Marketing
November 16, 2021

Which SaaS solutions should you use to foster enterprise collaboration?

By
Amandine Fernandez
Head of Acquisition
Running effective marketing campaigns requires several things: the right strategy, interesting content and assets, accurate KPIs, and seamless collaboration. This includes sharing the campaign and publication calendar across all touchpoints. Many SaaS solutions can help you do this.

How can SaaS collaboration tools help you?

Who likes meetings with rambling that runs on and on? Endless email exchanges over the smallest detail? Having to pick up the phone to answer questions? Juggling different websites and software just to view a document the way you want? According to a recent study, 84% of executives believe that the future success of their company depends on their ability to rethink how teams collaborate. The same percentage believe a connected workspace is essential. This is where SaaS planning and collaboration tools come in: aggregating elements needed to run a marketing campaign in a single place, including calendars, assets, tasks, people involved, and more.

The objective is to help project managers or leaders in all stages of their mission, right down to the tiniest detail. To accomplish this, a collaborative work tool in SaaS mode allows you to save precious time by centralizing all the project information. You see the overall schedule as well as progress on each project, who's in charge of which task, which questions remain unanswered, and which resources can still be activated. No more long meetings! It also reduces recurring problems like lack of communication on document versions.

If much project planning takes the form of a spreadsheet, this choice in practice proves to be questionable: the rendering is not the most readable, editing and manipulation information are sometimes complex, and rights management is not always adapted. These limitations are all the more apparent now that there are SaaS solutions dedicated to collaboration.

On what criteria should you choose your collaboration tool?

As always, the criteria for your choice depends on your needs and those of your team. Do you want to exchange better, or do you need to organize many tasks in parallel? Is it a one-time or regular need? How many people will need to use this SaaS solution? Are the users comfortable with project management and new technologies? In all cases, collaboration solutions offer the same core functionality.

Must-have Features

  1. Timeline: what is the status of the project and each of its sub-parts?
  2. List of tasks: what is their status, who is in charge of them?
  3. Document sharing: to avoid versioning problems and ensure that everyone is working on the right files
  4. Communication tools: so that all participants have access to the right level of information and can resolve problems more quickly
  5. Reports: particularly useful for project managers who can check on the progress of assignments

The main SaaS collaboration solutions

As the collaboration market is one of the most dynamic in the martech stack, choosing isn't easy. The best practice is often to try a few weeks before a final adoption. Along the way, you're likely to encounter one of these solutions.

Trello

Trello Board

With its kanban-like boards, Trello is definitely one of the most well-known SaaS collaboration platforms. With this particularity, Trello gives a view of an entire project in a single glance. In concrete terms, the solution offers a system of tables with columns and cards. Each column can correspond to a specific mission or stage of the project, with, for example, "to do," "in progress," "delivered," and "released" columns. The cards represent the different tasks to be done, and can contain attachments, comments, external links, and even a calendar to plan a deadline. This simplicity also has its limits for large-scale and complex projects or organizations.

Asana

Asana Board

With tasks that can be viewed in different methodologies like list view, kanban boards, calendar, and Gantt charges. Asana aims for versatility. Team pages make it easy to share ideas and conversations, rights management and notifications are fine-tuned enough to work in a dense and large-scale manner. Everyone can easily visualize their tasks and deadlines and prioritize them. The solution is also distinguished by the wide range of applications (office automation, storage, email automation, and more) with which it can be integrated.

Monday

Monday board

Known for its quality user experience, Monday features a well-balanced mix of features from task lists to project tracking to collaboration. While it may not offer as many features or integrations with third-party solutions as its competitors, it is customizable and flexible. The result is a very short user adoption cycle.

Airtable

Airtable board

Halfway between a database and a spreadsheet, Airtable is one of those "no-code" SaaS solutions that allow users to build multiple applications. In other words, Airtable is not directly usable as a collaboration application but can be easily used for marketing project management. Numerous templates are available that take advantage of the different views offered by the tool: maps, calendars, kanban boards, Gantt charts, etc.

Collaborate around all planning

Whatever your final choice, all the solutions mentioned here allow you to manage multiple calendars, integrating all your assets: social media planning, email campaigns, paid campaigns, content production, and email signatures. This is the challenge and the complexity of these plans: you have to make sure that they contribute coherently to large sequences (for example, the promotion of an event) and, at the same time, that the rules of the game are respected for each contact point. This is why it's important to rely on both global planning and channel-specific solutions.

You can integrate a channel such as email signatures into overall planning by leveraging Letsignit to guarantee the performance and the technical and visual conformity of the signatures.This is why, for a channel such as email signatures, it is relevant to integrate it into the overall planning while leveraging Letsignit to guarantee the performance and the technical and visual compliance of the signatures.

Note that Letsignit also takes care to embed its own collaborative features that fit your organization. Thus, the multi-subsidiary functionality helps you to give their own workspaces to your different entities to efficiently delegate signatures management. From planning to execution, SaaS solutions have now matured enough to handle email signatures as a full-fledged marketing channel within your overall planning.

About the author
Amandine is the Head of Acquisition at Letsignit! Initially a content specialist, she now actively contributes to the profitability of acquisition channels: SEO, SEA, SMA, SMO... Amandine is also one of the pillars of Marketing at Letsignit! For more than 5 years, she has been participating in and initiating marketing projects and campaigns that systematically reflect her vision, writing style, and creativity (which can also be seen in all of her colorful outfits that brighten up the day of everyone she meets).
About Letsignit
With Letsignit email signature manager, connect with your audience in a way that's on-brand and personal, while driving quality lead generation.
Frequently
asked questions
1
Is it possible to track the number of clicks on email signatures?

Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.

You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.

If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.

2
Can we add links to social networks, our website, and appointment-setting applications such as Calendly?

With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.

And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.

3
Can employees update their signature information themselves (number, function, etc.)?

It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.

This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.

4
Why it is important to standardize our email signatures on a large scale to ensure our identity and brand image?

It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!

A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.

With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.

5
What is the user experience like for our employees?

What is the user experience like for our employees?

  • If you opt for the Letsignit Add-in for Outlook, they will have a dedicated space in their Outlook account where they will be able to view the signatures and campaigns assigned to them.
  • If you opt for the Letsignit Desktop APP, they will be able to preview all their signatures and campaigns in this space. If they want to change their default signature to another one when sending an email, this will be done in their signature library in Outlook.

In both cases:

  • They preview their signature before sending an email and choose from signatures assigned to them.
  • Based on the permissions granted, they will also be able to modify their personal information such as their name, position, or address in these spaces.

In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.

6
Can my employees have multiple signatures available to them?

With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.

Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:

Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.

7
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

8
Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

  • Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
  • Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
  • Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.

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asked questions
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Looking for a tool to manage your email signatures?

Letsignit allows you to create, manage, and deploy email signatures for all your employees in just a few clicks.
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