barb geom nkow has some I don't know if I said that right barb has some good questions about that am i gonna rush you if we start that now or should I hold those questions do we can totally talk about those okay cool so so barb says she used to include logos in the signature that she heard sometimes it causes emails to bounce or even get blocked and that a lot of people even receive emails and plain text without any HT at all so can you talk a little bit about that and you know what where's the balance right like if you want a fancy signature maybe you get better engagement from the people that actually can receive it but what it's the risk of adding extra elements I mean that's that's a great that's a great question and I'm going to kind of parlay that question into I think a little bit of an overview of okay Barb's concern is and and really think how to think about this because the fact is is that everything that we do to an email has the potential to impact a livability okay so so starting with a basic email hi will you please buy my product well maybe we want to include a URL like a link to our website well the URL has a potential to impact deliverability believe it or not particularly if we're using any type of tracking tools attachments you want to send out like a white paper or a deck that can potentially provide an overview of the value proposition totally has the potential to impact deliverability this one is crazy to me but it's reflective of what what I've always sort of awright I've learned to call sort of the voodoo of spam filters believe it or not and Barb this might directly sort of address your question the ratio of image to text in the body of a message has the potential to impact deliverability meaning like your images carry with them a certain weight like in kilobytes and so does your text well actually if that ratio is of a certain level and your recipient mail server is of a certain sensitivity that has the potential to trigger a spam flag so so what better is more text to image ratio yeah so I mean like you it's something to be considerate of like if you are sending like an image heavy signature to make sure that you're doing so with like a meaningful message but that this also is specifically around what I would call sort of inline images so I'm sure you all have encountered images in Outlook where perhaps no and I have a little bit of a screen shot example here that I think could resonate let me see if I can find that but basically outlook for instance by default blocks images whereas here we go so here here's an example of two emails that I sent into Outlook with two different image formats that have again are treated differently by Outlook and also are well it's also relevant to this sort of deliverability question there are images that can be embed within the body of an email so in the context of this banner I've simply copied and pasted it as my email signature in Outlook well because that image is literally embedded in the body of the message it's going to appear automatically when I send that email into Outlook which is totally a positive however the negative is that it does contribute to that sort of image to text ratio that I talked about before so if I have a sensitive mail server that can potentially trigger a a flag so what's the alternative well the alternative is by uploading what we call a hosted image so if you notice in your email clients whether it's Gmail or Outlook you can upload an image by URL in doing so and adding that to your email signature you're uploading what's called a hosted image the good news about that is that when you send that email into Outlook it doesn't contribute to that that text image ratio because it's it's hosted on a server somewhere it's not actually in the body of the message and so we talk about the weight it's actually weightless it carries with it no way so - you're increasing your odds of deliverability in that regard however the downside is that without look you have this situation where posted images require that download images so the funny thing about this colin is that there's multiple ways to skin the cat in terms of how to create the most impact yeah but but both carry wood them pros and cons so I think what's really important about this is to use tools that are available to you to understand your audience if you're selling a more IT heavy solution for instance it might be that your sip your sending emails more predominantly into an outlook environment or an exchange environment where images are blocked by default where you might benefit more from having those inline images whereas if your settings selling into like a more tech like a more like a tech company like an outrageous sales loft the Salesforce they're likely to be using Gmail by default and Gmail by default shows images by default so you're gonna benefit greatly by just using hosted images so we actually provide some tools and I'm sure there other tools available in the market where you can actually perform technology assessments of your recipient base to understand hey how should we actually be delivering this message and the neat thing is I think you can do either but I think the point is that you want to optimize for your audience by having some understanding of that got it cool so I know you were kind of on a roll and I know we're talking basics of deliverability today yeah I don't let you get back to where you were before but real quick if anybody wants to read deeper about deliverability can you suggest any places they should look for that you know I think you know any email company will have gosh some some great insight into this top of mind women think about that column before the end of this webinar I'll have a couple of resources for you to share back to you okay great thanks yep you got it so so now I mean so far I think your question is a great one and it's super relevant because you know I this wouldn't be a sales hacker webinar if we didn't do a little bit of hacking here in terms of like actually like taking some ideas of how we can use banners and actually create creating them and using them so before we show you some easy ways that you can make banners that have an impact I just want to put a disclaimer out there because this is something that I think brand teams won't particularly care too much for because we are gonna be hacking a little bit here but I promise you like in sales people like these little hacks are actually gonna create I think a significant impact so just throwing the disclaimer out there I'll cover my ears ok I appreciate it the first step in