Exclaimer and SoftwareOne sign off on a strategic win-win

Exclaimer’s offering consists of three products or plans. Its entry-level product, Exclaimer Starter, automates the rollout of email signatures while ensuring that legal disclaimers are always in place and that the branding is consistent.

“The product that sells best is Exclaimer Standard which gives you unlimited signature templates,” Crema says, “and that includes unique signoffs for different departments or teams.”

The Standard tier also allows users to add or edit their details such as personal pronouns.

“These two products make life easier for IT; they were very much intended for an IT conversation. But because emails are so used, and are so trusted, we saw an opportunity to use email signature as a way to convey different, targeted messages, making it a powerful marketing tool.”

Exclaimer Pro unleashes the full power of email signatures by including personalized banners for marketing campaigns, upcoming webinars, links to success stories, and so on, while also evaluating the effectiveness of this messaging.

“The Pro plan has an analytics dashboard that helps us understand the level of engagement with the emails, and what content works best in our email signatures,” explains Crema. “We can go into A/B testing of our campaigns and make sure that we offer the content that is the most pertinent to our audience.

“For a partner such as SoftwareOne, our Pro plan has the added benefit that it might open and trigger other conversations that are marketing conversations. All of a sudden we’re outside of that traditional IT-focused conversation, and we’re going into how to use emails to generate engagement, to promote content, opening up a marketing conversation in the sales cycles.”

All three plans are simple to deploy and manage.

“Exclaimer uses information that is traditionally in the Active Directory if we’re in the Microsoft environment,” says Crema. “Once you have synchronized, there are a few things that need to be set up. You need to design the signature, which doesn't require any coding or HTML skills. Everything is done with a drag-and-drop dashboard. So it can be put in the hands of designers, but also IT people, marketing people, pretty much everybody.”

The Exclaimer products integrate seamlessly with Google Workspace but are used predominantly in the Microsoft ecosystem making them an ideal fit for SoftwareOne’s activities in this space. “Exclaimer is a really good way to add value and to upsell to SoftwareOne’s existing network of Microsoft customers; it is the ideal bundle and/ or add-on to a Microsoft offering.”

The partnership with SoftwareOne has been rolled out for the Middle East/ Africa and APAC regions.

“The strategies are slightly different,” says Crema. “SoftwareOne in APAC is almost acting as a distributor, where SoftwareOne sells to its network and then the resale sells to their customers. In the Middle East and Africa, SoftwareOne tends to sell more to its own customers. For all these regions we were able to set up these transactions via the marketplace.”

Crema manages six teams: UK, Nordics, Benelux, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and APAC. The ambition is to have all these channels transactional on Cloud iQ. “From our initial steps in APAC and the Middle East and Africa, we then got in touch with the team globally, and we’re trying to make progress with each SoftwareOne branch in local markets.

“Our intention is to create a meaningful partnership with SoftwareOne. When I say meaningful, it means two things. It means relying on SoftwareOne to be the trusted distributor and reseller of Exclaimer in strategic regions. Which means that we would trust them with our own customers. So there's a part where we would give SoftwareOne our leads, pass on some of our renewals to SoftwareOne, and also give it access to a network of our resellers. Globally Exclaimer has more than 10,000 resellers and we want SoftwareOne to become the distributor for some of these resellers. That’s one part of the story.

“Obviously, we also want to benefit from SoftwareOne's reputation to gain access the other way around to customers and resellers that have had a trusted relationship with SoftwareOne in the past. So it’s very much a two-way street: feeding SoftwareOne customers, partners, and leads and benefiting from its reputation in key geographies, with APAC, Middle East, Africa, UK, Nordics, and France, being at the forefront.”