If you think that email signatures are just additional trinkets that adorn your email, well think again. Just the way your attire speaks about your personality, your email signature speaks about your brand.
An email signature is the most important and effective sales enablement tool one could ever come across. The professionally designed email signature can make a killer first impression that can make a huge impact on your audience. It also adds a personal touch to your cold emails and strikes a potential deal with your audience.
As per the stats, a person sends an average of 40 emails per day which is equivalent to the potential 40 deals that they can close. If you nail it right with the right information and the design, email signatures can turn your email marketing campaigns into a revenue-generating machine.
Let’s dive deep into the topic and scrutinize how best we can leverage email signatures and drive more revenue for your business.
What is an email signature, and what does it do?
An email signature is essentially a block of text, gifs, images, and links that shares all the important elements and interesting details about you. Your audience should be able to get to know all the details they need to know about you and your company. You know who the recipient of your emails are and you can target them with the right message and kick off a conversation or a deal.
Think of email signatures as modern-day digital business cards. Just the way how a business card shares a personal and memorable experience with your prospects, email signatures leave first good impressions and take the right information to the right inboxes.
Ingredients to an eye-catching email signature
A sound email signature must have a great design and include essential information and function as well. To decide what data to include, you need to determine what information is relevant for your department to communicate. The IT section probably doesn’t deal with the patrons, so they don’t need their contact number, whereas sales reps should add their direct contact number or want to add it.
Here’s a sneak a peek into all the basic information you shouldn’t miss adding to your very own email signature:
- First and Last Name
- Your Title, Department
- Company Name
- Photo
- Contact details
- Email address
- Social media icons
- Website
- Address
- CTA
- Logo
- Disclaimers to protect your data while sending out your emails.
Here’s an example of what a professional email signature template looks like:
Now that you know the secret sauce to whip up a professional email signature, let’s explore further key email signature ideas and help you in setting up the first email signature block for your business.
10 cool email signature ideas that you can trail
1. Drive clicks with sales offers
Convert your email signatures into sales enablement tools by adding links at the end of your signature block. Whether it is to promote your new product, generate leads for your marketing campaigns, or expand your subscriber’s list, adding a link or an eyecatching CTA at the bottom of your email signature can do the trick.
You can also try including your website’s landing page and social media links to gain more visitors to your page and make the links trackable.
2. Put your products on a show
Displaying your best-selling product shots in your email signature is one of the best and most solid ways to pull users into your sales funnel swiftly. This little trick can be a massive showstopper, especially when you are running an e-commerce store.
On most occasions, you shoot emails straight to your Sales Qualified Leads’ inbox, and adding your product shots is a sure-shot way to encourage online purchases and drive ROI for your business.
3. Swagger about your success with case studies
Show off your success to your potential prospects and gain their trust and credibility by including case studies in your email signature blocks. You can either share a link that takes the users to the page of case studies or a CTA to download the case studies directly from the signature.
It works well for the customer reviews and testimonies too. You could either choose the best reviews and add them like a banner or if you have a page dedicated to customer reviews, you can share the links to the page.
4. Blow your trumpet with awards
Adding awards and certifications is a good way to boost value for your brand. Users refer to these accolades to differentiate between a good and bad brand, especially when they are trying to make online purchases.
If you have any accolades claimed from any recognized institutions, peers, or customers, make sure to add them to the bottom of your email signature block. It can build trust and add more value to your business.
5. Schedule more meetings
Reaching out to the customers and persuading them to connect for a quick meeting is hard enough. Scheduling the time that works best for all is even harder.
You can make this process of setting up the meetings seamless by including your calendly link to your email signature. Without waiting for your further emails or calls, your interested prospects can easily tap on the calendly and book a meeting at their date and time of convenience. Save yourself from all the frustrated back and forth conversations.
6. Make it impactful with animations
Videos and animations can be far more winsome and attention-grabbing than texts. More and more brands are using interesting gifs and short videos to tell their audiences about their brand stories, product tutorials, etc.,
You can include a small marketing video that tells everything about your product or a funny animated gif that resonates well with your audience at the bottom of your email sign-off and bring life to your dreary-looking emails.
7. Add a personalized touch with a handwritten signature
Emails are in general considered to be a cold and mechanical form of communication as both the email recipients and the senders never get the chance to meet and greet in person. You may include as many graphic elements and styles to your email signature but nothing makes it more personalized than adding your own signature to your email sign-off.
It reminds your recipients that emails are not just the machine transmitted messages but there is a real person who is sending out the messages from the other end of the world.
8. Spread awareness
Whether it is a special occasion or an event that calls for global attention, you can spread the word by adding a meticulously created banner at the end of your email signature.
9. Insert your Google Maps location
Unlike traditional business cards, you can include live location in your email signatures. When the recipients are apprehensive about associating with a new brand, including the Google Maps location can put their minds at ease.
If you are running small businesses, sharing live locations rather than typing out your address, makes them finding your business location a lot easier. Both the parties can save their breaths on explaining and finding locations.
