Introduction to Email Signature Marketing Banners

Updated 3 weeks ago by Tori Scharadin

Summary

Set your signatures up with the suite of marketing tools available in your Opensense account. Within minutes, you can easily target a marketing message to specific recipients, or segment your marketing message by team. No third party marketing integration required!

*note: not meant to replace marketing platforms like Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, etc. Max targeted recipient domains/email addresses: 400   

Initial Set-up

  1. Log into the Opensense Portal (Never logged in? Get access)
  2. Click on “Banners” under the “Marketing” drop down
  3. First, click on the Targeting/ABM tab near the top of the webpage
  4. At the bottom in the "Department Targeting" section, ensure there is an active route that looks like this:
  5. If there is already a department target in place for the campaign you are activating, jump to Creating a Banner
  6. If you need to add a new one, click the Edit button
  7. Scroll to the department targeting section at the bottom and click +Department Target
  8. In your new Department target, ensure the following:
  • Priority number is appropriate (if a user is in two different departments, Opensense will query the highest priority target)
  • Target is toggled On
  • Type of target is “Sender” if external banner campaigns, “Recipient” for internal banner campaigns**
** the allusers group does not work for internal only campaigns. Always place “Recipient” (internal campaign) routes as higher priority than “Sender” (external campaign) routes like in the screenshot below

  1. In the groups entry box, type in the department(s) to assign the banner to (use * to select from current departments, or begin typing the department until it appears in the dropdown selection. Haven't created a department yet? Here's how to Create a Department and Add Users. allusers as seen below is a pre-made department already in your account. You can use this for company-wide campaigns
  2. Enter the tag you would like to use for this group.
  3. Click Save. To activate campaigns for any department targets, simply apply the same tag to the appropriate banner!
    The department target is now live on any signatures that contain the ABM block in the HTML code (confirm this is in place here)
Create a Banner
  1. Log into the Opensense Portal and click on “Banners” under the “Marketing” drop down
  2. Click the “Add New Banner” button to create a new banner, or find an existing banner and click "Edit"
  3. There are four primary components to each banner campaign: name, marketing message, pre-built URL, and targeting tag

  1. Name the ad something specific about this marketing content
  2. For graphic ads, click the purple upload image button. Make sure the graphic is uploaded at the size you would like for it to appear to the email recipient. For a text ad, tab over to "Text Ad" and input your text the way it should appear
  3. On the right, enter the URL your recipients will visit when they click. As seen below, you can also upload documents and videos for more in-depth engagement analytics on marketing collateral!
  4. The banner tags (Audience/Targeting Tags) are how you will call the banner into the signature. These are freeform and should help you remember which audience the banner is for (for example, if it is just a general banner for company wide campaigns, tag it something like ‘default’ or 'rotation'). If you're not ready, save the new campaign without this piece for now. Only complete this step when you're ready to to activate this campaign! If you want to do a round of tests on yourself, here's how 
  5. You may want to include more functionality like scheduling
  6. Click save.
Optional: on the right side of each banner profile, you will see “Document” and “Video” tab, if you wish to link your banners to a specific document or video. In this case, you have a prerequisite step- Go to the Marketing drop down, and click on Documents or Videos for whichever you want to add, and upload your document or video there. After successfully uploading it, you can come back to the Banners section and select content from a pick list under the document or video tabs

Easy Live Testing
  1. Login to the Opensense Portal and click on Banners under the Marketing drop down
  2. Find the banner you would like to activate, and copy the ad name (everything after ad:, so for [[ad:100k_free]] you would copy "100k_free" to clipboard
  3. Head to the ABM/Targeting view
  4. In the Built-in ABM Targeting section, click + Account
  5. Then, input your personal email address and/or a friendly colleagues email address to send a live test
  6. Next, paste the ad name into the second column
  7. Click the green save button at the top right of the screen. Now, when you send an email to the targeted email address using your Opensense signature, you should get a live render of the banner to submit for approval!
You can keep test targets in place for the next campaign, and simply switch the ad name out as needed.

