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The Overlooked Owned Channel Sitting in Every Inbox

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Amandine Fernandez avatar
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Everyone has an email signature, yet they’re often underutilized as a marketing channel. Learn how to best take advantage of these ubiquitous calling cards.

Marketers can tell you their CPMs on Meta, their CTRs on Google and their open rates in CRM. But ask one simple question: “how many outbound emails does your company send every month, and what do those messages do for your brand?” and most teams don’t have an answer.

It’s a blind spot hiding in plain sight. A 300-person company sends around 250,000 external emails each month. Every single one carries an email signature. Often inconsistent, unmanaged and ignored. That’s the equivalent of running a constant campaign with zero strategy.

Table of Contents

Why Email Signatures Get Overlooked

The email footer isn’t seen as a media space. It’s “just admin.” Ownership is scattered: IT manages infrastructure, HR owns the directory, Marketing handles brand assets and no one truly governs the output.

Employees improvise their own versions, outdated templates circulate internally and before long, you end up with a patchwork of mismatched logos, broken links and legal disclaimers in the wrong language.

The result: lost impressions, compliance risks and cracks in brand credibility that accumulate over time. In a market where trust and consistency are everything, those “small” details matter more than most teams realize.

From Blind Spot to Predictable Reach

When you treat the email footer as an owned media placement, everything changes. Multiply send volume, open rates, banner visibility and click-throughs. Suddenly you’re looking at a measurable, scalable channel.

Across industries, the opportunities are wide open:

  • Retail and e-commerce: spotlight seasonal offers, loyalty programs or new store openings directly in customer inboxes.
  • Finance and professional services: share reports, regulatory updates or client events in a fully brand-safe environment.
  • Consumer goods: amplify sustainability efforts or product launches without relying on unpredictable ad networks.
  • Healthcare and education: promote new services, recruitment drives or training initiatives.
  • Tech and SaaS: drive feature adoption or demo requests through subtle, contextual touchpoints.
  • Employer brand across all sectors: highlight open roles, diversity programs or internal milestones.

The power lies in subtle repetition. These one-to-one emails don’t interrupt; they compound over time, reinforcing your brand with every exchange.

Making the Hidden Visible

Forward-thinking organizations are already bringing structure and discipline to this overlooked space. The principles are simple:

  • Consistency first: unify brand assets, fonts and disclaimers across markets and teams.
  • Segmentation: adapt banners not only by region and language, but also by department or role.

Email signature structure

Sales and BD: promote case studies, events or demo CTAs

HR and employer brand: feature open roles, onboarding hubs or well-being initiatives.

Customer success: share release notes, surveys or community updates.

Learning Opportunities

Internal comms: boost participation in DEI, training or leadership programs.

  • Measurement: track clicks, compare results with other channels and A/B test messaging like any other owned media.
  • Governance: apply the same brand-safety and accessibility standards you expect from paid placements.

Of course, coordination at scale isn’t possible without technology. Platforms like Letsignit, used by over 5,500 organizations and 2.2 million users worldwide, solve the operational challenge: centralizing signature templates, syncing employee data automatically, deploying updates securely across devices and providing visibility into performance.

The Bigger Takeaway for Marketers

In 2025, the winning marketing strategies won’t come from chasing the next shiny platform. They’ll come from maximizing what’s already yours.

Email signatures prove that even the smallest spaces, when managed intentionally, can become powerful levers of engagement. And they reveal something bigger: employees aren’t just senders of messages — they’re your most authentic, everyday ambassadors.

Every consistent, credible email signature is both a media impression and a human endorsement.

Maybe the next frontier in brand building isn’t louder ads or bigger budgets. Maybe it’s finally paying attention to the quietest campaign you already own.

Founded in 2013 and supported by Microsoft, Letsignit now serves more than 2 million users, making it simple to manage email signatures at scale while maintaining consistent, on-brand communication.

By reinventing the email signature, Letsignit transforms employees into brand ambassadors, amplifies external marketing efforts and ensures internal messages get seen — all from one central, secure platform.

About the Author
Amandine Fernandez

Amandine Fernandez has built her career at Letsignit, a leading B2B SaaS platform turning employee email into a strategic communication channel. Since joining the company over 7 years ago, she has played a key role in scaling it from an emerging startup to a market leader with €10M+ ARR, 5,500 customers, and nearly 2 million users worldwide. Connect with Amandine Fernandez:

Main image: Noelle Otto
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