creating a banner and again this is what I was talking about before about really riding the existing wave or the current that's created by your marketing team in terms of the initiatives that they're running start by going to your company's website if your marketing team is is is doing their job and doing it well theoretically they're trying to accomplish the same thing that you would be with your banner which is increasing engagement and subsequently increasing conversions so in this case I decide to use outreaches website as an example but I encourage you to check out your own and you'll notice the first thing that appears when you go to outreach our roofs website is frankly this really clear sort of message and I mean gosh even have a call to action here as a salesperson someone who's interested in creating something on the fly that could I could add to my email signature I'm actually just gonna crop that screenshot that and identify because I've identified some things that I think are gonna be particularly impactful so for instance this white register now button it's so contrasting to the background of the image that jumps off the page it's clear register now it's a very clear call to action a little industry trip tip here is that this banner also contains this play button if you can find a play button in the context of your website where the message just kind of fits adjacent to it the play button is is super super powerful we see about 2x engagement with the play button relative to a standard CTA so it's like a really a an important and powerful element but you'll notice I'm just gonna toggle back and forth here I've just literally used my screen grabbing tool to kind of crop down the the image that I just screenshot it for my website and you should scour your site look for you can find these on your white paper pages your resource pages your videos pages customer testimonials anywhere you can find something that's already defined to generate that engagement and that click-through is perfect to use as a as your own sort of email signature banner and campaign I love that tip that's such an easy homegrown thing to do yeah totally so that from there it's really about just sort of making it look right so obviously like I took something from a website that was fitted to my 15-inch Mac screen here sizing it down to about 400 pixels is really where we want to live I think 400 pixels generally fits quite nicely in the context of most common email signatures that we see I'm so going on like a mobile device that'll show up oh yeah yeah it'll render but it'll render great on on desktops mobiles etc somewhere between that 400 and 500 we recommend 400 but I think our reach has maybe even gone a little bit a little bit less a little bit skinnier than that but 400 is typically where we recommend our customers and then from there I mean gosh you just can add it either like in that copy and paste method that we talked about before creating that inline for our more exchanged outlook heavy recipient base or upload by URL for you know a more Gmail oriented recipient base either options going to work you can include to click through URL as well so create a hyperlink around it what's really cool about this is that if you are using any type of email tracking tool like your yes we're at out app HubSpot sidekick whatever that URL is actually also going to be tracked so what's neat about this again when I think about that active engagement and that passive engagement is that you're going to be notified when that passive engagements actually occurring so it's really neat because you know you're sending an email but you might get a notification hey someone actually clicked on my banner for this event that's something interesting to me and something that's gonna be worthwhile keeping in mind for my follow-up conversation so it's like a really really simple way to kind of take again the tools that are already available the content that's already available to make an effective email signature campaign as a sales person that's great yeah so we talked a little bit about sort of in line versus hosted I think this is kind of a neat a neat slide because I think you know as salespeople again we're constantly paying for ways to make sure that messaging is relevant and so so an idea here is you know your messaging might change what a prospect as you move them through your sales funnel you may even have templates that you saved to address certain aspects in in each stage in the funnel like certain follow-ups that occur when qualification is done a follow-up that occurs post demo a follow-up that occur occurs as you send a proposal etc so the neat thing here is that you can actually configure email signatures in those templates because as templates can actually include the signature that contained just standard content that you want to promote to create that impact or the email signature channel these are some ideas but you know you want to start with more general evergreen type content on the top of the funnel like your about us for the company maybe like an e-book that's sort of again that cornerstone content that your marketing teams created maybe a product overview video maybe just a high-level hey we're gonna be a Dreamforce this year or ignite down in Florida wherever you're sort of your big annual event promotion is occurring but then as you sort of again become more in tune to customer qualification process provide the demo provide the proposals perhaps you start including a little bit more relevant content in the signature ROI calculators I see a lot of those on on on b2b websites these days a relevant case study just high-level like how people have achieved X Y & Z using our product your latest blog could be something that again it becomes a little bit more relevant as after you've sort of had that first communication with your customer really as you're getting closer and closer to the clothes getting a little bit more targeted with your local events local lunch-and-learn a golf tournament we're hosting in Chicago these these are some things that tools like ours can really help with like really kind of lining up in a more targeted fashion but certainly a little bit of manipulation you can achieve sort of similar results on your own and then customer testimonials again make a lot of sense as you're sort of pushing towards that close and then once you do close the signature banners can can again yield some really interesting information like like customer satisfaction we have customers that leverage a really simple how's my service type banner that is