Jim James: 0:00

For $1 a month $12 dollars per year someone could have a customizable signature that is increasing their click through rate two to 3%. Hello, and welcome to this episode of speak PR now today, we're going to talk about the power of email auto signatures. It's something that I've invited Helga from New World stamps to talk to us about. She joins us from Ukraine. Helga, welcome.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 0:29

Hi, Jim. Happy to be here. And thanks for inviting me.

Jim James: 0:32

You're more than welcome to Helga, you have a surname that I'm not going to try and pronounce, maybe you can pronounce it for us. And tell us what role you have a new world stamp and how does New World stamp solve problems for entrepreneurs?

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 0:45

Yes, so my full name is Helga Zabalkanskaya. And well, actually, I am CMO of the NewOldStamp, this is a Emil signature, marketing platform and management platform. And the biggest idea that we have for our company is to actually help founders, or the small companies or business owners, as well as marketers, if you have one. So to improve brand visibility, and help utilize email signatures, actually as a marketing channel, so yeah, it seems to be a small problem that no one you really like, understand, sometimes it's underestimated. And you have the huge power to work with this.

Jim James: 1:30

Statistically, billions of emails every day going around the world, most of them at the tail end of the email, there's no contact details, no branding, anything. So tell us about email, signatures, but also email marketing.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 1:46

We all know that if, if you receive the email, sometimes most of the times we scroll down to see called the person behind this email before we even start reading the content of the email. So we try to see the at least a surname and the company name, or just the name well to understand that this is the person behind this. But just imagine that you see the photo, now you see the person you like, you understand, and your email automatically gets a bit more trust. But moreover, we often under underestimate the small call to action that we can add to the signatures. And even if it's small business, or it's a bigger company, you can just add banners, or add call to actions to visit the page to check the offer to book a demo. If you're for example, like software company, and you want to share a bit more information about you too. And I don't know people very often just miss this part. But it's really helpful. And it creates this replies and increases actually the trust.

Jim James: 2:55

How does it work, though, because everybody's got an email running on different platforms have, say, the desktop and the mobile, and maybe the web? How would they use a system like New World stamp to have a multifunctional email signature across all those devices.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 3:15

So this is the task for us to solve. When you create the email signature series in our platform, we we make sure that all the signatures will look consistent in all the mail clients and on on devices. So you create one signature that you can install to your iPhone to Apple Mail to Gmail and to Outlook, it will, it will look properly. Even if you send or receive emails from different email clients, it will be consistent

Jim James: 3:48

In terms of an individual's email, that may be one problem to solve. Is this working across a whole organization? Because standardization of email signatures is another issue, isn't it for business owners?

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 4:03

Yeah, I'm more than sure that everyone tried to install signatures for if you have a small team, team, even for five people, you're asking them to update something and then never never do it. So we have the central management system that can be integrated with your Exchange Server. If we're talking about the outlook system, yes, of Microsoft options. And if we're talking about the G Suite, we can also connect to the G Suite and putting the standard as signatures to all the employees in the company. So basically a marketer or the anyone who owns th NewOldStamp account, they make changes in our platform set up connection on the ones and then just with a click of a button, they can make all the updates. So no worries with the instructions. But if we talk about the individuals and small companies that don't have G Suite and green organization Or don't have Exchange servers or office 365 that set it up. You can just use simple copy and paste method and most of the mail clients, they allow us to, to make updates using our system, even if you just copy the code of our signatures.

Jim James: 5:18

What about things like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, how does that work does one have to kind of connect these individually cuz you might have an organizational account. But also you have individual LinkedIn accounts, you do have to have two people from a practical point of view, manage that, because it's quite frankly, quite difficult to get all the links and the images and the graphics to work, right.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 5:44

It all depends on the organization set up and the brand requirements. But if we're talking about, like, all the teammates should have personal email contacts to add links to their LinkedIn. So what you can do, you can simply, if you if you use the integration, you would probably have all this resources stored on your servers, or in the G Suite organization or in exchange. So you can create one signature template, and our system will automatically update all the elements that you want it to be updated. If we talk about like smaller companies that work work would be used more have manual process, you can create the CC file with the information and just push it to our system. And our system will create signatures based on the like, based on the master template to all the employees. So basically, it will take you I don't know, three seconds, if it's five minutes, if it takes about 1000s of signatures, and then you just need to hit the button to send over the signatures to the employees.

