Top 7 Things to Look For in an Email Signature Vendor

Here are seven of the most important things to consider when choosing an email signature solution vendor to bring your signatures to life.

1. A Centrally Managed Email Signature Platform

There are many features that make an email signature such a powerful branding and marketing space. Most notably, businesses and organizations can now manage all their email signatures in one place. With a cloud email signature service, a company with countless employees and many departments can unify employee signatures and signatures dynamically. This eliminates the administration and management demands of traditional email signature practices such as manual updates.

The IT department of the business can create standardized and consistent signatures with the correct information for all employees and departments with greater flexibility. It makes setting targeted, up-to-date, and unified branding of company-wide email signatures easier. When email signatures are run as an IT service, the company can invest its resources and staff in other high-value activities rather than maintenance, such as creating email signatures.

Delegating email signature services to a specialist company is a sure way to lighten the load on IT services. These include reducing the need for faq phone calls and complementing branding and marketing through the IT service,

2. A Cloud-Based Solution

Cloud-based email signature service is a new approach to empowering email signatures. This service populates email signatures based on sender data and creates and formats signatures based on set rules.

A company can use signatures to deliver targeted messages, promotions, or other information that recipients will find useful—for instance, changes in products and services or updates to company, department, or branch status. The best part is that all the signatures are implemented without requiring employees to spend countless hours updating signatures.

Email signatures populated on the email server require only a one-time client-server configuration. The updates are then rolled globally to all mailboxes. There is no need to install plugins, fumble with templates on user PCs, or worry about the resulting HTML code.

IT administrators have access to configurations to manage the signatures centrally and on-the-fly. Since all configurations are carried out on the cloud on SMTP servers, the signatures and the service are secure and dependable.

3. Limited Flexibility for End-user to Personalize Signature Data

While there are benefits to centrally managing email signatures on the server side, the best email signature vendor should also allow end-users some level of flexibility to personalize their individual signatures.

For instance, the department or branch heads may be able to update specific fields of the signature that affect their departments or branches. Individual users may also be allowed to set their own quotes in the signature without interfering with other fields such as titles, tag lines, or the company logo.

When users can update fields in the email signature, they can better personalize their signatures based on situations and the people or businesses they email. This will help reduce the number of calls for the IT department to the field. The pre-set controls and policies will manage which areas of the signature the end users can update and which ones are managed globally on the server level.

4. Robust Email Signature Compliance and Disclaimer Capability

While comparing various email signature solutions, you must find one that includes automatic disclaimers on all outbound emails. The law is stringent regarding communication and how a company handles user data. Therefore, an exchange should allow for a single disclaimer that is legally enforceable and up-to-date.

The Opensense email signature service goes a step further, enabling regional customization of disclaimers. The simple interface allows legal and compliance teams to easily update and edit disclaimers using a centralized email management software. This also allows you to have targeted disclaimers based on region or industry with greater flexibility. The ability for a disclaimer to be targeted to the recipient is a good idea for a company to protect itself and its employees, especially when running campaigns or promotions.

Notably, these email signature tools can implement variations of different signatures and disclaimers based on senders and recipients. Opensense's sender-based and recipient-based disclaimers bring the much-needed flexibility to personalize the legal section of the signature for each email sent.

5. Integrations With Company Directory or Source-of-Truth

Most companies lack data integrity in Active Directory or Source of Truth. The root of this problem is the lack of clean, up-to-date user info in their directories, such as addresses, incorrect or outdated phone numbers, missing nicknames, etc. A stale or dirty directory causes incorrect signature meta-data, often leading to frustrated employees and unnecessary help-desk calls.

While shopping for a server-side signature solution, consider one that can be deployed to instantly aggregate data from all devices. It should have the flexibility to allow IT and end-users to make corrections and add updates on user directory data so that it is appropriately reflected in your fully rendered signature. This removes the burden of accuracy and completeness from IT and shifts it to end users. The end user should be able to enjoy flexibility and control, where appropriate, to update their signature meta-data

Find a solution with full integration with Azure Active Directory and Office 365 Directory so that customers can achieve consistent contact information across all email signatures with little to no work from IT. 

6. Advanced Security

No organization wants to grapple with data security issues, especially now. For this reason, IT and information security departments must exhaustively scrutinize any cloud service and software provider to protect their company from data losses, breaches, malware, phishing, viruses, and other threats.

While shopping for an email signature solution, security is paramount. Find a signature solution that undergoes annual security audits by a third-party auditor to help protect your organization, its workflows, apps, and user data. Take the time to verify the security of user authentication, embedded audit trails, document and signature security, cloud server security, and the audit trail of the signing processes.

The right service should be fully redundant and use high-availability infrastructure running in the cloud. In addition, it must be SOC2 Compliant and preferably partner with world-class cloud security infrastructure providers to guarantee data protection.

7. Exceptional and Accessible Customer Support

Email remains the primary means by which companies communicate with their clients. Emails are omnipresent, straightforward, and powerful. The e-signatures should only be a layer feature added over the email service and must never negatively impact communication. However, things can go wrong at any time, and when they do, your email signature solution provider must be available and reachable to resolve it.

As a rule of thumb, the right cloud email signature service vendor should have a skilled US-based customer support team on standby to fix any emerging problems fast. In addition, the vendor should have a 24x7 dedicated customer support team with an expert ready to look into any concerns users may have with their emails or email signatures.

How would you tell apart proactive vendors from everyone else? For starters, you can review their G2 or Capterra Score for insights from other clients. You can also seek reviews and testimonials on their website and other third-party sources.

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