Think about how many emails you send in a day. Your email signature (or the space where your email signature should be) is sent to everyone – from your everyday clients to the suppliers you speak to once in a blue moon. It’s your business card, your digital contact card, and it builds your brand. If you’ve ever wondered how to write an effective one for yourself, you’re not alone – but you need to learn how! Here are some simple guidelines to make your email signature helpful and effective.
Have one. Whether you want people to hire you, buy your products, believe, trust, or care about you or your business, it’s pretty important to let people know what you do and how to contact you.
Include only the essential information. Figure out what’s important. Just like you would for your business card, figure out what’s essential: your name, website, mailing address, and phone number are a good start!
Limit colours and fonts. We suggest one, maybe two if for a really good reason. Keep it simple!
Go image-less. Images sometimes come through as attachments and can cause your email to be filtered to spam. If you’re keeping your text simple and formatted properly, it will look great – no image necessary.
Use formatting to direct the eye. Draw the eye to what’s important using a bigger font size, bold, or italics.
Make sure it looks good on both desktop and mobile devices. Send yourself an email with your new signature. Pull up the email on your mobile device and your desktop (or laptop). Does it look good on both? Many of us check our emails on-the-go just as much as at our desks, so make sure your signature is clear and that all the links work both ways.
Include a call to action. Make your email signature work for you! If you’re trying to increase newsletter subscribers, why not link to your sign-up form in your email signature. If you want more people to read your blog, link to it! Think about how many people receive your emails – imagine if just one or two of them followed your call to action every day.
Revisit and edit your email signature quarterly. Take a look at your email signature every few months (schedule reminders in your calendar now!), and think about whether anything needs to change. Is there a new project you want to draw attention to? Are your links still working? Keeping your signature up-to-date and working properly is vital for an effective signature.
If you ever need support creating or reviewing your content, we are here to help. Include your email signature on every email you send – we can’t wait to see it.
Kindly note: We don’t like to refer to ourselves as “experts”, but we do take great pride in sharing our business advice, distilled down from our extensive research and (often) mind-blowingly frustrating experiences we’ve endured and learned from. We try our best to create a clear and humble approach to good business tactics that you and your teams can understand and turn into effective and productive revenue streams. We are actual, real people and look forward to supporting you in any way we can, whether it’s on the topic of this post, or other business development and marketing communications you may be involved in, or considering. We are proud of the services we provide; if you don’t see what you’re looking for, just ask us – we also take pride in being super responsive!
