Mimecast's Stationery add-on allows you to apply a variety of corporate branding and legal disclaimers to outbound emails generated by internal users. By configuring a Stationery Layout you can:

• Standardize corporate identity by the consistent use of approved images, colors, and company messages.
• Legally protect external relations, by adding disclaimers that users are unable to remove or modify.
• Activate targeted marketing messages, through flexible policy management.
• Generate traffic to your company site, or other landing pages, by embedding links.
• Accurately track marketing efforts through powerful reporting and analytics.

Prerequisites

Prior to activating a Stationery Layout, you'll need to upload or configure the components that will make up your corporate emails. These components are optional, but can provide you with the following benefits:

• Images: Improve the marketing perception of your organization with the use of company branding, banners, or photos. Images can be static, or clickable and traceable.
• Micro Sites: Add links to temporary landing pages in messages to enhance brand continuity. Micro Sites could be utilized for specific marketing messages, to promote a new product, or to confirm subscription to a newsletter.
• Click Actions: Click actions can be added to components in outbound messages (e.g. to take a user to your company website). Statistical data can be collected on the clickable components, allowing you to improve the effectiveness of your stationery layout.
• Attributes: Populate your company email signatures with clickable contact information (e.g. the sender's name, email address, and telephone number). Using an attribute to populate this data is useful, as it allows you to centralize the information for all users.
• Profile Groups: A profile group is a local Mimecast folder containing email addresses or domain names. They allow you to apply different stationery to specific users or groups (e.g. sales teams). Groups can also be used to collect email addresses from click actions in stationery layouts (e.g. subscriptions).
  
  

Configuring a Stationery Layout

We recommend following these steps when applying stationery to your outbound emails:

1. Create a Brief: This is the best way to prepare for stationery configuration, as you'll plan the positioning of the components, and the effects they should have.
2. Upload Components: If images are to form part of the stationery for example, these must be uploaded to Mimecast first. Click on the links in the "Stationery Components" section above for further information. 
3. Create a Stationery Layout: This defines where each stationery component is placed, and how the user interacts with them. Typically both an HTML and Plain Text layout is required, to cover the possibility of text based email readers. The HTML version can be created using one of the different templates installed.
4. Configure a Stationery Policy: This applies the stationery layout to specific email users or groups, for specified periods of time.
5. Test Stationery: Send a test email to an external recipient to confirm that the stationery layout is successful. This vital step allows you to check and validate the various components, and to preview the end result for an external recipient.

See Also...

• Creating a Stationery Layout
• Creating a Stationery Policy