VM is Herige Group subsidiary specialising in materials trading. A Vendée-based family-owned company founded in 1907, it now has 1,100 employees. The company has 862 sales outlets in the west of France and Normandy.
Perrine Douillard, VM’s Communications Officer, was kind enough to share her experience with Boost My Mail. In this interview, she gives us her feedback on and details of campaigns that worked well.
Why do you use our email signature management platform?
At VM, we soon realised the importance of displaying an email signature uniformly representing our brand image on our employees’ emails. From there, we wanted to optimise the advertising space provided by our employees’ email signatures by disseminating news banners on our current business operations. Unfortunately, this wasn’t very satisfactory as the email signature and the banner made available on the intranet were not systematically downloaded by our employees.
We were looking for a web platform to manage our employees’ email signatures in uniform fashion, and which would enable us to schedule very regular campaigns. We chose Boost My Mail because it met all our criteria. The icing on the cake: the application is simplicity itself to use. Finally, the dashboard is a major plus as it enables us to control deliverability of email signatures and view numbers of clicks on our campaigns.
As for rollout, there was a first phase where we updated our HR database, for synchronisation of user data. Then we started on a first test phase on rollout to about 100 employees, which worked well. We’ve deployed all our employees with email addresses at our head office and in sales outlets, making more than 800 users in all.
We now have a standardised digital business card for each employee. This wasn’t the case before. The solution has provided us with a new sales channel for our business operations, with display of a clickable banner at the bottom of the email signature.
Here one example of our campaigns
Can you tell us more about the visibility of campaigns on employee emails?
Our employees’ emails are a new promotional channel for our core target: professionals. By disseminating a campaign on each employee email, VM increases our business operations’ and events’ visibility on the emails sent by about 800 of our employees. The advertising space provided on the email signature also enables us to disseminate all types of news. There are no sensitive or inappropriate topics as there are on social networks.
All our campaigns are based on a marketing strategy and a comprehensive action plan. These days, campaigns mainly take the form of 4×3 displays at sales outlets (posters and flyers), and on email signatures. It’s become an automatic process.
The best-performing campaigns this year in terms of click volume were the business attire and sale campaigns. They each generated about 900 clicks. They linked to our online catalogues.
For the record, the visual created for the sale of our business attire featured our employees at one of our sales outlets. The campaign had a double impact, as it was used for external and internal communication alike. In general, our email signatures have a positive impact on internal communication, as they keep our employees informed of business news, which is very practical!
What’s your assessment of Boost My Mail today?
We couldn’t do without the solution these days! It’s great for marketing teams to be able to produce personalised, useful, relevant email signatures. The advantage of emails is that they stick around. They’re either kept in recipients’ mailboxes or they’re printed out. So the message is well relayed and remembered.
