What Are Your Company Employee Email SIG Clicks Worth?

By Anne Holland, President

The other day I get an email from a Sherpa reader with a really great SIG (signature section).

Instead of just a name and contact info, this marketer put a little business card-style box at the end of her note to me, including a hotlink to a page of videos about her company. Naturally I asked her how the SIG was working.

She said, "Oh that's an initiative from our Web department." So I called over there and got the guy who invented the SIG box on the line.

Turns out last year he'd been fretting over the variances in everyone's SIGs. When you're a big ecommerce and high tech company with thousands of employees there's a lot of email going out from everyone's accounts, and everyone had "invented" their own SIGs to stick at the end of letters. Why not, he wondered, give folks a few branded formal templates that might work better? Last fall he created a selection of officially-approved SIGs, posted them on the company intranet and everyone could take their pick. The SIGs' hotlinks were all coded so the Web department could track SIG traffic amount and value with a 14-day cookie (although they did not track by individual employee).

Results? The company (which is public and has asked to not be named here) now receives just over 5,000 clicks from employee email SIGs per quarter. The average revenue per click is $9. You do the math.

As the Web guy pointed out, some of these buyers might have clicked anyway. They might have been responding to email from a service or sales rep and used the SIG hotlink to get to the site more easily. But, some of them might not have visited the site at that time if the unusual SIG hadn't caught their eye.

Because you never know why people are clicking on a SIG link, the best landing page turned out to be one with a choice of educational content (folks loved the company videos) plus lots of navigation links to shopping and service options.

It was more interesting than a formal company home page, but still easy to use as a launching pad for a broad site search. (This is the opposite of most landing pages, which should be extremely focused with little or no navigation.)

Maybe you should start thinking about what you could do with your employee email SIGs. Chances are, you can do more. And while you're at it, track the clicks from them!

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