How Ahtna ended email signature chaos across 1,300 employees and 30 subsidiary companies

Background

Ahtna is an Alaska Native Corporation headquartered in Glennallen, Alaska, operating a diverse portfolio of more than 30 subsidiary companies that deliver commercial, federal, and defense services across multiple industries and geographic regions.  

Before Exclaimer, Ahtna managed email signatures manually, and the approach had become unsustainable for both IT and marketing. The organization was also in the middle of a major rebrand and needed a way to deploy updated email signatures quickly and consistently across every employee and subsidiary, without the administrative burden of manual rollout. 

Ahtna's challenge

Ahtna tried to manage email signatures manually, providing templates and instructions to employees, but the approach quickly became unmanageable across a large, complex organization with 30 subsidiary companies. 

The marketing and IT teams faced multiple pain points: 

• Manual deployment creating inconsistencies: Employees copied email signatures from colleagues, which led to widespread formatting problems and broken HTML across email clients. 

• Complex subsidiary structure: Managing 30 subsidiary companies with different logos and branding was impossible to scale manually. 

• Outlook compatibility problems: Email signatures displayed inconsistently across different Outlook versions, especially with broken line breaks in replies. 

• Government client requirements: Government email systems stripped logos from email signatures and attached them as separate files, causing confusion for recipients. 

• IT administrative burden: The IT team spent hours on email signature support tickets instead of other priorities. 

• Marketing bottlenecks: Marketing had no efficient way to deploy brand updates, campaigns, or announcements across employee email signatures.

The results

How Exclaimer helped

Exclaimer's cloud solution gave Ahtna centralized control and automation to solve its email signature challenges. A phased rollout was carried out with a small test group from IT and marketing, before expanding organization wide. The test group's email signatures were live within 72 hours. 

With Exclaimer, Ahtna can: 

• Deploy email signatures automatically to every employee, with no individual action or manual intervention required from IT. 

• Manage all 30 subsidiary brands using folder structures and email signature templates organized by company. 

• Customize email signatures by recipient, with internal and external variations that switch automatically, including dedicated email signatures for government contract work. 

• Give employees controlled flexibility through the user details editor, so they can update specific fields while IT keeps control of brand elements. 

• Deploy marketing campaigns instantly using banners and scheduled email signature updates that reach all employees at once. 

• Display email signatures correctly across every platform: classic Outlook, new Outlook, Outlook on the web, and mobile devices. 

The solution eliminated the HTML formatting problems and solved the government client image attachment issue, so email signatures display correctly no matter the recipient's email system.