How to add social media buttons to an email signature

Let’s be honest. In today’s world, a company without any social media presence might look a bit suspicious. In this article, I’ll show you how to add social media buttons to your email signatures.

Like this template? Customize and download it for free

Add social icons the easy way

Setting up an email signature just for yourself? Use the free email signature generator. Follow a few easy steps to generate your email signature and then add it to your email app. It’s that simple.

Setting up an email signature for the whole company? Learn more about the best email signature software

If you’re no stranger to some manual work, see the DIY method of adding social media buttons to email signatures below.

1. Find an icon of the social network

We’ve prepared icons of various sizes and styles for your convenience:

Download social media icons for your email signature for free

If you need another icon, you can perform a Google Images search for alternatives and then download them to your device.

And if you don’t want to go anywhere, you can download (or copy the image URL of) one or more of these icons and use them in your signature:

2. Insert the icon into your email signature

Once you have your social media icons, insert them into your email signature. Icons are usually placed below your contact information, but you can put them anywhere you like.

To do this, you will need to open your email signature editor. Click the email app or email system you are using to get detailed instructions:

• Outlook (all versions)
• Gmail
• Thunderbird
• Apple Mail
• Microsoft 365 (Office 365/ Exchange Online)
• Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE)
• Google Workspace (G Suite)

If your email system includes a WYSIWYG HTML editor (like all modern email apps), you will be able to use the Insert picture button to add a social media icon to your email signature template (or use copy and paste).

If you need to add an icon directly in the HTML code (because you’re using a disclaimer in Microsoft 365 or Exchange Server), you will have to use the IMG HTML tag pointing to the web location of the image. Here is an example of what it could look like:

<img src="https://www.mail-signatures.com/wp-content/themes/emailsignatures/images/facebook-35x35.gif" />

3. Link to your social media profiles

The last thing is to make your button clickable. To do so, you need to link social buttons to your company’s (or your personal) social media profiles.

If you are working with a WYSIWYG HTML editor, it’s very easy. Just select your image by clicking on it, then click the Add a hyperlink button in the editor’s top menu (Ctrl + K usually works, too) and enter the URL (hyperlink) pointing to your profile’s page. Remember that the hyperlink should be the profile’s complete URL (for example: https://www.facebook.com/CodeTwo or https://x.com/CodeTwoSoftware).

When editing raw HTML code of your email signature, find the image code (see the previous step to learn what it looks like). To add a link to it, you need to insert the <a href=…></a> tags around the code of your image. For example:

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/CodeTwo"><img src="https://www.mail-signatures.com/wp-content/themes/emailsignatures/images/facebook-35x35.gif" /></a>

4. Adding an event-triggering button

Note: Changes in social network APIs may affect the results of the solutions I talk about below.

In most cases, adding event-triggering buttons to email signatures is not a good idea. People expect social buttons to lead directly to a social media profile. If a button does something else, it will be suspicious. If you decide to go through with this, anyway, make sure that instead of a standard social media icon, you’ve added a clear call to action (CTA).

Most social networks do not let you equip your email signatures with buttons that, upon clicking, would automatically follow Facebook pages, like posts, subscribe to YouTube channels, etc.

One of the exceptions is X, which supports certain actions (called “web intents”), for example:

https://x.com/intent/follow?screen_name=#Your X handle#

Your handle is the part after “@” in your X profile, for example:

You can also see the handle in your profile’s URL:

So, in this example, the resulting URL is:

https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=CodeTwoSoftware

Another action-triggering URL is YouTube’s subscribe to channel intent:

#Your Channel Address#?sub_confirmation=1

So, a real-life example would be:

https://www.youtube.com/@CodeTwo?sub_confirmation=1

To create buttons using these links, apply similar steps as when adding a social media icon. But once again, I strongly recommend providing a clear CTA, for example: Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

FAQ

Here’s a list of the most frequently asked questions about social media icons in email signatures.

Why add social buttons to email signatures?

That’s a valid question and I’ve seen it a lot. There are people who believe that your signature should include your name and nothing else. However, there are many valid reasons to include social media icons (and other elements) in the signature. For example, social icons:

• direct your recipients just where you need them,
• make your emails more actionable,
• add credibility,
• let your recipients easily verify you,
• grab attention and make your recipients more engaged.

Which social icons to choose?

There is no single right answer to this question – it depends on your social media activity and what you want to achieve. Pick social media profiles where you are (or your company is) the most active. And if you don’t focus on a specific platform and try to post simultaneously on all of them, pick the one where you have the most engagement. This way, people who click your social media buttons will trust your brand more and might increase your subscriber count.

How many social icons to add?

It depends. Remember that people usually won’t click all the icons in the signature. They can only click what’s available (duh) and will probably choose to click the logo they are most familiar with. That’s why there are two main strategies:

• Add one or two most relevant social media icons where you have the best reach. This shows where your primary focus is.
• Add more (but still only those where you are active) and let the recipient click the social media button to the platform they work with the most.

Pick your social media channels carefully and don’t go over 6 or your signature design will look cluttered.

Which size is the best for social media icons?

There’s no one-size-fits-all. The ideal size for your signature depends on the total number of elements, your font size and other factors. The most popular sizes range from 20 to 24 pixels. Keep in mind that if you want your social icons to look perfect on high-resolution displays, you need to use, for example, a 48×48 px icon and scale it down to 24×24 px with HTML.

Learn more about hi-res images in email signatures

Why isn’t my social media icon clickable?

There is more than one possible explanation for this phenomenon. The simplest is that you didn’t add the link to your social channel or that some kind of mechanism removed the link. But it is also possible that you’re using a single-image email signature. While such signatures won’t have their formatting broken (as some HTML email signatures tend to) regardless of the email app you use, they lack in terms of accessibility, cannot be responsive in any way, and can usually include only a single link in the entire signature.

Learn more about this and other actions against good email signature etiquette