In the rapidly-evolving world of digital marketing, it’s essential that you and your business are up to speed with the latest digital marketing trends if you’re going to succeed. With this in mind, we’ve looked around the digital marketing landscape to see which trends you can easily – and cost-effectively – take advantage of simply by using your business email signature to ensure audience engagement and brand success in 2022.
1. Optimise for mobile to maximise engagement
With more than half of website traffic coming from mobile devices, as Pamela Bump of Hubspot highlights in The Marketing Trends of 2022, it’s essential that your website offers a fast, fully mobile-optimised user experience.
But it’s not just your website that needs to be optimised for mobile in 2022. With up to 81% of business email opened on mobile devices it’s essential that your branded email signature displays correctly on mobile. You can’t take this for granted so make sure you choose email signature software that automatically ensures your signature is mobile optimised and displays correctly every time on every device. What’s more, a clear clickable link in your mobile optimised email signature is a great way to drive traffic to your mobile-optimised website! Need help optimising your email signature for mobile? Read our blog on how to make your email signature mobile-friendly.
2. Showcase your brand’s social responsibility
The modern consumer cares about social responsibility – it’s that simple. In their 2022 Global Marketing Trends, Deloitte highlights the need for ‘Authentically Inclusive Marketing’ with their survey showing that ‘57% of consumers are more loyal to brands that commit to addressing social inequalities in their actions’. These actions range from hiring and retention policies to using diverse suppliers and reflecting audience diversity across marketing messaging.
Email signatures offer a great opportunity to showcase your brand’s social responsibility and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) commitments, whether through email signature marketing banners, an icon promoting a specific company initiative so that recipients can click through for more details, or statements in your email signature disclaimer outlining your company’s environmental and DEI policies. The sheer number of emails sent ensures that email signatures are a highly effective way of communicating your brand’s social responsibility commitments.
3. Drive viewers to your short-form video
Within Hubspot’s Marketing Trends of 2022, their survey shows that short-form content is the second most effective trend marketers are currently leveraging and, in 2022, 89% of global marketers are planning to continue investing in it or increase their investment. Why? Because engaging short-form video gets to the point, it’s quicker to create and caters to the shorter attention span.
Want to promote your new videos to a wide audience cost-effectively? The interactive call-to-action ‘Watch our 1-minute video‘ is easy to incorporate into your business signature or email banner to get recipients clicking through to view your latest video content.
4. Keep remote workers engaged and on-brand
As Mateuz Makosiewicz at Ahrefs observes in 8 Digital Marketing Trends That Will Continue in 2022 ‘remote work is here to stay’ as, two years into the pandemic, it appears that the transition to home offices has been mostly successful. The post features a Stanford survey showing that working from home has increased productivity by 13% as well as the benefits of increased employee loyalty, better mental health and obviously less time and cost commuting.
How do email signatures fit into the Work From Home trend? Centrally-controlled, consistent company email signatures can help your remote workforce present a unified brand to the world whilst keeping your marketing cost-effective and your service levels high. Most importantly, they give you an effective internal marketing tool to keep all your remote employees engaged with your brand. It’s a key reason to have great email signatures in 2022 and you can find out how to really make them work in our dedicated blogpost ‘7 ways your email signatures can meet the challenges of remote working’.
5. Secure attendees for high quality virtual events
The current climate means that companies will continue to host virtual events – but a key 2022 marketing trend is that quality will have to improve. Webinars and virtual conferences need to offer attendees more than a narrated slideshow, so the emphasis is on professional production values. Your email signature might not be able to improve your creativity but, if you’re going to invest in improved design and production, they’re a great wide-reaching way to promote your upcoming virtual event with a clear ‘Book your place’ call to action.
6. Automate to increase efficiency and insights
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic for global marketers eager to automate how they engage audiences, efficiently answer customer enquiries and solve problems. Hubspot’s Marketing Trends of 2022 identifies key areas spanning everything from predictive marketing and lead scoring to chatbots and content creation.