10. Send seasonal greetings
Whether it is a special Christmas wish or new year’s wishes, you can spread the festive vibes through your email sign-offs. You can add them as a colorful and eye-catching banner at the end of your signature and send them over to your recipients.
Email Signature Design
We can’t stress enough the importance of consistency. Using the best email fonts that go best with your brand guidelines makes you look professional. Use a professional email template builder to create a visually appealing signature within minutes. If you are out on a mission to generate more leads through your email signature marketing campaigns, it’s crucial that you follow the basic design principles and craft a creative email signature.
Points to consider while designing a creative email signature
You may think that a basic email signature is easy to design. After all, it simply looks like a small block of content that appears at the bottom of your emails. However, designing an email signature is not an easy task, and there are several things a professionally looking email signature requires, such as:
- a simple, well-planned layout,
- all the appropriate contact information,
- graphic components that let the signature stand out.
You should also have some HTML know-how to put these things together, or you can use a signature design tool to do it for you.
1. Find inspiration for your email signature
Before you start creating your email signature design, look at available options and some of the pre-made templates. Checking out various professional email signature designs will help you come up with an idea of your own.
2. Choose the email signature layout
After you get suitably inspired, it is almost time to get down to designing. You need to now determine what logo and banner size you require for your template. You can use a free email signature design tool too!
3. Design the graphics
Apart from the favored size, there are a few other things to keep in mind while designing your email signature:
- Banners in email signatures should ideally be clickable. That’s why you need a clear call to action (CTA).
- You shouldn’t use images with a white background. While they might look OK in most emails, some Microsoft Outlook versions feature dark mode, where white backgrounds stand out, and not in the right way. That’s why it is better to either use images with transparent backgrounds (in the .png format) or choose neutral backgrounds.
- Email signatures should catch attention, so using various colors might be a good idea. However, keeping the whole design unified and compliant with brand identity always comes first.
4. Put the signature together
After deciding on the design, customize the signature fields. First, fill in the contact info according to the guidelines in the signature creator. Then add the images you’ve created earlier (remember to use direct image URLs) and see if your signature looks as expected in the signature preview. In case you get stuck, you can always check the user’s manual for additional guidance and find answers to the frequently asked questions.
Leverage
The Power of
Email Signature
Email Signature Design Best Practices
They say first impressions are crucial, but what about last impressions? To find the best email signature designs that can inspire your creations, you need to follow email signature design best practices.
If you conduct your business via email, the email signature is often one of your final communication points with a consumer and your service/brand. A sound email signature is simple, informative, professional, and puts relevant information at the forefront. But your signature doesn’t have to look dull or boring. There are several ways to get the most out of your email signature design, so let’s run over some useful tips.
1. Simple and neat design
Minimalism is the golden rule for eye-catchy email signatures. You may be enticed to include excessive features and fields in your signature block to grab the attention of your audience. But adding too many color elements and field blocks may deter most people from looking at it, let alone reading it or clicking your links.
So, instead, try to keep your signature to the point and tailor it to your brand. By including only the most critical information for the brand – the logo, email author’s name, job title, phone number, and Skype username—this design is kept short and simple, but also very easily navigable.
Take a look at the below email signature templates and think which one will make you look professional and drive engagement from your audience?
Depending on the essence of your business, you can experiment with a variety of elements and color palettes, and choose the one that is neat, unique, and performs well for your business.
2. Small Color Palette
When you use too many colors, you increase your risk of selecting clashing colors, and your design can quickly become overwhelmed and distracting. So, limiting your palette and being intentional about what colors you use and when you use them can keep your design productive and looking good. A good technique for selecting your color palette is to sample any graphic elements you are including, i.e., your brand logo.
3. Make font palette smaller
Like colors, using too many fonts can quickly overwhelm your signature and make it difficult and distracting to read. Find yourself a simple typeface with a few weight and style options and just mix up your type size, weight, and/or colors when needed instead of using a new font entirely. Plus, finding these useful typefaces is no hard task; you can find a plethora of flexible typefaces on various email signature design tools.
4. A hierarchy for eye movement
Having a strong hierarchy is a must for any design that uses type to communicate important information. Since your email signature is made up of relevant information, hierarchy is particularly important. When it comes to designing your sample, use scale, color, and font weights to visually signal to your email recipients which elements of your signature they should read first. Perhaps it’s the email author’s name, or maybe the brand/company name, either way, be sure to put this vital piece of type in the top hierarchical position.
5. Simple graphic elements
Jamming many separate graphics into one email signature can quickly over-complicate your design and make it more like a collage and less like a sign-off. A typical graphic element to include in an email signature is your brand logo. The logo addition is an amazing way for people to identify who this email is coming from quickly, and it creates a more substantial degree of recognition of your brand.
