Signamercial

Term defintion
The term signamercial is a combination of the words (digital)"Signature" and "Commercial", and is used in describing structured advertising/marketing used by organizations in outgoing emails - typically below the sender's signature.

Typically a mid-sized corporation will send out thousands of emails every business day. A large percentage of those emails are sent to both existing customers and prospects. By leveraging the space below the sender's signature, marketing, sales and service can send out structured messages that will be exposed to the recipient.

Signamercials vs. 'traditional e-marketing'
The traditional channels of e-marketing include:

* Mass-email marketing
* Banner Marketing
* AddWords
* Search Engine Marketing
* E-zines / digital publications

The two widely used distribution channels used are either mass-emails and Websites/Search portals like Google or Live Search. Both these channels have significant draw-backs:

1) Mass-emails has to conform to the CAN-SPAM act, and the sender is very likely to end up in the spam filter of the recipient.

2) Marketing through Search Engines like Google are either subject to "random clicks" by people who happen to search for a term related to the advertisement, or has a cost per click or display.

3) People tend to consider commercials distributed through Search Engines or mass e-mail to be 'Untrusted' or 'pushed' to the reciepient.

4) In order to use mass-email marketing, organizations has to invest a huge effort in collecting the recipients permission for each 'Newsletter' or 'email list'

The advantages of this new form of structured marketing is clear:
1) Although thousands of Signamercials potentially can be sent out every day, the form of communication is true 1-to-1 (Personal communication from sender to recipient)
2) No permission collection is needed because of the 1-to-1 nature of the communcation
3) Exposure of the Signamercial is almost guaranteed because the sender will in most cases will be Trusted by the recipients email system
4) The wide use of the HTML format in email editors like Microsoft Outlook allows for 'Rich' Signamercials containing graphics, animations, link tracking, etc.
5) The Signamercials can be targetted using the sender's organizational context. E.g a person in the Service department would automatically have "Services messages" appended to the outgoing emails, while a person in the sales department would automatically send out "Current product offers", etc.

The future of Signamercials
While Signamercials can be considered a new innovative way of structured digital marketing, the range of effect is enherantly limited to the combined "Email Radar strength" of the employees within the organization - meaning that you cannot reach people outside the contact lists of the employees.

Taking the above into account, Signamercials can still be considered one of most inexpensive ways of mass-exposing structured advertising through the digital media.

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Related ressources
Internet Marketing
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
Email Marketing

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