Jim James: 6:56

Well, and then does that work for both the sort of when you create an email? But also what about when you do the replies because, you know, and then there's the forwarding? Because that's a bit of a bottleneck as well, isn't it? When you set up your auto signature, you've got, you know, these different options of when you send the signature? Can you set that as a rule for the company, because that's something else that I've tried in the past is some standards across the company.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 7:25

Not all of my clients allowed us to do, but the one that we can use, so we can easily work with it with Outlook and exchange and office 365. So it's my Microsoft System, we can set up rules for replies and forwards for internal and external communication and mail. So you can have different signatures for each employee, G Suite, and Gmail, they just recently added this option that you can have reply and forward signature. So we are now working, how we can automate this fully. Because now it's like one part can be able to make it the other one is kind of manual, but we are looking for the solution. And we'll just implemented this soon.

Jim James: 8:09

What about email becoming part of your if you like marketing and CRM, because we're all sending email as part of a sequence of events, either with an existing customer or a new one? How does NewOldStamp can help with that part of the work?

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 8:28

It's most of the sequences, we're talking about the cold outreach for quite unknown people. So having the signature there will be just more than beneficial for you because you can even support your marketing marketing message that you have in your outreach in the email signature by adding some banner or some clickable information that can lead to the landing page. And we support SEO CRM system so we can easily set up our signatures in pipe drive, by the way, we are the only solution that works in the pipe drive properly. Yeah, and you can add us to Salesforce to HubSpot. Basically, any CRM system that supports HTML. this could be useful if you have special promotions taking place is you could upload a promotion. Let's say you've got a new product coming out. You could put that on the website, but you could create a banner for the email of all of your staff. And everybody in that week month would for example, have Christmas special banners in all of their emails. And that goes back to the website. Is that right? Yeah. This is what we quite often use for ourselves. So when you have special promotion, we add the promotional banner at the bottom of the signature. We push it to all our employees and everyone has done emails to like they recipient see that about information about this promotion? So itself support teams, I don't know marketing teams? Could I use that, for example, to drive subscribers to my email newsletter? Yeah, you can add it to always even three ways, you can add just the call to action button that will allow you just click the button, add the link to this subscribing page. Once someone clicks and they go to the landing page and subscribe. If you want to make it more kind of vivid, you can add the banner, yes, so you can add the promotional banner, or you can draw this the button on it make a huge message. So I don't know what to make it draw a bit more attention. Again, adding the link then it works more over you can also add the schedule. And our system will updated automatically. If we're talking about the banners, yes. At any time, for example, you are now launching so we have the holiday season. And you know coming back and forth the signature seems to be a bit tricky. So you can set up okay, from for the black Friday's show this banner than we have Christmas coming show this banner than we have. Yeah, so it's automation. When you currently send emails, you can get a send receive notice if you set that de-track the if you like the open rate and the click throughs. How would I know how effective these emails have been? Okay, so we don't track particularly emails, we track signatures. So we track clicks and signature views. Signature impressions, make it microdrive. Yeah, so. And we also like we calculate, click through rate, and always see it from analyzing all our clients and the latest so we see that actually, if you work with the signatures to run tests, as Euro in marketing, you need to make some changes to see what will work better for your audience. But the average clicks rate for my own signature and conversion rate, yes. click through rate. Yeah. So it will be from two to 3%. And if you're thinking that this is just the mouse signature is huge, it's really huge.

