An email signature is a vital part of your everyday emails, as it not only provides the recipient with your contact details, but also portrays your companies brand and professionalism. You wouldn’t consider sending out a traditional mail without a signature would you? So why do the same with your emails?
Here are 5 top tips to help you create the perfect email signature.
1. Include your email address
These days you often find some people say don’t include your email address in your signature as there is no need, due to the fact that the email address will be visible to the recipient anyway. Those who say this seem to forget that emails are often forwarded on to others that have no access to your details. If you have no email address in your signature, you become unable to contact and miss out on vital business connections.
2. Embed your images to avoid that little red cross
Images such as your company logo or social media icons can give your signature a more polished look, and at the same time help generate more brand awareness. However if the images are not embedded in your signature, they will appear as an attachment and the recipient will get the usual ‘right click here to download’ message, which takes away the power from your branding.
3. Link your images
If you apply links to images in your email signature, make sure you test to ensure they work. You don’t want people clicking on your company logo to find that they have been taken to the twitter page or vice versa. If you do include social media icons, don’t forget to add a link. Having the wrong link on an image or having no link at all just doesn’t look professional. Take this one step further by tracking your links with web analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
4. Keep your signature professional
Pay attention to the signature length, 4 – 7 lines is perfect. If you’re struggling with the length piping or colour variation is a great way to break it up. On that note, avoid including the colours of the rainbow, black, blue or grey will polish off that professional look you’re going for. Finally, remember who you’re making contact with, avoid corny inspirational or controversial quotes in your signature, the last thing you want is to offend a prospect or client.
5. Test your email signature
Finally, once you have created your signature, do NOT start sending out emails before you have tested it! You may be happy with how your signature looks on your screen, however think about your recipient. Will the signature look the same if opened on a mobile phone or tablet? Are you using a web safe font? Send test emails to different devices and email clients (Gmail, Outlook etc.) until you’re confident it renders correctly across all devices.
So there you have it, 5 top email signature tips from Rocketseed, follow them and be on your way to creating the perfect email signature.
