EDF Renewables North America grew rapidly. To project a better brand image, the company wanted all employees to use on-brand email signatures with the approved messaging and formatting. “For years we had been struggling with getting everyone to conform to using the same email signature. We are 1,000 plus employees and so there were people who went rogue. They used purple letters or a colored backgrounds,” says Christine Karlovic, communications manager at EDF. Because getting email signature imagery to look perfect is complicated, even well-intentioned efforts went awry with low resolution and improperly scaled logos and graphics.  Says Karlovic, ”It was particularly bad for people receiving our emails on mobile devices.”

The communications team wanted a signature management platform that integrated directly with EDF Renewables Active Directory software to ensure that all sender information was accurate and automatically updated. At the same time, they wanted to give her sales team control over what information they provided to email recipients - for example, whether they wanted to add a mobile number to make it easier for a prospect to contact them. Additionally, the company saw its signatures as an untapped multi-faceted marketing channel that could deliver immediate value to multiple departments and personae. “We knew everyone was spending a lot of time sending emails, and that the potential customers getting the emails were perfectly targeted for things like webinars or white papers. We had been sending links but we wondered if there might be a better, more interactive way to reach people in email,” says Karlovic. Finally, because EDF Renewables operated in a regulated fields, emails from certain employees required the right disclaimers. This was being managed separate on an individual employee basis. EDF believed that using a centralized solution to guarantee disclaimer placement would be more efficient and reliable.

Karlovic started searching via Google for email signature management solutions and found several options. She decided against using plug-in based email signature management systems because these systems would not work on mobile devices. Other options offered parts of the solution she needed but not the entire package. Then Karlovic was contacted by Opensense  and learned more about their Email Signature Management and Marketing Platform. Opensense checked all the boxes for her requirements.

Within a single day of deploying Opensense, Karlovic had fixed her company’s email signature brand issues. “The customer support and onboarding was amazing,” says Karlovic. After quick training and onboarding with the Opensense team, Karlovic was able to use Opensense’s Design Studio to create email signature banners that had the latest brand assets and apply them to all outbound emails. Her executive team immediately noticed the image and brand improvement. “Opensense made it easy to make the signatures look awesome - even on mobile. And we didn’t have to hassle people to install it. It just worked,” explains Karlovic.  “It makes us look professional and it’s a significant feature of our branding.”

The Opensense Design Studio proved so easy to use that Karlovic created multiple banners for different marketing campaigns and for different departments. “It’s super easy. I spend no more than 30 minutes per week on it,” says Karlovic. This allowed EDF to affordably and effectively leverage its signature banner blocks for a variety of useful purposes including webinar promotions, event marketing - even safety tips from the operations department. The EDF executives and sales teams appreciate the banners as a platform to drive content marketing. “They love the banners because we can promote their white papers and their thought leadership pieces so easily,” says Karlovic. “They get unsolicited emails saying, ‘We read your white paper from the email.’ It generates conversation and interaction.” In fact, shortly after adopting Opensense, EDF stopped paying for some of its external advertising. Says Karlovic, “We found the email banners were incredibly effective promotional vehicles. It’s a direct hit every time you are emailing someone you are doing business with."