We aren’t alone. In conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders across the industry, the sentiment is the same: we need to get more creative with the owned real estate we already have. We realized that while we were focused on external platforms to reach our audience, we were overlooking a goldmine of high-intent, 1:1 interactions happening right under our noses. HiHello employees send thousands of emails to prospects, partners, clients, and candidates each day. By treating these 1:1 interactions as an owned marketing channel, we’re turning high-stakes conversations into measurable brand moments.
The Challenge
HiHello employees send thousands of emails to prospects, partners, clients, and candidates every day: high-stakes, 1:1 conversations with people already engaged with our brand. We just weren't treating them that way.
Despite having branded signatures, we were treating our banner space like an afterthought: one generic image, rotating whenever someone got around to it, with no targeting, no connection to what our teams were actually selling, and no way to measure whether anyone was paying attention.
“Every send was a missed opportunity. We had centralized, branded signatures already running through HiHello, but banners were still a governance gap. We had no way to align what our teams were promoting with our company-wide initiatives, and zero visibility into the data. I wanted to turn those everyday conversations into a legitimate marketing channel." — Lily Shuman, Marketing Manager
Why we used our own product
The solution wasn't to find a new tool, but to leverage the infrastructure we already had in place. We decided to not just use HiHello to send out our generic company banners, but to approach this programmatically. Using our own Automated Email Signature Manager, we moved away from ad hoc, blanket updates to a programmatic strategy. This allowed us to target specific high-intent audiences with really interesting content at a moment of high trust, effectively turning our email signatures into a centralized distribution engine.
“Our own product was the obvious answer because the hard part, signature automation, was already built in. We just needed banners to plug into that infrastructure. With that, we could be agile. We could be intentional. We could iterate in real-time and prove value from an underutilized marketing channel.” — Shanan Burman, Marketing Director
Using the HiHello Automated Email Signature Manager, we focused on two outcomes:
1. Frequency: We implemented a cadence of banner rotation across the entire company, with banners changing sometimes within a few days or a week. This allowed all recipients to see a variety of messages within an ongoing conversation or sales cycle, that:
- reinforced value propositions
- drove to event registrations
- supported holiday or calendar-based messaging
- showcased new product features
- promoted high-value content
2. Audience-Targeted Messaging: We moved beyond the standard email signature, treating the outbox as a high-intent marketing channel. By mapping specific banner designs and copy to the audiences who could best benefit from those messages, we aligned our internal departments with the content that moves their specific needles:
- Sales: We replaced generic sign-offs with a rotating inventory of banners that highlight a weekly variety of key differentiators and value propositions. This ensures that every 1:1 email provides fresh, relevant value, helping keep prospects engaged throughout the pipeline.
- Customer Success: Drove webinar registrations for product education and customer feedback collection.
- Marketing: Synced perfectly with our global campaign calendar to amplify seasonal campaigns, product updates, and events.
- Recruiting: Showcased culture, open roles, and highlighted benefits to every candidate in the pipeline.
"I was on a call with a prospect’s security team working to close a deal. In my follow-up email, our Security & Trust banner was right there. It was a total coincidence, but it felt like a silent reinforcement of our credibility that helped to move that deal forward." — Todd Hagelin, Enterprise Account Executive
The Execution: Behind the Scenes
To keep this authentic and manageable, we treated the email signature as we would any other digital campaign. This included:
- The Creative Brief: This formalized the strategic goals and visual guidelines, ensuring that the email signatures were treated as a controlled digital campaign.
- The Campaign Planner: This was our roadmap, ensuring no department was "off-script."
- The Final Creative: These weren't generic; they were designed as a system to feel like a natural extension of the email conversation. Intentionally designed to look different from each other and stand out in the email thread.
This strategic approach ensured that as a recipient scrolled through an email conversation, they would encounter multiple rotating banners, amplifying our key messages and differentiators.
The Results
By turning our ‘hidden reach’ into an intentional channel, we saw a direct impact, and our email signature banners became a dynamic, high-performing channel.
"Getting to put our messages right in front of customers and prospects--frankly, our best audiences--has created a tremendous opportunity for HiHello. In promoting our latest webinar, our signature banners actually outperformed several paid channels in terms of driving registrations. Because they're part of an email coming from someone our audience already trusts, these activities can be seen as trustworthy, too." — Rebekah Boon, Vice President of Customer Success
The data confirms that when managed with strategic intentionality and the agility to pivot whenever we need to, the email signature becomes a dynamic, high-performing channel.
- Consistent Engagement: Email signature banners drove inbound traffic on 86% of business days over a 30-day period, with zero active ad spend or campaign management required, and continues to drive traffic today.
- The Power of Creative: In our first weeks, a single banner drove more than 50% of all clicks. That kind of concentration is a signal. It tells you that when the message matches the moment, the audience responds, and that intentional design and messaging are performance levers, not afterthoughts.
- Built to Learn: We used that signal to brief the next wave of creative. We knew what had resonated, which audiences had engaged, and what to sharpen going into the next rotation. Click volume grew by 56%, and every banner in rotation earned its place. No wasted space.
- Sales Enablement: With banners present in 77% of closed deals in Q1, our message effectively supported the sales team during critical closing conversations. This proven impact has led to a decision to implement banners for 100% of the sales team in Q2, establishing them as a core sales enablement measure.
- High Intent Moments: The visitors who engaged went deep: during continued discovery, sentiment stayed strong. The banners drove significant engagement. 100% of recipients who clicked a banner and engaged took further action on our owned properties. Proving we didn’t just get them with clickbait, we set them up for nurture, where we were able to hit them with other messages.
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Is this a valid channel? We say yes. Here's why (the TL;DR)
- Own the Strategy: We treated this channel like any other media buy, creating a formal creative brief and Campaign Planner. That upfront planning transforms an ad-hoc, individual effort into a scalable, strategic channel that is aligned with your global calendar.
- Achieve Audience Certainty: Your 1:1 emails are the only channel where you have 100% certainty of the audience. This level of high-intent, captive attention is hard to get, and leveraging this unused real estate showed real impact, driving inbound traffic on 86% of business days.
- Harness the Power of the Thread: Frequency and creative variety tell a full story across an email thread, one that you don't have to depend on end users to opt into or follow directions to achieve.
- Bridge the Governance Gap: Centralized control is the difference between a missed opportunity and a strategic channel, ensuring alignment across sales, marketing, and recruiting departments.
- Beware: You Might Get Addicted. We now have a quarterly meeting with our designers to continue building out more banners. (Be on the lookout for our May the 4th banner!)