useful to kind of ensure that NPS and and that we're doing what we can to really retain and hopefully expand our customers throughout their time as a customer with our with our company so these are just some ideas that I think like could be useful and just again some examples of banners that we've seen that we think are pretty pretty cool and pretty effective so just to kind of get the gears turning a little bit with the folks on the call to kind of just see what what might make sense on their current website today and perhaps even looping in some of your brand team to help make just five or six like super easy super impactful banners that could be useful during your sales process but again I think that the powerful thing about this is that it is creating that that that level of engagement that we see nearly twice as much as your sort of standard just dropping a link into an email so there is some real engagement to be out here you know I have to say I love how you think about the funnel and matching signatures to that because when you think about it the amount of email right that goes out that people are seeing and so many people have like a top down email signature where some brand person if there were any you know if they were thinking about it at all in the first place said okay here's everybody's signature everybody use this same format not necessarily appropriate for every customer before or after point-of-sale so in those cases where it's like a top down here's one signature that everybody uses we have a question actually from investment does Kelly so the question is kind of I mean it's kind of like a management I guess question or like a getting permission versus asking forgiveness question like what happens in that scenario I mean you see this a lot so when people want to implement your suggestions how can they go about it without bending the rules or sell up to whoever is holding the keys to unlocking something a little bit more nuanced you know I gotta be honest with you I've always encountered this a lot because you know we perform frankly email signature audits with our with our customers and I would say you know it's one of those things that some companies are their sales teams are just more entrepreneurial like for instance you know just again reading off some of the comments and earlier I see that a lot work or people are already taking things off the website or including their calendar links etc in terms of getting that internal buy-in I think like what I always think is kind of effective is it's just sort of like creating like a really simple like like pitch internally again I think the numbers kind of speak for themselves like if you needed to go that this far rather than just doing it it's just creating those simple examples using them some of the methods that describe just screenshotting your own signature in the context of like hey we could be promoting our event this way or discarding a report or this case study and just knowing that for ever again for every hundred people in your company or sending a million emails a year between four and seven percent of your recipients are gonna click throwing that content and just letting internally people understand and really know that hey we owned this million email channel I mean yeah sure we could go to google and and we just released it this really power interesting blog that for every 500 people in your company there's about I want to say a hundred thousand dollars of media value associated with the email is that they're sending out again we talked about those the sins and the number of opens the overall number of impressions so without even doing any real work you can make the case to say hey we're actually leaving this money on the table in terms of media value and our company is already investing in all this different content I think there's a really easy pitch to be made internally particularly if it's something that's going to help move the needle from a sales standpoint ultimately the content wouldn't exist if it didn't move the needle from a sales standpoint yeah yes it's just another channel through which you know you have the ability to kind of to really leverage that content and again in a way that's meaningful and you know like I said before with some of the tracking like if you're using already using some type of email tracking getting that notification that perhaps someone is clicking on a banner that's more upsell or cross-sell oriented maybe you don't get that response back but now you have a data point to operate off so it's like hey next time I talk to John I'm gonna make sure I bring up product B you know even though he's just purchased product a so far because you have that extra data point so there's a digital body language aspect of this as well that I think is super relevant and super powerful to sales people particularly like so uh so Yvette you could write down all the wonderful things not to pat ourselves on the back too much but you can write down all the wonderful things Bobby and Loy and Lauren are saying you know grant we're gonna send the recording of this webinar out so you can grab that and send it around to your team and try to build a groundswell of support or you could just test something it might get a little slap on the wrist but you also might get some better results so yeah I won't say that as a customer slash marketer who's a decision maker on these types of purchases one of the most impactful things was seeing the ena audit that Bobby was talking about and like showing me everybody's signature in the organization some of the sales people did hack their email signatures and some of them looked okay someone was horrible some of them are using purple Comic Sans and that is like an eye opener in terms of like wow I had no idea there's so much disparity in terms of like what emails in your shows look like across the org and it was actually kind of terrifying in addition there's a lot of content that people were trying to promote that were super old so like a Forbes article that we were mentioned in and tada or team like there's just better analysts reports there's better things that they could be doing and if you're doing this at like a system level it just it was kind of a no-brainer once you saw the nightmare that is email signatures like as an from an audit perspective so I would recommend if you're trying to sell up to somebody in your organization I would just recommend that they maybe do an audit of you know what people are doing within your organization when it comes to email signature it's probably similar to