The complete guide to marketing collateral in emails

Sending marketing collateral to your leads is one of the challenges that every contemporary business needs to face. This is the complete guide to marketing collateral. Learn how to effectively manage it in the digital world.

What is marketing collateral

Marketing collateral is a set of marketing materials that support your marketing message. In other words, it is the follow-up to send to your leads that should prove what you say about your product or service is the truth.

Marketing collateral examples

What you include in such a marketing pack depends on your offer and strategy. See some sample contents of such marketing packs:

• Success stories – websites are meant to sell products and services. That’s why people often treat website information skeptically. Success stories show real use cases, and prove that a product was actually used and a customer must have been pretty amazed to agree to participate in writing such a story.
• Research – any independent data or review that supports your case is worth its weight in gold. Use it however you can to persuade your prospects.
• Numbers and even more numbers – marketing promises are one thing, but if you can add some numbers to them, they suddenly become more real. The most valuable numbers are ROI. So if you can calculate it, it will be perfect. Other numeric data that can impress your leads is the customer satisfaction factor or the number of companies that chose you.
• PowerPoint presentations – that’s a must-have for any marketing pack. It lets you present all this data from previous points in a neat and attractive way. And remember to use charts for presenting all those numbers. People love looking at charts.
• Product demos – show how easy it is to use your product or demonstrate real-life effects of its use, and it will be hard for anyone to say ‘no.’
• Examples of use – you probably know your tools like the back of your hand. Your customers usually don’t. If you have a dozen of different scenarios you can solve using your tool, share the knowledge. It just might solve the exact problem your leads are having.
• Comparisons – when your potential customers look for solutions, they will want to know why to choose you and not a competitive solution. Honest comparisons are a good way to win your prospects.
• Brochures – most marketing collateral includes brochures. A brochure can be useful, but still – it usually contains the same marketing message as your website. If you’re smart about it, people will be able to use it as a source of the most important information about you.

Challenges of managing marketing collateral

Coming up with the right materials is the marketing’s daily bread. It’s not a challenge, it’s a job. They prepare the materials and begin the never-ending story of polishing them and keeping them up to date. That’s when the real problems start.

You see, marketing materials usually have hundreds of revisions. But it’s usually not the marketing who sends those materials out.

The greatest challenge is when Sales reps need to follow up and include marketing collateral in their emails. That’s where you can face some… attachment issues:

• Instead of looking for the right marketing collateral package, you take the one you saved to your local drive. Yes, the ugly one from 2010, with the typo and meant for another product.
• You spend a few minutes every day to get the right file from the shared drive.
• You mean well, but forget to add the attachment 1 time out of 5.
• The marketing materials are great, but your recipient doesn’t trust attachments, especially the zipped ones, so your emails go straight to thrash.

Effective marketing collateral management

The solution may not be obvious, but it is simple and effective.

Add marketing materials to your email signature.

Why is it better? If done right, it solves every challenge. Think about it:

1. You can create an email signature for every scenario. With a click of a button, you can change the signature to another.
2. Instead of struggling with attachments, just link your marketing banner to SharePoint, a landing page or any other place where the marketing keeps the right and updated materials. It’s a win-win-win.
   • Sales always send leads to the right place
   • Leads choose what to download or view.
   • Lower email size means quicker delivery, happier email servers and sleepier spam protection filters.

Sample email signatures

Look below for some email signature inspirations that can turn your leads into happy customers:

Example 1: An eye-catching banner and easy and effective call-to-action encourage customers to learn more about your product.

Example 2: Customer stories effectively show real life applications of your products. If you add a well-known brand, this banner becomes almost irresistible to click and learn more.

Example 3: As already mentioned, numbers are effective. If you have any statistics for your ROI, it should get attention of even the most skeptical leads.

How to effectively manage email signatures (and marketing collateral)

OK, there is a catch to shifting your old, attachment-based marketing collateral methods to email signatures.

The traditional approach, where everyone sets up their own email signatures, based on company email signature template, works for small companies at the very best. For a larger business, it’s a beautiful dream, especially if you think about all the different email clients and devices. See just how hard it turns out to be:

That’s why we came up with a perfect solution to this problem: CodeTwo Email Signatures 365.

Here’s how it works.

1. IT sets it up for your company. It’s a five-minute task.
2. Marketing creates beautiful email signature templates and adds marketing banners that link to your marketing collateral.
3. Every user gets personalized email signatures with their contact details automatically added. They can switch between different designs with a click of a button.

It’s set and forget. And if marketing needs to change anything, they can do it from one place for everyone.