If you work in marketing for a B2B company, you will certainly have read and heard it countless times: Content marketing is THE marketing trend - especially in the B2B sector. And most likely you will already be doing content marketing yourself. Logically. As a B2B company, you usually sell complex products and services that require explanation.With content, you can now unobtrusively communicate all these explanations to potential customers and successfully convert your leads into customers. No wonder that the majority of successful companies already rely on content marketing.
And the numbers prove them right. According to studies, companies can use content marketing to generate 54 percent more leads than traditional outbound strategies and increase their conversion rate from six to twelve percent.
So it seems clear that blogs, whitepapers, case studies and infographics are currently the right tools for B2B marketing to generate leads and win customers. But that's not the whole story.
Content marketing also needs traffic
Sure: "Content is King". But even as a B2B content marketer, you still have to ask yourself how potential customers and leads can experience this content at all.Only publishing good content and then hoping that it will be found by itself does not help. Not much has changed with the turn to content or inbound marketing.This is why content marketers mainly use two online marketing instruments: Either free traffic via search engine optimization (SEO) and social media or paid traffic such as search engine marketing or display advertising.This has proven to be very successful and is undoubtedly still very effective. However, there are also additional ways to generate traffic - and as you will read right away, these can be worthwhile for all companies.
Almost every company still has unused traffic potential
A still rarely used traffic source is for example the e-mail signature of your employees and colleagues. Yes, exactly, this little piece of text at the foot of your email!Used correctly, it can be used to draw people's attention to everything that is important to your company. For example, a blog article or a current offer from your company. Or your new whitepaper. Or your participation in a trade fair or other event. So far, only a few companies use this opportunity to generate additional traffic. As you will read in a moment, these companies are missing profitable opportunities.
2,100 free clicks for a brand new blog post in just one month
You can see how much a company can miss if it leaves its email signature unused for marketing purposes from a simple calculation example.
Calculation example:Let's say your company has 200 employees and you want to attract readers to a blog article you've just published. Now, if you want to estimate how many clicks you can expect on your blog post, you just need to realize that an average employee sends 38 emails a day.So if your company has 200 employees, that means about 7,600 outgoing emails a day. If you now refer to this article in the email signature of every employee in your company and just 0.5 percent of the recipients actually click on this signature, you will receive 75 clicks per day and 525 clicks per week!These are important if you want to promote a marketing message that only increases your perception and does not really require clicks. An example would be an award you have received. Or a message that briefly explains your company values.Sounds interesting? It gets really exciting when we look at the advantages of email signature marketing in combination with the traffic sources search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA).
Search engine optimization and email signature marketing
No doubt about it: Search engine optimization (SEO) will remain one of the most important means of attracting visitors to your website for the foreseeable future. However, for many medium-sized B2B companies it will be anything but easy to generate 525 clicks for a brand new piece of content or an ad using SEO in the first week of publication.As valuable and sought-after as organic search engine traffic is, a good Google ranking requires some work and time. To achieve a good positioning to a certain search term within a few weeks or even days has become impossible in most cases due to the numerous Google updates in recent years.
Because Google considers numerous factors for the placement of your side in the search results. These include the click-through rate (CTR), which means that the more often your page is clicked on in search results for a particular keyword, the better you'll be ranked in search results.
SEO successes need their time
But for you to achieve a high CTR, some Google users must first have seen and clicked on you in the search results - and that usually takes a while. Also, because you first end up with a new post in the search results in the back places, where only very few Google searchers get there.And of course there are a number of other factors besides the CTR that make it unlikely that you will end up right at the top of the results with a new post.If you want to bridge the time until a good placement and want to generate valuable traffic continuously beyond that, email signature marketing is the ideal supplement to search engine optimization, because you can generate free traffic for fresh your content or your news faster.This type of marketing is also a help if you want to expand your readership or the audience for your content. Or generally generate more traffic and want your reach.But is it also a good addition to paid traffic campaigns, such as Google AdWords?
Google AdWords and Email Signature Marketing
Yes, even if, unlike search engine optimization for Google AdWords, you don't seem to have to take any special precautions and can basically receive visitors immediately, there are good reasons to additionally support your paid traffic campaigns with email signature marketing.First and foremost, of course, there are the costs: Google AdWords is known to be not exactly cheap. The most expensive click price in the USA, for example, recently was 670 US dollars. Yes, that's right. For ONE click.Such click prices are naturally not reached in Germany. But also with us there are some enterprises, which must reach for AdWords correctly deeply into the pockets. Economic detective agencies in Frankfurt, for example: In 2014, they had to spend 86 euros on a single click. Even if such numbers are not the norm, Google AdWords remains a rather cost-intensive way of winning leads.Costs arise not only from the actual click price, but also from the need to test the ad. In order to achieve better prices for AdWords ads, you must first achieve a high click-through rate.
The requirements of Google Ads have increased
Your positioning and the price for your AdWords ad is made up of several factors - the more frequently your AdWords ad is actually clicked, the higher the quality Google attributes to your ad. With positive effects for you: Your ad will be placed higher and your ad price will be lower at the same time.Testing different ad variants is therefore an integral part of AdWords. Finding the winners, however, i.e. the ad that is placed as high up as possible at the lowest possible cost, costs time and money - after all, you have to create and buy different ads to determine which of the variants performs best and delivers the highest ROI to you.Email signature marketing is also a great addition to Google AdWords campaigns. Unlike Google AdWords, you don't have to spend a lot of time testing ads and waiting for your clicks.You can immediately start promoting your content or other messages you want to communicate for your business. But beware! Even though email signature marketing is much cheaper than AdWords, it's not completely free. If you want to know why, you should read on.
How much does email signature marketing cost?
As the calculation example at the beginning showed, e-mail signature marketing is worthwhile for every medium-sized company that wants to supplement its existing traffic sources with another free and previously unused one - and this via a marketing channel that belongs to the company.Every email sent from your company without a signature therefore means a missed chance to draw visitors' attention to your (content) marketing offer and thus generate leads for your company!
Similar to search engine optimization, however, e-mail signature marketing is not entirely free of charge. Even if you don't have to pay for the traffic itself, the costs are in the preparatory onpage and offpage optimization. The actual preparation itself, i.e. the actual optimization, can therefore be costly.The situation is similar with email signature marketing. If you really want to use this marketing tool effectively and successfully, it is not enough to simply use one banner for all employees of the company.The departments in your company communicate with very different target groups. Accordingly, the message should also be as relevant as possible for the respective target group. However, this requires - besides the design of the different signature banners - a considerable administrative effort.In addition, email signature marketing, as with all online marketing channels, only makes sense if you can also measure the performance of your email signature. However, tracking the exact click rates requires some adjustments - and these cost know-how, time and money.
With Mailtastic, you benefit cost-effectively, quickly and easily from email signature marketing!
With Mailtastic you can easily set up and exchange all signatures of your employees. You can centrally define and exchange the signatures of all employees in your company - without any programming effort or complex technical adjustments.In addition, you can of course also trace the clicks and impressions and thus the success of your email signature from the central platform and turn your email signature into a real marketing tool with which your company can "incidentally" generate traffic for your marketing messages. And the click rate allows you to quickly identify which messages are actually reaching your target group - making your email signature a real testing tool for your marketing.
We advise you personally!
Have you become curious about our email signature marketing? We would be happy to show you in a demo what Mailtastic can do for you.