what I experienced great tip someone who would know what the hell they're talking about cool so we've talked about like how to how to pimp your ID how to create an email signature on your email signature yeah I know you touched on deliverability a little earlier I think you've got more for us there so I want to make sure we get yeah yeah now that we've done all this work right it's got to get to the place in there might be a few pitfalls it sounds like well I mean these are just things that I think whether or not you do email signatures just as prospectors this really low-hanging fruit in terms of tools that are available to us today that can help us just make sure that our efforts aren't falling on spam ears I guess you could say make no ears yeah you know no ears no eyes nowhere at all so I I just want to just provide a quick tool and quick tip under the hood that as prospectors as modern prospectors I want us to be aware of because I think it's super useful in the context of what we're trying to achieve so we talked a little bit earlier about some of the different things that can trigger potentially a spam filter and again just to kind of reiterate as salespeople we send emails obviously we send emails with links we send the emails with attachments we should be sending emails with useful and engagement engaging email signatures so how are we gonna make sure that these messages aren't ending up in spam well believe it or not there's a really powerful tool available to you that's super easy to access and read and I want to teach you how to do that today because this is something that if you're a frontline salesperson your your company will pat you on the back if you find something here that that shouldn't be there or isn't properly configured and since it's so easy to do I wanted to share it with you so so the easy trick number one is is I call it check your SPF okay and that's not a sunscreen reference that's literally an email authentication tool that can be very easily accessed and I'm going to show you how so so basically the first step is simply to send an email to your personal gmail account sending it to personal Gmail makes it super easy I'm sure you could accomplish in a yahoo or a hotmail account but I totally recommend the gmail account because they've made this recording like really easy to access so here's a screenshot you could say of me sending an email to my personal gmail account what it looks like as a recipient so the first thing that you're gonna want to do is find those three buttons on the right-hand side and click that button first it'll pop up in this menu and you're gonna hit this button here called show original okay this is something that frankly before working at opens and since I stayed a hundred feet away from at all times but I've actually found there to be some really interesting insight when you hit show rich no in fact at the top of your show original and if you're on your computers right now I totally encourage you just pop into your Gmail and just check this out now it actually shows this sort of report and this report contains elements of email authentication that your company is currently engaging in today the one that I really want to want you to just quickly focus on and just take a look at is this one called SPF and really what we want to see is passes all around if you see passes all around you've got nothing to worry about you're in great shape and and and you should do what you're doing with confidence because your company is engaging the highest levels of email authentication possible however I would say something like 20-25 percent of the time when you hit show original you might see something that looks a little bit like this in this case it's a soft fill if you see something say something remember that it's not just for Subway's it's for your email authentication as well so in this case you could see an SPF soft fail another example you might see something like an SPF harm error so why this is important is because when you send an email your recipients mail server is checking this SPF report and if it sees passes then it's all good if it sees perm error or soft fail it's likely gonna be a little bit more stripped in terms of some of the things that you're doing in the email like the links the attachments the images in your signature etc so first and really simple trick here is just check to make sure that your company is doing what they need to do on the SPF side send yourself a test email and just check this SPF record again if it says passed you're golden if you see perm error or something like a soft fail find someone who you trust and just let them know that this is going on because it does need to be addressed and it's gonna impact your deliverability whether or not you're managing the email signatures so when you say someone you trust that would be like an IT ideally yeah ideally it'll still like a manager I mean this is certainly something that your IT organization would need to kind of address so if you have access to them that would totally be the best person to reach out to ok and just even including a screen shot would be would be I think super helpful cool I just some probably some people Tom saw me taking notes because I'm gonna do this later ok that sounds good I wanna if we if we're good on time I just want to mention one more thing because I think yeah companies like outreach I think deliver value on this and I know a bunch of other companies are doing the same we do some of this as well but predictable tracking URLs so we talked a little bit earlier about how you can use sidekick or yes or whatever to track your banners well something to be aware of and I only noticed this just this week this is actually an email that we got from a prospect we actually used a sidekick on a on a tracking link for an NDA believe it or not and Google Chrome has this crazy level of like they call it Safe Browsing but it just sort of create this massive red block on the recipients screen obviously it doesn't look great this is sort of a browse his approach to see when they see that TDOT sidekick open comm so so really why this is important or why this is relevant so you'll notice like if I send it tract link and hover over the sales hacker.com URL that's tracked when I hover over it that the click-through at the bottom here doesn't just say sales hacker comm in fact it's wrapped with this T dot sidekick open comm URL that's how sidekick actually is able to communicate to you or yes we're tied up is able to communicate to you that hey this links being clicked they wrapped the sales