Professional email signatures help promote your business and positively influence the way your company is viewed.
A poorly designed and badly structured email signature can damage your brand and have a negative impact on your company’s legacy.
Unsure of what to include on your email signature design?
The following points cover the main dos and don’ts.
1. Key Contact information – keep to your basic professional contact details. Your professional name, phone number, website address and office address (if applicable). Adding too many different ways to contact you will overload your design, stick to the basics!
2. Social Links – adding in links to your company’s’ social pages can help to increase followers and engagement without spending a penny. 3 or 4 different social links is plenty but, make sure they click through to the correct profiles.
3. Your Branding – ensure your design is inline with your company branding. Consistency is key here to ensure you continue building trust around your brand.
4. Keep It Simple – often less is more. Overcrowding leads to confusion and can look unprofessional.
5. Tables – use tables to help make sure that all elements of your email signature are correctly aligned and spaced. This also helps to keep your signature looking the same when it arrives with any recipient.
6. Size – the average recommended signature width is between 600-650 pixels. Any bigger than that and you may find it renders oddly, and elements are chopped off in certain views.
7. Images – do use images, even if its just your logo icon. Images help to spice up a boring signature!
8. Checks – do check how your signature looks on different devices. Remember a large percentage of recipients will view your email on a mobile device.
9. Consistency – ensure everyone in your organisation is using the company email signature design and not something they have created themselves.
10. Exclaimer – use Exclaimer Cloud Signature Solution. It will make your life so much easier when it comes to designing or pushing out a new email signature to all your staff.
1. Fonts – don’t use too many fonts. Lots of different fonts can result in your email signature looking like a 5-year old’s efforts at creating their own party invitations. Not the impression you want to give with a corporate email signature.
2. Overcrowded – don’t overdo the design or the amount of information. Create your signature with KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) in mind.
3. Legal – the legal jargon isn’t interesting or pretty, but it is required in most countries. Don’t forget to add the disclaimer.
4. Colours – please don’t use too many different colours (unless your logo icon is a rainbow!)
5. Quotes – inspirational quotes are great, but what you think is a motivator can easily be interpreted differently by someone else. It’s best to leave such quotes off your email signature, unless you are a motivational speaker!
6. Bullet Points – professional signatures won’t use bullet points. This is due to the various email clients interpreting and displaying them differently.
7. Image – never make your whole signature an image. It will be more likely to end up caught in your recipient’s spam filter. Or not show in your recipients’ mailbox as majority of email clients don’t automatically download images. Image email signatures are generally very poor quality.
8. Links – don’t use too many hyperlinks. Using too many links causes confusion and makes the signature appear messy.
9. Custom fonts – using custom fonts might look good on your screen, but your receiver is not likely to have the same fonts installed. Custom fonts are often automatically converted to a common font like Arial or Times New Roman.
10. Promotions – Email signature banners are a great way of promoting a product or special offer. However, remember to take the banner off your signature once the promotion has finished. Outdated offers can give the impression of archaic business practices.
Hopefully, this helps clarify what should be included on your email signature and what really needs to be avoided.
You may also like to consider a slightly different signature design for internal emails and external replies.
Contact us for further help and to claim your 14-day free trial of Exclaimer Cloud Signature Solution!
Related blog post: Why Do You Need A Professional Email Signature?
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