MarTech Interview with Carol Howley, CMO at Exclaimer

Can B2B teams drive more sales, marketing and brand goals using their email signatures? Carol Howley, CMO at Exclaimer has some pointers that can help:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Carol, tell us about yourself and what inspired your foray into marketing…

Thank you for having me.

I’ve worked in the digital and technology space for both established businesses and start-ups for over 15 years and have experience across several marketing disciplines. I am passionate about building strategy, storytelling, and bringing products to life for consumers, which I’m lucky enough to have had the opportunity to do throughout my career.

In my current role at Exclaimer as CMO, I am really the steward of the brand and responsible for raising awareness of our product and company, but very much on the hook for growth! I focus on building the company and marketing strategy, recruitment, and scaling our team whilst expanding our presence globally.

I believe there is a growing need for better, more personalized communication between businesses to support building relationships and foster human connection to drive sustainable growth. I am excited to help foster that growth and help build the future of email signature platforms at Exclaimer.

I joined the team at Exclaimer because I really believe in the mission the company is on to drive results for customers and support engagement marketing. Email signatures are an undiscovered marketing channel that enable marketers to link up personal communication with demand generation campaigns as well as make sure we have consistent and beautiful branding across our entire shop front.

We’d love to hear about some of Exclaimer’s newest innovations and how it’s helping to change the game for business email signatures?

 Many people don’t realize how important email signatures are for businesses. In today’s digital workplace, people aren’t connecting in person as often as they used to, and people are sending more emails than ever before. In fact, approximately 350 billion emails are sent and received each day around the world. We live in a world of mass marketing, disconnected conversations, and crowded inboxes, with over half of all emails received predicted to be spam messages. However, by leveraging the power of personalized email signatures, businesses can boost engagement and increase brand awareness from a single email.

Designed for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Exchange, our software allows businesses to simplify email signature management with templates that can be easily designed and managed so anyone on the team can control the design process. Our platform offers personalization with different languages to choose from, social icons and website links, headshots, promotional banners, legal disclaimers, and more. We offer brand consistency that ensures every team member has the proper email signature. We can create specific templates for different departments to ensure that there is consistency across the organization, which can especially come in handy during acquisitions and rebrands. Emails are a powerful tool and our features help businesses take control and enhance engagement through email.

On the innovation front, we recently made a few exciting announcements including launching an enhanced solution for Google Workspace that allows customers using Google Workspace to deliver consistent, compliant and engaging email signatures across all devices in a simple, automated way. We also partnered with Microsoft and joined their Microsoft Cloud Partner Program as an Independent Software Vendor meaning Microsoft Azure Marketplace customers can now access our platform. We hope to continue to build our network through partnerships for more users to have access to Exclaimer.

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How in your view can B2B teams use their email signature to drive sales, marketing and even HR alignment in today’s hybrid work environment?

 There is so much opportunity for email signatures beyond it simply being a form of signing off an email. The average time spent reading a brand email is 10 seconds, so including important information in an eye-catching place is crucial. We want companies to think about how to amplify email and emphasize the engagement element. Email signature platforms are tools that businesses can use to engage with customers, employees, and prospects. It is a tool to build long-term relationships, from early stage to long-term. Connection and personalization are key to building relationships and B2B teams can leverage that in their email signatures to drive sales in today’s hybrid work environment.

HR and other sectors can leverage email signatures to represent company culture by improving professionality and creating succinct branding across the organization, sharing important company updates, and boosting brand recognition. There is also untapped potential in using the email signature space as a marketing channel as users are able to target who they are connecting with and make it more personalized. In fact, observations suggest email signature marketing can be more effective than traditional email marketing, with a higher open rate (90% vs 22%) , 300% higher average click-through rate (8% vs 2.5%), and lower cost per mile ($2.50 vs $15 – $30).

Can you talk about some of the most interesting ways in which leading brands have used their email signature section to drive impact across key areas of business including customer facing goals and sales?

Email signatures aren’t only a space for businesses to add titles and company logos, but are also a space to market their business. We’ve seen brands add links to social media platforms, review sites, blogs and more to drive engagement outside of email and onto their websites. Brands have gone beyond links and logos too, adding advertisements to their signatures, leveraging the space as an additional marketing tool. In fact, email signature marketing even compares well against other channel CPM averages including Google Display Ads, Google Search Ads, Linkedin Ads, and Twitter Ads.

Afterall, the average person sends around 40 emails per day, which allows for many opportunities to advertise directly to your target audience.

As an example, the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts is a partner of ours who points to the ability to use signatures for their various departments to interact with their partners, customers, and fans. This has helped them with uniformity and running banner campaigns for different departments, like giving their Mascot group their own unique campaign banner while Ticket Sales features another.

Many organizations don’t realize that there are third-party solutions to automate email signature management and that was important when working with our long-term partner, eNerds, who saw many clients migrate to Office 365 that were unaware of compatible solutions like Exclaimer to streamline the process. Consistency of email signatures across an organization is important, but so is the ease of the process when being able to manage and update signatures through one platform. We see huge value in the broad use cases available for email signature technology to increase engagement and grow our partner network that allows companies to offer Exclaimer as a service to their customers.

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What are some predictions you’d like to share surrounding the future of email signatures in business and the features that will empower change in this segment?

 As we all know, AI has been a hot topic in the tech industry over the last few months, and I believe that AI has the potential to make a major impact on the personalization of email signatures. I see a future where AI can detect who the email recipient is, and can customize the email signature to meet the needs or interests of that specific person. We’re also looking into how AI can be used for sentiment analysis to predict churn and make sure customers are getting serviced as needed to prevent that churn.

Looking at business sectors, I see growth in new sectors and industries embracing email signature platforms. As it stands, the majority of our work is in the marketing and IT industries, but we predict expansion into HR, finance, healthcare, and law sectors. Email signatures are transferable to any industry and I hope to see these industries adapt to the platform in due time as it is such a crucial tool to creating unity within an organization, whilst adding value to email communications.

A few common faux pas you’d advise teams to steer clear from when it comes to formatting business email signatures?

Avoid making your signature too busy, as it can be distracting. You should include what will benefit you and your business the most, whether that be a logo, links to the website, contact information or headshot. It is also really important to ensure consistency throughout your organization, so make sure all departments are aligned on formatting in order for the signatures to be cohesive across the entire company.