The Ultimate Email Signature Software Checklist

You and your employees each send an average of 1,000 business emails every month. It’s your #1 communication channel and signatures are the best way to showcase your brand on email. Everyday business email’s 99% open rate also means interactive signatures create huge extra engagement opportunities.

So YES, your business needs email signature software.

Branding is the basic job of email signatures. However, it’s very unlikely a free template design will meet your exact brand requirements.

To get perfect ‘on brand’ business email signatures, choose a solution that offers professional, bespoke design to your brand specifications.

Setting up and managing signatures individually takes up far too much IT management time.

Save time by choosing a centrally-controlled solution so your IT team can make company-wide updates in an instant and automate all employee detail updates by syncing with your Active Directory.

Over 70% of emails are opened on mobile so check with any prospective provider that their signature software is mobile-optimised and that they guarantee all elements of your signature design will always display perfectly on:

• desktop
• laptop
• tablet, and
• smartphone

Software that gives you centralized control and totally ‘tamper-proof’ signatures will remove all risk of employees ‘creatively’ altering their signatures and undermining your brand.

Also, check that you can incorporate signature variations for:

• different departments
• sub-brands, and
• constituent companies

It’s essential for large businesses.

Because if it’s not secure then it’s not a solution. You need signature software that meets the very highest security standards.

These are our top 3 security questions to ask before making your decision:

• Is the software security tested (e.g. BURP Scan) or does it have a good ‘Center for Internet Security’ Benchmark percentage (of at least 80%)
• Are newly released security updates automatically applied to the software?
• Are all mails sent using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) / TLS (Transport Layer Security)?

It might sound obvious but whatever email client you’re using – Microsoft (Office) 365, Google Workspace (G Suite), Exchange or any other – it’s essential you first check the compatibility of any new signature solution you’re considering.

Don’t assume compatibility!

Always check your signatures can include direct links to your business social media profiles, blog and newsletter sign-up.

Can you also add marketing banners with clickable calls-to-action?

These can promote your brand, products, events and offers and – with segmentation, targeting and scheduling capabilities – you can run full marketing campaigns.

The best email signatures offer wide business benefits. Check if you can run customer satisfaction service surveys within your signatures.

Does the software offer real-time click-alerts so your sales team can respond to potential leads immediately?

By choosing a signature solution with reporting and analytics you’ll be able to see how your email signatures are performing. Will it identify your most prolific senders, report recipient click-through rates, and allow A/B testing?

For the best insights it should also integrate with Google Analytics and your CRM.

Be sure to have signatures on internal emails too. They reinforce your brand amongst your staff and can open up a whole range of engaging internal comms opportunities – from onboarding and news to social interaction and strengthening of your company culture.

Check that you can add consistent email disclaimers company-wide (or adapt as necessary for different departments) and update them instantly. Everything from confidentiality to copyright can be covered.

Also, be sure to ask if disclaimers can be personalised and timestamped for extra protection.

If it’s free, you may end up paying massively in other ways… with poor, problematic signatures, plenty of wasted management time and unnecessary signature stress!

Paying for best-in-class signatures will give you the professional look, security, support and promotional opportunities that your business needs.

If you have a problem with your CEO’s email and you can’t get hold of someone, you have a real problem and you need it solved quickly! Don’t rely on searching through online FAQ’s and knowledge bases.

Look for a solution that offers dedicated account management and 24/7 online and telephone tech support.

Taking on new staff? Re-organising departments? Opening a new overseas office? It should be simple to add new on-brand signatures with all the correct employee, department and country office details.

Scalable email signature solutions should be able to cater for up to tens of thousands of employees!

It might sound very specific, but it’s a question we’re asked a lot. To avoid your email signature crowding email chains by appearing multiple times in full, check that any prospective provider will allow you to create a shortened email signature (possibly just featuring employee name, job title and company logo) and automatically apply this version to all ‘reply’ and ‘forward’ emails.

These are just a few of the questions we get asked. If you are in discussions and aren’t 100% sure about the answers you’re getting, please get in touch.