You can increase your leads by 15% simply by telling people what you do, learn how to use auto signatures.

Today, I'd like to share about auto signatures and the power of the emails that we send and receive everyday that most of us don't necessarily take advantage of or even open. I'd like to do this because I've been working recently with a virtual assistant in the Philippines to outsource my email. In my inbox, I have some 18,000 emails. I don't think that means that I've got a lot compared to anybody else, but it seems like quite a lot to manage with that treasure trove of contacts, clients, consultants, media, business partners, and so on. Also, I've probably sent as many emails as I've received over the last 25 years. One of the key differences between the emails that I'm receiving and the emails that I'm sending is the auto signature. The auto signature in our emails is something that w can use for free. On a erage, it is said that peop e get about 120-130 emails ever day and send about the same amount. When you add that all u , what you'll find is that it's a potential opportunity for dire t marketing. If we assume that t's about 125 emails a day and e work for about 180 days a y ar, you've got over 23,000 emai s that you will be sending du ing the course of a year to var ous people. In the course of talking to the virtual assistant in Manila, there were a number of people that I wanted to reach out to and to find the contact details of and to make appointments. We experienced some difficulty on that front when we found out that majority of people don't have an auto signature, so there is no way to phone them. They also haven't put in what their business title is, where their business is located, or even a potential call to action. There are 23,000 emails that you can send to people that are directly interested in what you do. That's basically free PR, so I just thought I would look at the opportunities that exist for all of us to help build our brand and awareness using this tool. There are some 294 billion emails sent every day across the world. Obviously, if we're pitching to the media or to a customer, what we write in our body of the email is important, but as is the auto signature. So I thought we could look at some tools and some tips that you can adopt to help get your emails noticed. There are a number of different filters that we can include in our email, and there are a couple of tools that we can use. One is called Yesware, which actually helps to create an auto signature for you. The main elements that we might want to include, and the view of this company Yesware, is that we should only have three to four lines of text: our name, our title, our company, a link to our website, and also a phone number. Personally, I find it very frustrating when people don't include a phone number. I was trying to ring someone yesterday for a last minute project, but with no phone number, in the end, I had to just write them off, so being able to contact or reach someone easily can attract more people to your business or service. We can also include our social media profiles. I personally include a link to my LinkedIn profile, because my LinkedIn displays lots of information about me. If you've got a product to sell, and if you've got a particular strapline, you can include those as well. For us, it's, "Keep on communicating," and I also include the line, "Getting clients noticed since 1995." It's just a couple of small things that would tell somebody that may not be so familiar with my company what I do and how long I've been doing it for. There's one view which is not to include your email address in the email signature, because it's actually a bit like sending an envelope with your address on the front. It's a duplication. The other thing that you can do, which I've started to do, is to include an image in my email. I personally have a photograph of myself, not because I'm in love with myself, but because many people, especially thanks to this pandemic, will never meet me. Many partners, suppliers, prospects will be people that have no idea who I am, but of course, as we know, body language and our facial expressions are key to creating a culture of trust between partners. Research done by Stanford University shows that the most memorable photographs are of people, so it doesn't have to be your logo necessarily, but you, and also that memorable photographs are color photographs. Interestingly enough, the same research from Stanford found that the impact of misspelled emails is not that great if we write the phrase, "Sent from my phone." It's almost like a get out of jail card. If you use the iPhone stock, "Apologies for typos. I'm using my iPhone," people may actually forgive you for that. It actually also implies that maybe you're working at a time on your mobile phone. But if you do use email, ideally, one would use correct grammar and spelling and punctuation. And if you do so, then the same research found that the sender was considered to be credible. If you're in a business like public relations and you're sending things that are grammatically incorrect, no one's going to trust you. I certainly find that when I'm corresponding with freelancers, writers, and so on on platforms like Upwork, if their correspondence with me is littered with errors, I think they're only going to do the same when they correspond on my behalf, and so I don't even consider them. You can use plugins like Grammarly, which will double check the tone of your email signature, your email itself, and also the grammar. Grammarly, by the way also, works when you're creating tweets, posts on LinkedIn, and posts on other social media websites, because it's browser-based. There are a number of platforms that can be used. One is called WiseStamp. They claim to have 1.2 million professional users. In their research, they claim that using a professional auto signature, which includes a picture of yourself, your name, your job title, your phone number, and a link to your website or LinkedIn account, plus icons to your social media, will get you 32% more replies, a 10% increase in social reach, and a 15% increase in leads. That translates to 22% more clients. Those are pretty astounding numbers, really. If you're sending 120 emails a day, and if you can get 30 email replies or more per day, then that's going to annualize to being nearly 5,000 more people replying. Another one is called Newoldstamp. That creates some unique and slightly interesting colors and formats, and it increases your visibility by incorporating a photograph and social buttons. It's almost like an Instagram style feed, and they have 11 email signature templates that you can choose from. Another option is called HTMLsig which again, allows you to create some very simple auto signatures. You're uploading your content, your name, your phone number, and your LinkedIn profiles, and