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Social email seems redundant. Every so often, I hear the term and I have to think: Isn’t all email social? What I think social email means is that you make yourself more accessible by way of a smart, link-friendly signature in your email.

I have always admired the marketing-savvy friends and colleagues who have social signatures where you can click through to their Facebook page or Twitter account or LinkedIn profile via a hip, artsy button right from their email signature, and I presumed it took some special coding skills, until I found about WiseStamp.  They do the special coding part for you.

If you look at your email and the standard signature you plug in, if you have one at all, you might wonder how you could jazz it up.  After all, every contact with a customer or prospect is an opportunity to share what you’re doing that might lead to additional sales or more conversation and engagement with your brand.  It seems a real headache to create a new email signature each time your write a blog post or tweet about something, if not impossible. Well, with a tool like WiseStamp, you can showcase your thought leadership within minutes and do it in a non-threatening and very professional way via the email signature at the end of your email.

What I liked:

• Super fast – in less than five minutes I had my own custom, hip signature. You can watch my YouTube video of it if you want. I didn’t edit the video a whole lot. I take you through it about as fast as I did it myself.

• It let me add Twitter, Facebook and various Instant Message options nearly as fast I could type this sentence.  I only added a few for this test, but there are 14 or 15 different options.

• For just about every major social sharing service I could think of, WiseStamp had a way for me to share the latest in my signature: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Flickr, eBay, Digg, you name it. They even had a popular quotes app that let me rotate in different simple quotes to spice up my signature without even trying.

Here’s a screenshot of my simple signature versus my WiseStamp one. The green box is my simple (yes, boring) current email signature via Google.  In the red box is my social icon-powered signature from WiseStamp. My screenshot doesn’t really do it justice. Having the little icons just looks way better than regular html. They have a bunch of samples.

What I wished it had:

• I would like to see a similar function for Microsoft Outlook because not everyone is on a webmail client like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL. They do have a Mozilla Thunderbird extension, though.

• Even though I had downloaded it, I couldn’t figure out how to get back to it!  Of course, my suspicion is this is mostly operator-error. I kept thinking I would see something in my browser window, and I did, once I was back in Gmail where I had originally set it up. It shows up in the upper right portion of my inbox and I can go in there and edit the settings. I could also get to it via Firefox, Add-on and Options, and by clicking on WiseStamp, where it shows as one of my add-ons.  Again, they might have covered this in a tutorial, and I sometimes move to fast for my own good.

If you’re blogging for your company, adding status updates to Facebook,  Twitter or other social sites and you want a low-key way to promote your latest content in your emails, then you should take a close look at WiseStamp. The basic signature app is free, but you can customize it further by spending between $24 and $36 a year.  The premium levels allow you to create a custom social icon (and the option to make the icons larger, which would be a good thing). Depending on your social presence the premium might make a lot of sense. They also have tremendous reviews from Mashable, LifeHacker, Kim Komando and other notable tech gurus.

Learn more about WiseStamp.

From Small Business Trends

WiseStamp for Email Marketing and Social Signatures

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends