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Marketing Tip #33: Signatures on ALL of your Emails Kirk Behrendt
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We live in the electronic information age. Every smart dentist in the world has a website. Often the hardest part about having a website is getting people to be aware of it and use it. This month we look at one of the most simple, cost effective, and underutilized methods of directing traffic to your website…signatures on your emails.
I don’t know what it is like your world, but I get in excess of 200 emails a day. Well over 75% of them are junk mail. The remaining 25% are legitimate communication efforts. So, if your world is anything like mine, you have about 10-100 opportunities a day to passively market to those who you communicate with by creating a signature on every email you send.
What is a signature? A signature is your personalized stamp that is automatically created at the bottom of every email you create. Here is an example:
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Don’t worry about being too forward with this. It is a common business practice to do so. Here are a few things to consider:
- Be proud of your efforts in building your website. Create channels to send people to it. Make sure your team, friends, family, specialists and business network see a link to it all the time.
- You would be shocked to poll the percentage of your patients, friends (and even team members) to find out how many haven’t seen your website. You would be even further alarmed to find out how few of a percentage even knew you had a website.
Do this:
- Make sure that every email that is sent from your office has a signature on it, whether it be from you or one of your team members.
- Put whatever you want on there, but make sure your signature includes at least these 3 things: your name, your number and a link to your website. Adding a slogan, mantra or tagline is also a nice touch.
- If you can, give people an incentive to click on your website link. You will be surprised by how many people take you up on it
I know a great dentist in Virginia, Dr. Charley Varipapa, who used to sign all of his emails this way:
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I find myself clicking on his rental property links almost every time and wondering when I can get out there.
Now, he has an image banner at the base of his signatures. Here is what it looks like:
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Here is how you create an email signature:
If Microsoft Word is your e-mail editor, see Word Help. Word offers the most customization options for signatures.
1. From the main Microsoft Outlook window, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Mail Format tab.
2. In the Compose in this message format list, click the message format that you want to use the signature with.
3. Under Signature, click Signatures, and then click New.
4. In the Enter a name for your new signature box, enter a name.
5. Under Choose how to create your signature, select the option you want.
6. Click Next.
7. In the Signature text box, type the text you want to include in the signature.
You can also paste text to this box from another document.
8. To change the paragraph or font format, select the text, click Font or Paragraph, and then select the options you want. These options are not available if you use plain text as your message format.
9. To add an electronic business card — vCard — to the signature, under vCard options, select a vCard from the list, or click New vCard from Contact.
10. Click Finish when you are done editing the new signature.
To get your signatures to automatically appear in the messages you create or reply to, do this:
11. From the main Microsoft Outlook window, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Mail Format tab.
12. In the Compose in this message format list, click the message format that you want to use the signature with.
13. Under Signatures, select an e-mail account, and then choose the signatures that you want to use for new messages and for replies and forwards. You can use a different signature for each.
You will be amazed at the number of comments you get in the next few months.
Sign away,
Kirk Behrendt