Managing banner ads in corporate emails behind IT’s back

I recently came up with a small marketing hack, which lets the Marketing department run and switch ad campaigns in emails without the help of IT. Nothing too complicated (or ominous, as the title might suggest) – some marketers out there may already be doing it. But it saves a lot of time, resources and gives marketers a little more freedom to get creative.

In previous articles I discussed the support for images and setting up server-level email signatures on Exchange or Office 365. If you give them a read, you will realize that to modify any aspect of organization-wide email signatures you have to get your system administrator to apply the changes you want directly on the server. Not a very efficient method, obviously. However, when it comes to banners and other images, it is possible to limit your sysadmin’s involvement to only 1 action. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Design the body of your HTML email signature template.

The banner or image you use has to be hosted online and inserted via the HTML You can hyperlink the image by putting an Remember that some popular email platforms (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365) come with personalization capabilities. Use variables such as %%FirstName%%, %%LastName%%, etc. to have users’ personal information automatically pulled into their signatures.

2. Ask your sysadmin to deploy the template in your organization.

3. When it’s time for a new banner campaign (or any other image like e.g. a new logo), just prepare the new image, give its file the same name and extension you used in the <IMG> tag in step 1 and upload it to the web server.

IMPORTANT: Make sure that the resulting image URL matches the one you used in your email signature template in step 1.

That’s all. No more inter-departmental tasks, endless email exchanges and waiting weeks for email banners to be changed.

Hyperlinks in email signatures rotated behind IT’s back

It’s not possible to skip IT in modifying a URL that has already been included in an email signature HTML template. This leaves only imperfect workarounds such as: creating a marketing campaign blog with a static URL, maintaining a dedicated landing page with rotating content, or setting up a mock URL with temporary redirects to rotating marketing campaign sites.

Email signature management software for marketers

To extend your direct control over organization-wide email signatures to aspects other than banners/images you have to use dedicated software.

CodeTwo Exchange Rules (for Microsoft Exchange) and CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 allow marketers to manage server-level email signatures without requiring the system admin’s assistance. Some of the applications’ key features include:

• Central management via intuitive Administration Panel
• WYSIWYG HTML signature template editor
• Rule-based automatic email signatures
• Wide range of rule conditions
• Automatic personalization thanks to support for users details’ variables

Start your free trial:
CodeTwo Exchange Rules – 30-day trial
CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 – 14-day trial