6. Align the design
Here’s a secret for you: the difference between a neat, organized, and effective signature that just looks crudely thrown together in alignment. By simply aligning your graphic, type, and icons logically and simply, you can bring order and harmony to your design instantly. Taking the time and effort to modify your email signature on the page itself is very important, too. A majority of email signatures are left-aligned as left alignment is generally most natural for the eye to navigate and read.
7. Use the space with dividers
When you have a lot of content and a small area, space is often a luxury. So, by using dividers, you can fit a lot of info into a compact area without making things appear overly complicated or too busy. With the help of simple blue graphic dividers, each segment of information and content can be organized in a cleaner, simpler, and more digestible way.
8. Maintain your balance
As a final piece of advice, simply be sure to maintain a balance in your design. Not only does this mean a literal visual balance between elements which is very important, but also maintain a balance between your components. When it comes time to design, pick your battles – Do you want to use more than three colors? Fantastic, just be sure to select signatures carefully and balance them out with a super simple design.
Now that you have an idea of what to and what not to include in your email signatures, let’s move on to the next crucial step of creating email signatures.
What is an email signature generator?
An email signature generator, true to its name, is a design tool that allows you to build and customize email signatures you can later upload to your email service provider and save as your default signature.
There are several email signature generators available online that are free like personal email signatures and custom email signatures. Plus, some tools even let you build customizable templates, where you can include other cool information like graphics, clickable links, photos, and much more these are known as email signature template generators.
Essentially, you can transform your email signature into a virtual business card to establish your brand identity, inform prospects of precisely what you offer, and personalize your outreach.
In this day and age, you need to use every opportunity to imprint your brand on potential customers on different platforms like Apple mail, Yahoo mail account, Gmail account, Microsoft Outlook, etc.
Using an email signature generator to create company-wide email signatures can provide additional contact information about your business, develop your brand, and make you look more professional with little effort.
Benefits of an email signature generator
If you create a single email signature for private use, it may not be a big deal. You can put in eons of time to design it as per your needs. But when you generate a hundred corporate email signatures for your employees, it may be somewhat problematic and time-consuming.
Of course, each of your employees can do it independently, but it will end up in every signature looking different, and there will be no solid system in place. Eventually, your company will lose face in front of clients.
However, this is exactly where email signature software gets into play. Using a free online email signature generator is the best and simplest method of generating and managing all your email signatures. It is an easy, time-saving, and effective method. Here are some benefits to make you prefer a free signature builder over conventional methods.
1. Preserve your company identity
If your accountant sends emails with an email signature that includes only the name, title, and phone number, it definitely counts as a disaster. Simultaneously, the office manager may have designed a ridiculous picture that takes more place than the email itself.
Remember that all your email correspondence is like a unified ecosystem. Having a single style for all corporate email signatures makes it much easier to be consistent in your company’s tone and voice.
2. Create email signatures for all sections
Once you identify a fixed email signature style, you can customize signatures for different departments. Employees from each department send emails for various reasons. That is why they have to include different information in the email signature.
You have to make sure the original style is preserved, but the format may be different. This will not undermine your company identity but merely help differentiate the departments, because the form will remain the same (colors and fonts).
3. Manage your email signatures in one go
The function of centralized email signature management is one of the main benefits of using an online tool. It helps regulate all email signatures more efficiently and saves time when creating a new email signature for a new employee. Use Gmail for internal and external communication. A free Gmail signature generator will allow you not only to generate any email signatures but also to keep and manage them from a single environment.
4. Boost your email marketing campaign
Most email signature designers let users insert visual elements like photos, social media icons, logos, and banners. You can use this opportunity to advertise your product, enhance brand awareness, or simply communicate. With the help of a banner, you can inform a recipient about the event you arrange. It will help spread the news much faster without even devoting a separate email for this purpose.
5. Create professional email signature designs
Online email signature designers are magic devices. The secret of their success lies in professionally equipped templates that users can pick as patterns of their email signatures. If you are a newbie when it comes to web design, you can’t do without any accessories to build a superb email signature need something like a default message font, HTML email signature, company logo for brands, and other signature details.
Email signature designer vs Email signature generator – Difference
When it comes to differentiating between an email signature generator and an email signature designer, the biggest (and perhaps the only) distinction that comes to mind is coding. While email signature design tools require you to have a basic knowledge and understanding of HTML coding, email signature generators essentially do all the work. All that’s required of you are entering the info you need in your desired signature, and voila, it is done!
If you don’t know how to code, use free template editors that translate your design to HTML. You can determine how your signature looks like in real-time and experiment with different styles.
Conclusion
Email signatures are a small but essential part of developing your business, brand, and professional identity. Find the ultimate guide for freelance email signature. They provide your email recipients with valuable information and links, while also displaying a way to showcase your brand visually.
When devising your email signature, have fun with it, but try to keep things moderately simple. Keep your type legible, your colors attractive, and your graphics scalable. If you follow these basic steps, you’ll find it easier to leave the best lasting impression on your email contacts. Get your Free Email Signature and learn more about the free email signature generator and desired email signature for your brand, professional and freelance at Sloovi.