More Features

Schedule a Targeted Banner Campaign
  1. After following the steps above to tag the banner and adding it to your signature template, go back into the Banners section and click the Edit button
  2. Click Enable Schedule to set a custom schedule (e.g. start and end dates, frequency etc.) for your banner to run 

Tagged banners are live until their scheduled stop date. In the screenshot above, the event banner is removed from rotation on May 10th at 4pm.

Rotate Multiple Banners for A&B Testing

Compare banner traffic between multiple banners or rotate multiple messages to your recipients.

  1. For random rotation of banners into the email signature, use the same banner tag (i.e. "marketing") for more than one banner. As you might expect, if they are scheduled banners then be sure the time frames overlap so both banners are active during the same times.

Random rotation is a perfect ecosystem for testing two similar banners to see which is more effective at driving traffic. This is commonly known as A&B testing to learn about your target market.

Deactivate a Banner from a Campaign

  1. Login to the Opensense Portal and click on Banners under the Marketing drop down
  2. Find the banner to deactivate, and click Edit in the top right
  3. Remove the Banner tag
  4. Click Save
  5. That's all! The banner should now be deactivated.
In Designer Studio, you may see a tag block (example: [[adtag:marketing]]) rendering where your banners usually appear. This can be seen in the Opensense portal only, and will be stripped from the email signature when sending emails.

Include ABM in a Signature Template

To use the Targeting/ABM section, the ABM block must be added to the active signature design. You can confirm, add it in, or even remove it by following the steps below.

  1. Navigate to Designer Studio in the Signatures dropdown menu
  2. Navigate to the signature template of choice and click Edit
  3. In the signature’s HTML editor, include the code [[abm]] at the bottom (or wherever you would like the banner to appear in your signature). This will replace any banner code you had previously.

Once placement is ideal, click Save

The targeted recipient domains/addresses will now receive the specified banners

  1. 400px by 80px shows up well across devices. Other dimensions can be supported. For the best aesthetic: match banner width to the pixel width of your email signature.

  1. Clear Call To Action. “Get Your Gift” performs better than “Click Here”

  1. Play button/Movement helps drive engagement. .gif supported (even better if clear CTA)

Accessing Banner Analytics 
  1. Go to your Marketing dropdown and choose Banners:

  1. Find your banner by searching for it in the search box:

About your Analytics

  • Total Delivered: The # of emails with this banner that have been delivered
  • Advanced Views: The # of times this banner has been viewed by external recipients. To add internal recipients to the count, check "Count Internal"
  • Advanced Clicks: The # of external recipients that have clicked on the banner and its CTR (click-through rate). To add internal recipients to the count, check "Count Internal"
  • Basic Views and Basic Clicks: These metrics are disabled by default on most accounts.
  • Live # days: The number of days the banner has been on a signature
  • # Recipients: The number of unique external recipients.
Additional Analytics

To view additional analytics, click on the purple Show Report button and scroll down: 

This is what you will see:

Platforms/applications used to click/view your emails with the banner, and recipient emails click list

  • View on the map where these clicks were located.
  • Click on the Show Clicks button to see the list of email recipients who have clicked on your banner.
  • Click on the Clicks to CSV button to export this list into a CSV for you to save. CSV contains sender and recipient along with additional metadata
Export Campaign Data for Ads
  1. In the banners section, navigate to the Reporting section on the left sidebar
  2. Click {#} AD SUMMARIES button for a full summary of the filtered ads
  3. Click {#} AD CLICKS for a list of sender/recipient information on any clicks that occurred
Tip: Narrow down which ads you are exporting by searching for a specific banner tag or campaign

Data can be pushed to an external attribution reporting system by adding utm parameters into analytics codes section.

If you already are using a url builder, you can just copy and paste the complete url into the banner url entry
  1. In the banner you would like to update, click Edit.
  2. In the “Analytics Codes” section, click +URL Parameter
  3. Name and Value are the arguments/tags that correspond to external attribution report

Important note: Analytics Codes treats UTM parameters the same as including parameters directly into the URL. Including utm parameters in both URL and analytics codes section will capture data twice.

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