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Corporate email signatures have always been a bummer in services like Microsoft Exchange and Google… Of course, Exchange admins can use transport rules to add HTML text to the bottom of emails outgoing, but they are still somewhat basic, a nightmare to set up and manage. , and you’ll probably have to rely on knowledge of HTML and CSS. And yes, users can create their own signatures, but how do organizations ensure consistency?
To the surprise of many, Microsoft hasn’t developed any serious solutions for email signatures, leaving the doors wide open for organizations like Letsignit, a French company determined to become a world leader in email marketing signatures. It even has the support of Microsoft (Microsoft France participated in the development) as well as large investment funds, and is currently developing internationally.
Letsignit makes sure all employee email signatures are fully aligned with corporate identity, automatically and easily. Additionally, it can turn email into a communications opportunity by providing organizations with a way to distribute banner marketing in a controlled and targeted manner.
Although relatively new to the game, one could easily assume that Letsignit had decades of experience with email signatures, given how mature their solution is! So, let’s dig.
Requirements and installation
Letsignit was designed for Office 365 Exchange Online and Google’s G Suite. Since Exchange (and recently Exchange Online, to be more precise) is by far the most popular email platform for organizations, that’s what I’ll be using for this product review.
Letsignit relies on two or three Azure enterprise applications to work, depending on how we configure it.
Initial setup is done through simple and intuitive Letsignit wizards that administrators can access once an organization has signed up for the service.
First, we run the Office 365/G Suite integrations wizard, which invites us to authorize the Letsignit Authentication corporate application, allowing Letsignit to access our users’ profiles:
Once done, the next step is to deploy the Letsignit Outlook add-in to our Office 365 tenant. This add-in automatically applies signatures to user emails and allows users to manage some of their details (if allowed by admins) and signatures when they have more than one.
One of the many benefits of these add-ins is that administrators don’t have to go through the hassle of packaging an MSI file, deploying it to users’ workstations, updating it, etc. . Once deployed to the tenant and assigned to users, it is automatically added to those users’ Outlook clients (Windows or Mac), and it’s ready to go!
From the Microsoft App Store, we can easily add the add-in to our tenant:
For simplicity, in my case, I’m going to roll it out to all users (the whole organization):
Once done, the add-in should be available to users within a few hours. But before we can use it, we still have a few steps to follow.
Creating email signatures and making them available to users is done through the Letsignit admin portal. To do this and personalize signatures with user details, Letsignit needs to have visibility into our users and their attributes. This can be done via a CSV import containing all the required details, or we can synchronize our Azure Active Directory with a database managed by Letsignit, which is much easier from a manageability point of view. This synchronization is updated frequently (every 3 hours), and it is unidirectional only.
Synchronization is done through another enterprise application called Letsignit Directory, which gives Letsignit read access to our directory data:
The sync engine allows administrators to choose which users they want to sync based on their domain or specific groups:
Once everything is set up, we can see when the last sync took place, and manually trigger a sync if needed:
In Letsignit we can manage three different types of user attributes:
- Default attributes are the default attributes of our directory, which are automatically synchronized with Letsignit;
- Custom attributes are custom attributes from our directory (if configured);
- Letsignit attributes are attributes we can create in Letsignit that are independent of our directory.
Below I left all the default settings with one exception. I blocked the job title so that users cannot change it themselves. This is a valuable feature for organizations that want only users to be able to update a subset of their information, or none at all.
We are now ready to start setting up and using our first email signature!
Configuring and using signatures
The configuration and assignment of signatures to users is done through the Letsignit administration portal. From the main dashboard, we can see at a glance how many signatures and campaigns we’ve assigned to users, how many clicks have generated links in signatures (we’ll cover this and campaigns in more detail later ), how many licenses we use, and more:
All signatures are designed in this portal which only administrators have access to, which means that users cannot design their own signatures. After all, that would defeat the purpose.
The designer is user-friendly, making it easy and intuitive to use, yet very powerful. We can start designing our first signature from one of the provided templates, start from scratch or even import HTML code. We may also have a different signature for a reply or forwarded email.
Once we have chosen a template and started creating our signature, the user fields will appear either with their name (like {Title} for example) if we are in in working mode, or with the current admin details when you are in preview mode.
Changing and formatting a field couldn’t be simpler via the menu offered when you highlight a block:
Almost anything can be personalized. In the following screenshots, I change the telephone prefix (T), and adjusting the padding between city and country so they are more spaced out:
We can also drag and drop user details and many other items from the left bar:
Finally, I’ll add some social media icons to the signature, as well as a Microsoft Teams widget so recipients can easily reach our users:
And here is my first signature, all done in just a few minutes!
The final step is to assign this signature to users. To do this, you can either individually select the user or users to whom you want to assign the signature, or use one or more groups:
We can also configure our signature priority, which will determine which signature is added to emails by default for users with multiple signatures assigned:
Once we save our changes, that’s it. Our first signature has now been assigned and is ready to be used!
Users don’t even have to do anything. As long as the add-in is deployed and a signature is assigned, roughly from the time an administrator activates that signature, it will be available to users. In my test, I opened a new email almost immediately after assigning the signature and making it active, and it appeared right away (without restarting Outlook)!
The signature was even immediately available in Outlook for the web (aka webmail/OWA) without further configuration!
From the user’s perspective, from the Outlook add-in, I can select which signature to assign to my email (if I have multiple signatures assigned to me) and update my information. Here we can see that I am not allowed to edit my job title since we previously blocked this field:
Another great feature of Letsignit is Campaigns. This allows organizations to increase the impact of their marketing campaigns by relaying them in email signatures. Instead of updating a signature to include a marketing banner, we can create a campaign with the banner and add it to a specific signature (or all of our signatures). You can even choose which users will be targeted by which campaign, and during which period!
Letsignit offers the possibility to collect Click on the information of recipients who have received emails with our signatures and/or campaigns. This way, organizations can analyze whether a particular campaign is generating the expected click-through rate, which campaign is the most effective, etc. For GDPR reasons, no recipient details are collected, only the sender, signature or campaign that contained the click, and the link itself:
For other clients, such as mobile devices, Letsignit offers a SMTP setting similar to other email signature providers, which allowed Letsignit signatures to be placed in all outgoing emails sent from any device. For Exchange Online, inbound and outbound connectors are created between the Office 365 tenant and the Letsignit Microsoft Azure service data center. The outgoing emails we choose are then routed through Letsignit to get a signature applied before being sent.
- send connector: a dedicated send connector redirects emails coming from our Office 365 tenant (we can target specific users, domains, etc.) to go through Letsignit’s Microsoft Azure service data center;
- Placement of signatures: once Letsignit receives the email, the signature is applied to the email;
- Receive connector: a dedicated receive connector allows emails from Letsignit to return to the Office 365 tenant securely;
- Email sent: Once the email returns to the sender’s Office 365 tenant, it is sent for delivery to the intended recipient.
Conclusion
Letsignit is a great solution for organizations looking for a simple yet powerful way to manage and deploy professional email signatures for their users. It has all the features one would expect, and more! Honestly, too much to cover in this review, unfortunately. Setting up Letsignit is quick and easy, creating signatures is surprisingly easy thanks to the fantastic designer, and managing signatures and campaigns could hardly be easier! All in all, a great product for any organization.
TechGenix.com rating 5/5
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