so on, and it'll auto generate for you a graphic. You can also create signatures on your mail platform itself. Outlook enables that. The iOS enables that on the mobile phone, the iPad, and the desktop. Strangely enough, though, they don't share. One has to enter the email auto signature into all three platforms. You can just send it from one cut and paste it into the other. Those are not as easy, I found, to integrate pictures or links. What I do now with Zoho is I create two or three different auto signatures, because I have one which includes a photograph for when I'm sending an email to people that I've never met and who I'm writing to for the first time, and then I have an auto signature without the photograph for people that I know well and correspond with regularly, and whom I don't want appear as vain to if I keep sending pictures of myself. The point is that auto signatures, which are in the footnotes of everything we do everyday, are an amazing resource for PR work, and they're entirely free. Remember, some 23,000 emails get sent by you, and let's not even mention if you're doing direct mail campaigns and you have multiple emails going out on your behalf. There are a number of different footers that you might want to include. One might be a legal and confidentiality footer. That may not be relevant for every every email, which is why having multiple email footers could be a good idea. It's understandable why law firms and listed companies always have these long and legal entity footers. It could actually also just be a link to an online footer if wanted to make it a little less obnoxious. Also, I find, especially if you're doing a reply, including receipt, you end up with a lot of the email including the disclaimers. You can have the GDPR-compliant footers which are available online, and these are useful especially if you're doing a lot of email marketing. You can have a security or virus disclaimer. You can even have a green email footer, like I do which says, "Please think before you print and click on Ecosia for your search." You can have a social media button or multiple buttons, which is a great way of getting people to know that you're connected online without listing them all there. They'll just have to click on it, and it'll take them to the corresponding site. There's also the unsubscribe link if you're sending emails. I personally find it annoying when unsubscribe links are buried at the bottom and almost impossible to find. If I don't want the email and I can't unsubscribe, it doesn't mean I'm reading it. It just means I'm ignoring it. It would be better to make the unsubscribe button obvious. It'll give more accurate numbers as well to the number of people who are actually interested in And then of course, there's the marketing email footers, which can include a call to action. For example, "If you like this, click here to get more information or to download this product." I include a Calendly l nk in my footer, which says, "Bo k a meeting with me," because I try to reduce the time it tak s for someone to have a conve sation with me and find out a out EastWest Public Relations an the SPEAK|pr program and all he work we do around the worl . All the elements within t e email auto signature are the e to serve a purpose. It's n t just filling in to look nic . What is the goal of the ema what you're sending. l that you're setting and you' e sending out? Is it to info m someone? Is it to reprima d somebody? Is it to enable th m to pay a bill? Is it enabli g them to make an appointment? Emails can, for most of us, take up a huge amount of time. If you s it enabling them to correspo d with other people on yo r behalf, which is where I use t e auto signature for t e vacation get 120 valid emails a day, and you're sending that many a day, if you're like me and you're looking to outsource that, creating rules in the inbox is useful, but each rule where an email gets forwarded, for example, to a virtual assistant, or I'm forwarding all the emails that have a finance-related element to the different bank and bookkeeping companies that we have in Singapore and India, those would also then have a rule to forward them and an auto signature to say, "Please take account of these bookkeeping issues. Thank you," and it has my contact details in case they have any problem. Clearly, we're really moving in era of automation. What studies done by Yesware and Stanford are showing is that site visitors that come to make purchases, that visit websites from emails are up to 4% more likely to make a purchase than those that just find us by search engines. In other words, if we're sending out emails to people, we've already got their address, and assuming it's by valid means, we're a trusted correspondent already. The email, be it a general or personalized email with a specific intent, can lead to a transaction. It should lead to some kind of action, or why else have we bothered to send the email in the first place? Email signatures and auto signatures, as we've seen from the WiseStamp research, can le d to a 15% increase in leads and a 32% increase in replies. What e want to avoid is maybe getti g another 30 emails, because f we've already got 120 and we' e getting another 30, that's a l t of emails to sort though. I don't necessarily want to invi e another group of emails to y inbox. What I can then do is o automate my response which say , "Thank you for respondin . Please visit my website to g t this offer, to get th s download, to buy with th s purchase discount." Ema l management is very important, s I've mentioned, and I think th t all of us will associate wi h tha Finally, two requirements for emails are TLS and SSL encryption. Transport Layer Security or TLS setting is the trusted setting for emails, because not all emails come from a domain which has this trusted encryption. If your email doesn't have this standard TLS encrption, it will most likely end up in spam. You can verify this by going to CheckTLS. SSL or Secure Socket Layer encryption, if you have your own domain name with GoDaddy, for example, is worth double checking, because in some cases, one actually has to verify the domain name in order for it to have the encryption. If you haven't gone through that step and you're wondering why emails are not getting received, it's not because your auto signature isn't good, it's not because people don't want to hear from you, but because they're simply not getting your emails. Someone asked me today about free PR, because they don't like to spend money on public relations where they can't see a direct result, so I'm working hard to bring tips and tools that are free, because this is a podcast not to sell you things, but to share what I've learned as an entrepreneur to help other business owners to get noticed without spending a lot of money. All it takes is a little bit of creativity and a little bit of ingenuity.