The Most Comprehensive Email Signature Guide

Email signatures play a vital part in an email. Last impressions matter as much as first impressions. A good email signature needs to be precise, informative, and to the point. But, that does not mean it has to be dull. Your email signature represents your brand. Therefore it is necessary that you incorporate certain standards and elements into it.

Here is the email signature guide for creating the best email signature.

What should I put in my email signature?

The email signatures are small blocks of information that are inserted into emails: names, positions in the business, phone numbers, company logo, website link or call to action. You can easily edit and add emails using Postcard.

1. Name
2. Contact Details
3. Number
4. Website link
5. Company logo
6. Social media icons

Easily build and customize email templates with business email signature format that are easy to use at email signature marketing.

Professional email signatures are mainly personal signatures and are displayed on every sent message in digital marketing. It is similar but has a difference. Email signatures increase response time and generate more site visitors, as well as increase brand identity.

Here are some resources for Sales and Marketing:

Modern Marketing Metric

Stages of B2B Sales

Professional Email Signature Templates

While it is important to include important information, ensure that you do not add too much information in there. Most often people treat their email signature like a mini autobiography. They include a lot of links and information that can make it look bulky. This kills the purpose of the email signature.

Which, brings us to the next question, What is the purpose of an email signature?

Well, an email signature should help the recipient find more information about you and perhaps allow different ways to contact you. What ideally should go into an email signature, is your name, role, company, and probably your website/social media handles and your contact number.

1. Choosing the color palette

When it comes to color palette less is more. We all would have at some point come across a professional signature where each alphabet is of a particular color. While it seemed cool at one point, the business standards have changed and it certainly does not look professional anymore.

Also, when you use a lot of colors, the design can become overwhelming. It is best to select the brand colors that are used in your logo. This gives a sense of belonging to your brand.

2. Choosing the font

In the last section, we discussed why your color palette needs to be small. Well, your font palette needs to be even smaller. Stick to a maximum of two fonts. Most people, prefer using multiple fonts to highlight a text. Find a typeface font and use different combinations that go with it.

3. Hierarchy

To communicate a design effectively, it is best to have an approach rather than just going with a gut feeling. One of the ways to ensure that is to maintain a visual hierarchy. Now, what does a visual hierarchy mean?

It is the way by which humans process information. Most often than not, the information on a page is processed in ‘F’ or ‘Z’ patterns.

F pattern: F patterns are generally used for designs that have heavy text. It follows the shape of the letter F. It starts at the top left and then moves horizontally to the top right.

Z pattern: Z patterns are used for less dense designs. Here the information starts at the top left and moves towards the top right. And then, goes diagonally to the lower left and finally the right side, tracing the shape of the letter ‘Z’.

When it comes to signatures, it is best to choose an ‘F’ pattern. This is easy on the eye and helps in consuming information at a glance.

This is important because no matter what type, color, or weight you use, it does not make sense if your readers aren’t reading them. When it comes to hierarchy, it is best to have the Author’s name followed by the brand or company which is followed by the contact information.

Recommended Reading=>> Remote Sales – The quick guide

Using Simple Graphic Design Elements

Using a lot of design elements in your signature can end up looking like a collage rather than a signature. Too many highlights can cause chaos causing people to ignore the signature in the first place. Limit the usage of the elements to a maximum of one or two.

This brings us to the question, what element should be used?

It is a common practice to include the headshot of the author. This helps in building a professional relationship and enhances the trust quotient.

Another element that you can add to your email signature is your brand logo. This helps the audience to quickly identify the sender and strengthens brand recognition.

You can choose to incorporate both in your email signature as long as you have a simple and minimalist design.

Social Media Elements

If you or your brand has a good social media pages presence then it could benefit you a great deal to link your social media platform in your email. Apart from driving traffic to your pages, it opens up new avenues for the recipient to contact you.

But how you do this plays a great role. You can’t simply go ahead and link all the platforms that you are on. This will occupy a lot of space in the signature section and can make it look clunky. Find the pages that enhance your value and makes sense for the business. Also, include hyperlinked social media icons rather than adding the URL.

Dividers and Alignment

Here is something that not many know of. No matter how bad your design is, a good alignment can save the day. And no matter how good your design is, a small alignment issue can bring the whole thing down. Aligning your signature in the right way can instantly add harmony to your design.

To ensure that your design is aligned:

• Apply even line spacing
• Align both horizontally and vertically
• Align the text to left
• Ensure that you have a margin

Dividers can play a similar role in the design. Dividers are a great way to fit a lot of content in a confined space without making things took complicated. It helps in organizing the signature in a simple, clean, and easily digestible way.

Create Your Signature with Mobile in Mind

According to a survey conducted by 99 Firms, more than 40% of consumers use a mobile application for checking their email. This enforces the importance that one must give to mobile friendliness while creating a signature block.

The prime thing that one must consider for a mobile-friendly design is scalability. Mobiles are smaller than laptops, therefore a design that might look great for a desktop or a laptop might occupy the entire screen when viewed using a mobile phone.

It is important that you have this in mind when creating the design. Also, if your design can scale down, you need to consider the readability of the image when it is scaled down. What if the text in the design scales down to a point where it is not even readable?

The next thing that you need to consider while creating an email signature is to ensure that the links can be tapped. If the space allocated for an icon or a link is too small when viewed on a mobile device, it becomes difficult for the recipient to access it.

Ensure that you leave adequate spacing between the links that will help the users access the link that they want.

Let’s see the best email signature metrics.

Yes, you need an email signature! Here’s why

Have you experienced a recurrency effect before? Psychologists describe this tendency of people to recall the latest information. If you are implementing email marketing you could think about this as a way to organize information for a campaign. Your email signatures should never be forgotten. So subscribers will not always remember your name.

But e-commerce emails do help ensure that they remain memorable. They help establish your brand identity and help build trust by confirming the fact.

Goals of Email Signatures Design

If your signature is professional looking and visually attractive then you will be able to build sanitizing marketing tactics on this design. For example, you could display an extra offer to customers at the end of their email, post links to useful websites, or advertise rewards programs on their sites.

A signature in emails helps you to achieve branded products by helping to promote your company.

Free email signature generator

The good thing is you won’t need any help creating your business email signature yourself. There are apps for that too. Here are our favorites for the moment.

1. Hubspot’s Generator

2. Mail Signatures

3. Gimmio’s Generator

4. Signature Maker

5. Company Sig

6. WiseStamp

7. Exclaimer

Do’s and Don’ts of an Email Signature

Do’s:

• Add your social media links, People need to know you are real.
• Use the right tools to create the email signature. Tools like Microsoft Word or Outlook will format the signature in their own way which will not look the same when you are using another platform.
• Use the industry-standard size (650 Pixels) for email signatures.
• Use tables to create layouts if you are not versatile in CSS or HTML.
• Use an ALT text

Don’ts:

• Don’t Use bullets
• Don’t add too many links
• Don’t add custom fonts
• Don’t add irrelevant information

You can also have a look at Creating a Professional Email Signature – Dont’s

Bottom line

Email signatures although small, are an important part of the email. They play a vital part in building a brand identity as well as a professional identity. It helps in showcasing your brand visually without any marketing spending.

A final piece of advice is to maintain balance. When designing your email signature, it is important to keep things simple. Simple is beautiful when it comes to email signatures.

Have an email signature, already? Show us what you got.