How do email signatures fit into automation? By integrating seamlessly with your marketing automation and CRM systems, such as Salesforce. That way any recipient click-through from email signature and banner campaigns automatically feeds into your marketing automation to deliver extra customer insights and help further qualify leads. You can also use the information gathered by marketing automation tools to determine the banners applied to business emails (including those sent direct from your CRM system), ensuring that the target audience receives marketing messaging that best meets their interest and helps drive conversion.
7. Streamline social media channel selection
It’s tempting to keep adding new on-trend platforms to your social marketing mix but companies are increasingly realising that by keeping their brands’ social media presence to 3-5 platforms they can effectively reach different audiences without overstretching their marketing management resources.
Prioritise the social platforms that achieve the best engagement amongst your target audience and cost-effectively repurpose content between them where possible. For a professional audience, LinkedIn continues to be a rising star in 2022 with rapidly growing users, engagement and new features.
The great thing about keeping your social media channels to between 3 and 5 is that this number of clickable icons can comfortably fit on your email signature, encouraging recipient engagement with your latest branded social content with every email your employees send.
8. Personalise customer experience with segmentation & targeting rules
Personalisation is more important than ever in 2022 with 80% of consumers saying they are more likely to do business with a company that offers them a personalised experience than one that doesn’t!
So whilst you might think that email signatures are only personalised for the sender, the addition of an interactive marketing banner means that the recipient can directly engage with a marketing message that’s relevant to them. How can you make sure this approaches personalisation? By choosing email signature software with advanced segmentation, targeting and scheduling rules so that the right recipient or recipient group receives the right email banner marketing message at the right time – and even based on their previous banner interaction – to maximise engagement.
Check out our email signature banners page to learn more about targeting, scheduling and automating email signature banner campaigns that will further personalise your business email and improve your customer experience.
9. Promote content that converts – blogs & case studies
Within a company’s content strategy an engaging blog can really generate ROI. A regularly updated blog with relevant consumer content helps your SEO, drives customer engagement and builds your brand – and it’s as effective in 2022 as it’s ever been. An email banner, or even just a call-to-action (CTA) in your signature, is an incredibly effective way to promote and drive traffic to your latest or most relevant blog post.
Case studies also continue to be a key content requirement for 2022, driving leads and creating brand credibility by showing in detail how customers benefit from your product or service, as well as showcasing the calibre of your client base. Easily promote them in your email signature banners, especially when featuring a key result or glowing testimonial quote. Make it easy for recipients to click through to see how your product or service delivered results.
The ‘Blog Booster’ and ‘The Client Case Study’ are just two of our 33 Great Email Signature Banner Examples to help you get the most from your email signature in 2022.
10. Take control of your key communication channel
As Forbes Council Member Krista Neher observes in Twelve Digital Marketing Trends For 2022 And How To Take Advantage Of Them, a simple 2022 digital marketing trend is for marketers to become more focused and aim to do fewer things better, in other words ‘less is more’. With so many digital marketing channels available it’s easy for marketers to spread their efforts and budgets too thin. As she points out, it’s ‘the foundations that still matter’ and marketers need to avoid the danger of being distracted by shiny new digital marketing tools.
So when it comes to focusing your efforts, it’s important to remember that email is still your business’s number 1, 1-to-1 communication channel (and you have complete control over it) so it’s worth exploring all the branding, promotional and analytical opportunities that email signatures, banner campaigns and reporting can offer.
Final thoughts…
We all know marketers love a new trend and 2022 offers plenty for you to take advantage of, whilst remembering to get the marketing fundamentals right. Your everyday business email might not seem to be the trendiest channel, but by adding professional email signatures and banner campaigns you can transform your everyday email to deliver exceptional engagement results and help your brand stay on top of digital marketing trends in 2022. To find out more about how email signatures can help build your brand in 2022, contact us today.
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