Jim James: 12:29

You're missing a big opportunity there aren't you as a company if you're not using the auto signature feature.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 12:33

And I also like to mention here that not on the click link button is important but you know, this is the brand impression, especially if you don't use if you have long lists to signatures. When you reach out to somebody you don't know, every time someone's open the email they see along with it. Okay, and so multiple times. So you know, this is about the brand awareness as well. And how do people do that? Do they need to be good at design or you have templates, or the import from another platform we have, we have our signature generator, we have templates that are pure, like custom, like they are wider, customizable, basically, you can reproduce any type of signature you need, you have the fields, you can move them, you can choose the layout of signatures, how the elements would stay. So if you want social icons on the right side, or under the signature, where you want your company name to be all this, all the things you can do, actually, you don't need to be a designer, it would be nice to have branding guidelines to make it accordingly. But yeah, it will take you I don't know, if you come up top apart from and just want to play around to make something nice for the first time, five minutes, not more. You don't need to be a designer. I don't know developer tester, whatever, just do it for yourself.

Jim James: 14:02

And in terms of the the pricing, these very expensive or accessible from a price point of view.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 14:12

Well, it's really accessible. We if we have the package system currently. So you if you need one signature, you can buy one and the more signatures you want to buy, the cheaper it will be but the prices are starting from $1 per signature per month. We are now changing Yeah, we are now changing it a bit because we see the value and we see that users sometimes don't want to have access to all the features for$1 a month. So $12 per year someone could have a customizable signature that is increasing their click through rate two to 3%. You just need to compare it if you want to have a cup of coffee in Starbucks, you would buy how much $6 per coffee or something like this.

Jim James: 14:59

Why do people not do this Helga I mean, it seems so obvious. And for me, it's been a source of some frustration where people write to me and don't have a phone number, or an email address or any way of connecting to that

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 15:13

I think we are now see a bit the increase in this interest. But when we started with a new old stamp, we just we saw that we need to educate people doing this, they're just not aware about the opportunities they're losing, and how they can benefit from it. Because most of the people say, oh, whatsoever, this is just my name, and they have their like Kind Regards, I dont know Helga. And I said, Okay, you're reaching out to this person, why don't you want to view the, like, opportunity to reach back? Make it easy for them when they're just okay. I never thought about this. Now, this is just at first people, like said that they don't need Facebook ads, for example, we need to educate them. This is the same thing with the signatures.

Jim James: 16:04

What about security? Helga, am I needing to install my contact address book onto your server? Or is it all safely wrapped up on my own, and there's no issues because obviously, hacking is a problem these days.

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 16:22

We access only the signature settings. Basically, we don't need to go, I don't know, some extensions, for example, in Gmail that we use, they can read your emails, body addresses, and so on. We don't do this. We don't ask even a request for this. We just access the signature part. And that's it. And if we're talking about the bigger organizations like using exchange service, so we have a bit different idea that we don't integrate with deeply with the server, the IT department would only set up specific rules that allowed us only use this tool. And that's it. So we don't have deep integrations with all of the system that makes us very secure.

Jim James: 17:12

Right. And how who are some of your customers now? They big companies? small companies? you're based in Ukraine. But where are your company clients from?

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 17:21

Though we are based in Ukraine, we work globally and the measure of how our customers are coming from the US and the UK? And yeah, our target market would be for the company starting from 25. And please don't we cover all the needs of the smaller companies and we have a bit simplify solution for them. However, if we're talking about like small teams, we have users from well known companies like FedEx, game loved, Vodafone. So this is like small teams that use our signatures, not the whole company.

Jim James: 17:56

If we want to find out more about where they can find you, how can they do that?

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 18:01

Yeah, so the best the best would be just to visit a website is NewOldStamp.com. a bit tricky name, but this is what it has.

Jim James: 18:13

Helga thank you so much for joining and sharing more about the power of email marketing and auto signatures

Helga Zabalkanskaya: 18:18

I'm happy to share my experience.

Jim James: 18:26

So you'd be listening to the speak PR podcast, with Helga with the slightly impossible surname, so I'm really not going to insult her by try. So thank you for listening and do check out their website and send people great emails that represent your company properly and also will increase the number of leads that you get from the emails you send out. So until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business that if you're going to send out some emails, make sure that they are properly Auto signature Thank you so much.