E-mail remains a dominant channel for business communications, but unregulated e-mail signatures can present a serious brand, trust and compliance risk for organisations.
This is according to speakers addressing a webinar presented by Exclaimer in partnership with ITWeb.
Jess Mitchell, Account Executive at Exclaimer, said: “E-mail is still where business conversations are happening, but most organisations have little control or visibility over how their brands are presented in those e-mails. A 50-person organisation might send around 2 000 e-mails a day, and business e-mail numbers are expected to grow to over 408 billion by the end of 2027. However, up to 80% of organisations still rely on manual methods to manage and update e-mail signatures.”
A poll of webinar attendees found that 66% of them still manage e-mail signatures manually.
Mitchell noted that the risks associated with this include brand trust, compliance and employee identity accuracy issues. “If e-mails are managed manually and you are trusting employees to manage theirs on their own, you risk your business credibility,” she said.
She emphasised that e-mail is no longer just communication – it is part of the organisation’s digital governance. E-mail is increasingly linked to security and trust, and regulatory expectations around digital communication are increasing, she said.
Mitchell said effective e-mail signature governance should include centralised control over signatures across all users and devices, with accurate employee identity information that is updated automatically from Active Directory. It should also ensure consistent brand messaging across every e-mail, with automated legal disclaimers, registered business information and other controls added to every e-mail.
She outlined how Exclaimer allows organisations to centrally manage standardised, secure e-mail signatures for Microsoft 365.
Tom Yates, Solutions Engineer Manager at Exclaimer, demonstrated how Exclaimer helps protect brand trust with consistent, professional e-mail signatures for over 9 million users across 75 000 organisations worldwide.
Exclaimer gives IT teams everything they need to standardise and control e-mail signatures, using brand kits to upload font preferences, colours, logos and links, banners, icons and campaigns, along with legal disclaimers in a central portal. The brand kit then offers signature design templates with drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy to create signatures.
Yates explained: “This connects with Active Directory, allowing you to create dynamic signatures. There is an option to schedule changes for active campaigns or seasonal promotions. It also allows for individuals to have multiple signatures to represent their different roles or different brands within the organisation.”
He added: On occasion, a user may want to change information in a signature, so end-users can sign in to a secure link and change certain fields, such as their display name. We are seeing a lot of customers using this feature to change things like working hours, qualifications or their pronouns.
“We have also added brand assets into the solution for meeting branding, which integrates automatically into Zoom, with integrations also available for Teams and Google Meet. This pulls through users’ display name, job title and branding.”
Exclaimer also allows organisations to track the number of signatures sent, and track click-throughs on elements of the signature to measure campaign performance. A comprehensive dashboard also allows IT to track sent e-mails by time and date, and highlights any mailboxes that don't have signatures applied to them.
E-mail signatures may seem like a small detail but they sit at the centre of brand identity, compliance and risk management, they noted.
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