So long as nothing obscene, profane or just-plain inappropriate was lying there at the bottom of the screen, you've probably never questioned how the employees in your company configured their automatic email signatures. Now Pavel Macholda, CEO of Selfkey Systems, has an answer to your unasked question. His "Always Current Business Card" (ACB Card) software enables employers to unify how email signatures look across a company. It also lets them serve up a banner ad next to every email sent by every employee. And if the employer decides to change the offer, logo, tag-line, etc., the software can dynamically update both the signatures and the banners -- even for sent messages that are already sitting in somebody else's inbox.
In many ways the ABC Card boils down to a graphically-rich, dynamic version of the promotional signatures that you see at the bottom of most emails sent from free Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail accounts. But instead of a simple text link, the ACB Card is a JPEG image that can look just like a business card. Whenever a user opens an email equipped with the ACB Card, the user's email program calls the JPEG from a server: either Selfkey's or one on the employer's network.
Since the image is served dynamically, any changes to the image will be reflected when the recipient next opens the email. Similarly, employers can deploy a banner -- a branding message, special offer, or the like -- throughout all emails and change it at will. The employer (or, more likely, the IT department) only has to make one change, rather than synching up dozens of different accounts and computers with updated information.
At a monthly cost of roughly $5.00 per user, the ACB Card is expensive as a vanity signature but cost-effective as a way to get banners in front of customers, particularly if employees send a large number of emails.
However, Macholda's pitch -- like so much email marketing -- has been complicated by Google's increasingly popular Gmail service. By default, Gmail disables all external images, requiring users to click "Display External Images" on an email-by-email basis. Instead of the ACB Card, all a Gmail user sees is a hyperlink that leads to a Web page with contact information and a copy of the JPEG, thus nullifying the brand impact of the card. Similarly, if the recipient of an email featuring the ACB Card has HTML formatting turned off, the JPEG will not display.
A few years back, when Macholda first started to work on his technology that underlies the card, he focused on an always-current address book that an individual could use to update her or his contact information in other people's contact lists. He found that "people just did not care very much about the utility," but he saw interest from marketers.
Jeffrey Lewis of Portland, Oregon-based Foundation Home Lending (a residential mortgage banking company) uses the ACB Card on his and all Foundation employee emails because "it allows consistency with my marketing. With my employees, we can give a consistent message that I'm directing… It's better than just a tag line with 'Go college team!'"
Lewis uses the ACB Card for both internal and external communications: "It's marketing and it's branding. It's not just emails to my employees but also to all the people that they touch as a part of the business. It gives me opportunity to show my brand in a consistent way to everybody my employees touch." Furthermore, Lewis says, "My cost per touch is low because my customers will typically be receiving emails from my company anyway."
But isn't this just another version of Plaxo?
Unsurprisingly Macholda disagrees, "I don't consider Plaxo to be a competitor because we have distinctly different products. Plaxo's system employs a different logic -- although it sends out what looks like business cards, their system builds cards from the information that the sender has in his or her address book and asks the recipient to verify that the contact information (about the recipient) on the card is correct. I have interviewed several recipients of such emails, but I have yet to talk to one who responded; some even consider it spam. In our system, the senders include their own business cards and reach out to their correspondents, who can update their address books, if they want to. My research shows that, in importance, the utility ranks second to the branding effect, so we are focusing on the marketing aspect of our product -- banners were the next logical step in our product development."
It remains to be seen whether companies will embrace the bottoms of their employees' emails as a new marketing channel.