hacker.com URL with a tracking URL that has a notification associated with it the problem though is that mil servers and browsers are smart and they start to recognize patterns if there's a thousand people using sidekick today sending emails into a don't in tech company all of those emails are gonna contain tracking URLs with a similar pattern and eventually what happens is that these mill servers become smart and they detect that pattern and then they'd add those patterns to different black lists and so what you run the risk of to some extent is having your tracking URLs whether it's in the body of an email or to see the signature banner potentially triggering the blacklist which could all of a sudden cause your emails to either balance or go to spam so in another trick to keep in mind is that if you have a tracking vendor talk to them about branded URLs outreach does it it I know of several other companies that do it if you aren't doing it today talk to your vendor if they don't do it I recommend finding a vendor that does because again in this era that we live in things are becoming more compliant things are becoming more strict these are things that we need to do as salespeople as marketers as IT organizations as companies to make sure that again that message is also as being received and of course well received so low-hanging fruit just a couple tips that as a employee at an email company I thought I would be remiss if I didn't share in the context of today's conversation I like it this is actually been extremely helpful we've gotten a lot of thank-yous already I want to make sure that we have yeah I think we have a couple minutes here for we do for questions and there was one question Yvette asked earlier that I didn't get to but because we're talking about deliverability this is what I want right now embedded video and email mm-hmm good bad hurt engagement what do we think about it it all it's all good as long as you are just being cognizant of those URLs because because here's the thing let's say I'm sending an email from my sales hacker comm email account it's probably more in the wood weeds and you want but well not when you when you send that email and that recipient server receives that email it sees it's coming from Colin at sales hacker calm however in the body of the message it might see something like video.com slash Colin slash pitch dot mp4 that URL doesn't match with your sending domain you're sending domain is sales comm the domain of the URL is video comm anytime you have mismatching urls in the body of the message that has the potential to increase the spam score so if there's a way for you to white label that with your vendor go for it I mean it we did I think the data speaks for itself in terms of the engagement only thing to be cognizant out there is is your provider providing a white labeled URL where rather than saying video comm it says video sales hacker.com right that that actually matches up and that actually doesn't trigger those spam the spam filters in the same way more in from from like a marketers standpoint I know you have a huge background in email marketing what do you how do you feel about embedded video an email um embedded video an email I mean as a marketer I usually say do something like a screenshot and link out to a video that's usually like a good hack like Bobbi seen earlier having a play button on an image is very powerful so I always recommend you can get the same effect by having a picture of a video and with the play button on it and then linking out to a to a landing page that's hosting it so that you don't have to your deliverability cool there we have it folks if there are any other questions you might be able to sneak him in go ahead and pop them in I can't say I'll answer mom we'll do our best so we also wanted to end here on on finishing the story that we started earlier because we're not done yet we told you how it started the lauren didn't love the idea and we started using it and outreach has had some success with it I think but Laurens gonna tell you exactly what happened yeah I mean I was jaded and now I guess as a millennial will say that I'm glow we use unleash our upcoming sales conference as a way to kind of use email management to get awareness out there and I thought it was gonna be just that in terms of like just you know getting eyeballs on unleash and learning about it potentially but we actually did see like a close to 10 percent lift in paid ticket sales just from our email signature so direct signups from the email banners which was pretty shocking to me to be honest and those are people who have come in three days of their life and a fair amount of money to purchase a ticket and so that that to me is is I mean that that proved 2.5 are X ROI on our investment in the software that we used to which is open sense to manage this and so to me that was worth it within itself and it also got a lot of executive awareness like you know within my executive C suite they they have it now in theirs and they now have more awareness of unleash and other marketing programs so just internally it was good as well that's awesome and because we love outreach and we're excited about unleash we're doing something today for everybody that joined this webinar so if you're still listening thanks for hanging out with us you have a special promo code that you can use to buy tickets to unleash there are only 100 tickets left we're sold out almost we're gonna get there pretty soon and the conference is still almost a month away so act fast your promo code is SHPO d sh pod and what's that promo code for $100 off I believe yeah $100 off and we're still doing I want to say we're still selling one buy one get one I could be wrong my field marketer is gonna melt we're still we still have a discount right now like a special promo going this week to get a discount on our tickets but this will give you an extra hundred dollars off awesome all right so everybody thanks again for joining us - Bobby and Lauren thank you so much for your time check out on leash if you haven't yet SH potties our promo code check out open sense and get in touch with Bobby if you have more questions that we didn't get to answer today he'll hook you up I don't know that's all I got all credits everyone I'm seeing some questions about deliverability don't hesitate to reach out to me I'm always happy to provide a little bit of an expertise so take it out of my email address if you want to connect offline happy - there you have it folks we'll see you the next sales hacker webinar thanks for being here everybody